Screen Daily
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Awards buzz is building around wartime drama Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk not least because Sony Pictures' campaign calls attention to the film's groundbreaking tech credentials.
After showcasing the film at kit trade show NAB earlier this year, director Ang Lee headlines the cinema conference at IBC next month to explain why he chose to shoot Billy Lynn's at an unprecedented 120 frames a second, also in 4K and 3D, despite the fact that no exhibitor is currently able to play it back. He will again be flanked by creative collaborators on the project, editor Tim Squyres ACE and digital technician Ben Gervais.
While IBC has recently upgraded its projection system to be able to display high dynamic range (HDR) to help illustrate discussion on that topic, the venue's single Christie projector will only display a maximum 48 frames a second in 3D 4K (potentially it could show 120fps clips from the film in 2D or in 3D 4K and 24fps).
This variation in exhibition options is being touted as a selling point by Lee who can be expected to explain how and why he has chosen different frame-rates for creative reasons in different scenes of the film.
Being able to alter photographic decisions in post is a concept running through several other IBC Big Screen sessions. Visual effects supervisor Kevin Baillie, who is CEO of California facility Atomic Fiction, reveals how his team created the Twin Towers and the period-accurate New York skyline on a Montreal sound stage for Robert Zemeckis' The Walk. The production logged 9.1 million processor hours – claimed as the largest use of cloud computing in film history. Zemeckis himself has recorded a special commentary.
Disney Research will be at IBC to talk about photo-realistic motion capture, a technique which its lab in Zurich has advanced with systems that offer filmmakers continuous control of emotional performance in live action motion pictures.
“The biggest issue is when motion starts,” explains Disney Research scientist Dr. Derek Bradley who presents in Amsterdam. “You can make a pretty realistic render of a face but this can break down if you want real subtlety, especially when rendering a known person.”
Bradley helped devise the Medusa Performance Capture system which was employed on Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Jungle Book. “We know where every point an expression moves on the face, which is a key ingredient for vfx artists building a facial animation rig for an actor,” explains Bradley. “Realtime facial performance capture, however, is not yet at the quality or resolution of offline processes.”
Camera maker Lytro will showcase its new is testing its Cinema camera which lets filmakers adjust practically everything after the fact, including some things that are simply impossible with any other model. For example, you can tweak depth of field, frame rates and shutter angles in post, changing those values within the same continuous shot for dramatic effect. It does this by capturing not only the colour and intensity of light, but also the angular direction of each pixel.
As visitors will see in a IBC demonstration, the camera is the size of a small car and costs upwards of $125k to rent making it impractical for anything outside of a studio or a studio budget. “We are working towards the next generation which will be handheld and portable,” reveals Jon Karafin, Lytro's head of light field video. “Right now this is a niche market technology to support vfx or tent-pole feature films. It is a development platform to ensure we get the technology right.”
Few cameras in the IBC exhibition itself will match Lytro's light field unit for radical design but Panavision's new digital camera will probably be the pick of the show. Due for release early 2017, the Millenium DXL is a collaboration between Panavision, Red and vfx facility Light Iron. It combines Red's 8K sensor, core electronics, and recording format with Panavision optics (notably all Primo 70 lenses) and Light Iron's colorimetry to replicate a highly stylised cinema look. It can be rented exclusively through Panavision.
Red itself is arguably innovating faster than any other camera maker. Its 8K Dragon sensor housed in a $60,000 Weapon camera body is shooting Guardians of the Galaxy 2, while the company is also developing a new 8K sensor for the Weapon, called Helium. This will cram 8K's worth of pixels (that's 16 times the resolution at which most current films are projected) into a smaller, Super 35mm-sized chip making it suitable for a wider array of lenses. Red custom built a camera containing the chip for director Michael Bay, who plans on using it on Transformers: The Last Knight.
