Slumdog Millionaire wins "Best Film"...without much film at all.

Slumdog Millionaire is truly one of those inspirational filmmaker stories. We never get tired of an underdog and a low budget film about a poor person in India is about as un-commercial as you can get in the feature film industry.

The recognition for the film (to date) includes:

2008 Camerimage Film Festival "Golden Frog" Award for best-in-class visual aesthetic and technical values

National Board of Review of Motion Pictures "Best Film for 2008"

American Society of Cinematographers nominates Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC for Outstanding Achievement Award for Slumdog Millionaire.

A total of four 2009 Golden Globe Awards






Nominated for ten Academy Awards

Received 8 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Directing, Cinematography and"Film" Editing.


In addition to being amazing, it's also a "film" that was acquired, in the majority, digitally. (depending on who you're quoting and whether or not you refer to raw footage or finished screen time the figure sits around 60-70%).

There has been a LOT of buzz around some Digital Cinema Cameras, but this one has been a bit under the radar.

The Silicon Imaging 2K and 2K Mini are now officially cameras of legitimate capability... Actually they really aren't two cameras. The 2K Mini is the sensor assembly alone and works by ethernet link to a fast laptop, which constitutes the 'processing' portion of the camera body, complete with viweing LUTs and an onboard version of Iridas SpeedGrade embedded for viewing picture adjustment. The full SI 2K takes the mini and inserts it into a full camera body with all the processing and storage on board, including the embedded version of SpeedGrade, no laptop required. If you have the full SI-2K, you already have the Mini, just detach it from the full body and connect it to the body via ethernet and you have a dash cam or POV camera with a full body on .

The camera uses a Super 16mm sized Bayer sensor (for more on Bayer, see my blog post on the Bayer patent from 12-14-08).

The workflow-favored format for the camera to write to is CineForm RAW, which is a high quality, compressed RAW motion picture format that has several post workflow options for editing directly inside an NLE without 'flattening' the image.

(**I should probably point out that I was involved a bit with this camera's testing prior, and shortly after its release, as well as involved with CineForm products, so I am probably not without my biases...)

Congratulations to everyone involved with Slumdog Millionaire, and congratulations to Silicon Imaging and CineForm.

Links for more info:

Slumdog Millionaire at IMDb

Silicon Imaging

CineForm

Dalsa announces a 48 megapixel image sensor.

Dalsa has introduced an image sensor that is 48mm x 36mm and has a photosite lattice of 8000 x 6000. The CCD is a Bayer pattern in the modern RGB configuration. (See the post "Bayer Sensors...Patented in 1976...")

The technical paperwork in here. The claim is that even though each photosite is reduced in size by 30% from the previous generation sensor, the signal-to-noise ratio improved by the same amount.

Dalsa also has an excellent tech paper on how image sensors work here.

Luckily our data storage expands as voraciously as our pixel counts...

TimK

Bayer Sensors...Patented 1976...but things have changed a bit...

If you spend any time working with television or feature or high end television spot production, you've probably heard at least one person express wonder or disdain, or perhaps complete faith or doubt in the relative merit of a Bayer Pattern sensor.

The original patent, granted on July 20, 1976, has the sensor primarily as a Y'CC (color difference) sensor with the green photosites shown here being Y' and the red and blue photosites being "C1" and "C2" (as opposed to naming a specific color difference structure).

(image is courtesy of Wikimedia)

However, Bryce Bayer changed the proposed sensor layout for an RGB implementation in the patent. Today, most well known Bayer implementations in the 'digital cinema' technology area (RED, Silicon Imaging, etc.) are RGB, and photosites are distributed as illustrated in the first visual. However, the original vision for a Bayer pattern RGB sensor in the patent was actually what you see here:

You'll notice that blue is sampled far less... Apparently the arrangement was meant to mimic human visual acuity, which is of course sensitive most to green, less to red and least to blue. The sensor's layout would have spatially sampled 50% Green, 37.5% Red, 12.5% Blue.

It would've been curious to see how such a sensor performed. Though it would've been maddening to develop a low pass filter for it...

(I don't know of any implementations of this highly asymmetrical system, but I don't work much with still imaging or highly specific industrial applications...if you know of one, please add it in the comments.)

Original Bayer sensor patent #3,971,065.


TimK

Panavision's must see videos on camera specifications

I know this isn't new info for many of you, but the Panavision guys have done the most complete job of interpreting camera and acquired image specifications to-date in my opinion.

The video is in 7 parts...download them and watch them...

(The point at which the bayer sensor configuration is compared to the Genesis can seem like it's making a case for a particular workflow, but overall, the info is incredibly solid and nearly unavailable anywhere else as far as I can tell.)


Demystifying Digital Camera Specifications