Image courtesy of Philip Bloom. Click through for his actual coverage of the show.

Canon Expo kicked off with a bang as the venerable imaging giant stunned crowds with its working prototype 4K camera! Is this the future of digital cinema?

Ug. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

There’s so much wrong with this prototype “concept camera” (as Philip kindly points out below, it’s important to understand that this is not a camera Canon plans on bringing to market) that I hardly know where to begin. It’s an atrocity of aesthetics and ergonomics. It has a fixed, not-very-special 20x zoom lens. The sensor is only 2/3”. It shoots 60fps. Nothing about this camera reflects any awareness of what digital cinematographers want. It’s as if Canon brass lifted the internet ban on the engineer’s dungeon just long enough for them to visit to RED’s web site, and then shut it down again after they’d read as far as “4K.”

Of course, this isn’t a camera, or even a plan for a camera. It’s a statement by Canon. They meant to say “We get it. We know what’s important.” What they actually said is “Ooh, bigger numbers!” I expect this kind of technology dick-swinging from Sony, but not from Canon.

What’s most troubling about this non-camera is that Canon made it at all. Anyone invested in Canon’s gear should be pissed at Canon for squandering their time and resources building this toy. I look at this thing and see my parents returning from Vegas with a sheepish expression on their faces, saying “Remember your college fund?”

Canon, please stop building fake “4K” video cameras when you can’t even make an SLR that shoots actual 1080p HD.

We’ve discussed the very real aliasing/moiré issue with Canon’s HDSLRs. It is both a real problem and a somewhat workable limitation that many happily accept. What is not in dispute is that these are symptoms of a poorly-sampled, low-resolution image. Readers of this site know that I am not a spatial resolution fetishist, but even I am painfully aware that my 5D and 7D footage is lacking detail.

Canon makes it incredibly easy to demonstrate this, since the 5D Mark II that makes such fuzzy pseudo-HD video also makes ridiculously high-fidelity stills. The frames below are a 1:1 frame grab from a 5D video, and the same scene shot as a still and then scaled down to 1920x1080. I did the scaling in Lightroom, using no Develop or Output Sharpening.

Click for full-sizeClick for full-sizeFeel free to download the full-res originals and compare yourself, or look at the 1:1 comparisons below:

Port of Oakland? Or #### ## #######?Chain-link fence? Or a dirt piece of glass?The difference is staggering. And remember, I don’t even care all that much about spatial resolution. What I do know is this: a sharp 1920x1080 camera can make an image with more detail in it than most female movie stars are comfortable with for close-ups. So for today we can dispense with a discussion about the merits of mastering at 4K. Canon is nowhere near that conversation with their HDSLRs. They’re still falling way short of HD.

To be clear: What you are seeing above is two different ways that the same camera made a 1920x1080 image. One image was hastily yanked off a sensor (skipping entire rows of pixels) and then compressed to H.264 in realtime; the other was captured as raw 5.6K bayer data, decoded slowly to RGB by an engine optimized for quality, then downsampled to HD using every 5.6K pixel to build a 1920x1080 image with as much detail as appropriate for a true HD image.

Does the latter sound unfeasible for “real” video work? Well it shouldn’t — it’s what we do with our RED One cameras now.

The RED One is more than just a “4K camera.” It’s a 4K sensor, some very clever software, an even more clever compressed raw codec, and then more clever software. Not to mention a decent form factor, decent colorimetry, smart proxy workflows for editorial, and viewfinders that actually help you expose and focus. It’s a full-fledged 4K ecosystem.

And look how painful it was for RED to get all that working.

Canon, you have none of that stuff, you have no idea how to make it, and you don’t even know that you don’t know this.

So stop dicking around with your fake 4K toys and start making cameras we can use. That we want to use.

Build a full-frame DSLR that shoots high-quality HD video at a variety of frame rates and the world is yours.

I’m terrified that you won’t though — because then you’d have to put it on a pedestal at a trade show and say “Look, we finally built a camera that actually does what we claim our current cameras do.”

So much more fun to say “Hey look, 4K!”

“We so get it.”

After my Fetishists post, I was invited by Mike Seymour to join he and Jason on Red Centre to discuss in greater detail the points I raised. It was a welcome opportunity both to drill down on each of the specific issues, and to clarify a few things that some of the many comments seemed to miss—namely, that I chose my “fetishists” out of respect (so please, those of you with the pitchforks, put ‘em away), and that as crowd-pleasing as a “shut up and shoot” post can be, this actually wan’t meant to be one. The truth is, all your favorite filmmakers are fetishists, and you should be one too if you want your films to be their best.