The point to shooting resolutions beyond 4K is less about image sharpness and more about the point at which visible artifacts disappear. Pixelation is most noticeable in vfx-intensive scenes where the additional image information can prove useful. That's why other camera makers are keen to push 8K. Canon may preview a prototype of an 8K camera housed in a EOS body while Sony, which already permits 8K shooting via its CineAlta F65 (two of which were used to shoot Billy Lynn's) is rumoured to be launching a sleeker version.
Notable new glass on show includes Cooke Optics' 35-140mm anamorphic/i Zoom lens which joines the variety of Anamorphic/i, 5/i, S4/i and miniS4/i lenses some of which were used to shoot Pete’s Dragon.
The Leica Cine MacroLux, available on the CW Sonderoptic booth is a lens attachment which provides a variety of unique looks on wide lenses and telephotos, including “an incredibly beautiful treatment of skin tones,” says Sonderoptic marketing director Seth Emmons.
Virtual Reality
There will be no escaping VR at the show with camera rigs mushrooming on the show floor, several 360-video focussed conference sessions, and a special set of exhibits in the show's Future Zone, including a world's first remote controlled dolly for 360-degree cameras devised by wildlife cameraman Rob Drewett who runs Motion Impossible.
Eighteen months ago VR rigs typically consisted of multiple GoPros jury-rigged together in a tangle of wires, leading to complicated setups and little mobility. Sleeker versions are emerging from major brands including, at the budget end, Samsung Gear 360, Ricoh Theta and Nikon Keymission 360, and toward the high end, GoPro's $15,000 16-camera Odyssey, co-developed with Google. Jaunt and Nokia have technology aimed squarely at filmmakers. The latter's OZO costs $60,000 boasts realtime on-set playback and a new broadcast streaming application announced at the show, also in the Future Zone.
Software
Editing software to work with 360-degree images is being introduced by Adobe for Premier Pro, SGO in its Mistika finishing system and SAM for its compositing machine Rio. Adobe's edit software, for example, will gain a 'field of view' mode for imported spherical videos and will let editors switch between monoscopic, stereoscopic, and anaglyph frame configurations.
HDR is a big focus, especially for TV where standards have only recently been agreed. Dailies workflow tool Colorfront, for example, has added support of on-set HDR which will debut in Europe at the show. This uses the ACES-compliant Colorfront Engine to manage on-set look creation with support for simultaneous SDR and HDR deliverables. The new version also brings the software up to date with camera formats including the Millennium DXL and Red Weapon 8K, ARRI Alexa 65 and Panasonic VariCam.
Blackmagic Design's grading tool DaVinci Resolve has 250 new features in its latest version 12.5 including improved HDR support and ResolveFX, which helps accelerate effects work.
Lighting
LEDs continue to erode the dominance of HMI and tungsten outputs on stages and location because of their energy conserving, lighter weight, smaller size and increasingly malleable creative properties.
Chroma-Q won a 2016 Cine Gear Expo award for its Space Force LED fixture which outputs up to 26,700 lumens, comparable to a traditional 6kW source. In addition, the Space Force features adjustable colour temperature and intensity via a remote control device. It can be found on the stand of Lights Camera Action.
British LED lighting manufacturer, Rotolight, will be touting the new Anova Pro, which comes with a customisable software which can be set to strobe, neon, lightning, weld and gunshot among others.
Perhaps the 'hottest' LED lighting designer/supplier around is Digital Sputnik, formed by the Kallas brothers from Estonia. Its equipment was selected to be the main lighting source for Independence Day Resurgence (lensed by Markus Förderer, BVK) the first major feature to be predominantly shot with LEDs.
Its fixtures have subsequently been used on Star Wars: Rogue One (Greig Fraser ACS ASC), Ghost in the Shell (Jess Hall BSC), The Neon Demon (DOP: Natasha Braier); Jason Bourne (Barry Akroyd BSC), Kong: Skull Island (Larry Fong ASC), and Alien Covenant (Dariusz Wolski ASC).
CEO Kaur Kallas attributes this to the product's light grading capabilities which enable cinematographers to grade the light to achieve the look they want instead of grading the image on a monitor. “This is not only a huge timesaver on set but also dramatically reduces post production requirements.”
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