Technology and gear are not the first things I think about when I think about filmmaking, but they do tend to be the first things I blog about. If “none of the tech matters, just make a movie” was the end of the conversation then that would be the end of ProLost. Talking tech is great, and nobody does it better than Red Centre, so please subscribe if you haven’t already, and give a listen to episode 66.

If you’d like to play the home game while listening, here are full-size stills of the image of Mike from the post, before and after color correction. These stills are pulled from 5D Mark II footage I shot of Mike in the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, and you can decide for yourself if it’s compression, 8-bit-ness, or an insidious combination of the two that makes it tough to brighten Mike’s face.

Click for full-res camera original imageClick for full-res, graded image

Click for full-res, graded image with some preprocessing

On the show Mike also mentioned that he’s embarking on a new fxphd DSLR Video course as a follow-up to the popular-but-aging session that he and I shot in Japan. This time, Mike has nabbed someone who actually knows what he’s talking about, none other than Tyler Ginter of the 55th Combat Camera Company. I look at a helicopter and think, “how can I put this in my movie?” Tyler looks at one and says “I think I’ll jump out of that with 90 pounds of gear strapped to me (including a 5D Mark II). Check out Tyler’s videos on Vimeo and stay tuned to fxphd for more updates.

In my last post I made a barbed remark about the Sony NEX-VG10, based on early reports that it only shot 60i (NTSC) and 50i (PAL). Turns out it may actually have a progressive mode, which would make the PAL version an option for filmmakers in PAL countries, or those in the U.S. willing to jump through the 25/24 speed-change hoops like we old fogies once did with the first DV cameras. Personally, I’ll wait for real 24p, the importance of which Sony, unlike Canon, cannot pretend to be unaware. Now that so many camera manufacturers are fighting to give us DV Rebels exactly what we want, I won’t be expending any energy on cameras that don’t.

And last but not least, if you’re not on Twitter, this might be a good week to start.

I was having a bit of fun today combining the 3D Camera iPhone app (Alex Lindsay’s pick of the week on MacBreak Weekly yesterday) with Plastic Bullet (his pick a few weeks ago). After brunch at the amazing Brown Sugar Kitchen, I stopped by one of my favorite West Oakland sites: the concrete plant at Peralta and 24th.

No sooner had I started snapping my stereo pairs than I heard a loud “Hey!” In front of me, a dude in a hard-hat was pointing behind me. A guy in an orange vest was trying to get my attention.

Immediately I began subconsciously preparing my customary sanctimony. This is a public street. I’m just taking snapshots. It’s my right as an American. Today we celebrate our Independence Day. Etc.

(You may recall that I blogged a while back about a PDF you should print and keep with you called The Photographer’s Right, to help you with said sanctimoniousness.)

I turned to orange-vest man and he shouted over the truck noise “Hey, would you like to go inside? The angles are better! I’m the manager here, I can take you around!”

Say what?

Leave it to Oakland to continue to surprise even a guy who’s lived there for over ten years.

He led me around while I happily snapped, and I took his business card, expressing my sincere intention to use his location in a professional shoot if ever the right job came along.

There’s no conclusion here except that I thought I’d try to balance out all the whinging I do on this blog a bit. Not all is crap in the world.

Just the new Sony camera.

I’m not at NAB this year, because Las Vegas murders my soul and trade shows stomp on the remains—but there are some cool things happening at and around the show already.

First a small but important thing: Red Giant Software is having a big sale between now and April 18. 30% off everything. More details here.

Adobe announced Creative Suite 5, which includes new versions of After Effects and Premiere Pro. Both and standout releases, and I extend a hearty congratulations to the product teams. The After Effects feature that has everyone flipping out is Roto Brush, which uses, presumably, some sort of alien technology discovered beneath the Great Pyramids to semi-automate complex rotoscoping tasks. Like the Content-Aware Fill technology in Photoshop CS5, it has the potential to save you tons of time, which you can repurpose for more important things like staring at your computers screen muttering “How the hell do they do that?” Read more about what’s new in After Effects CS5 at the blog of After Effects Product Manager Michael Coleman.

The CS5 tools we care about are now 64-bit applications, which means many good things, but also means that all your third-party plug-ins need to be re-engineered for compatibility. Red Giant Software’s announcement about this is here.

Redrock Micro has teased some images of new products to be announced later today, including one that apparently eats your iPhone and turns it into Pure Awesome:

microTape Range FinderiPhone/iPod Touch advanced automation

Storm

The Foundry has released details on Storm, the end-to-end filmmaking tool tool they’ve been teasing us about. As expected, fxguide has thorough coverage.

Panasonic AG-AF100Panasonic has somehow found the stash of Obvious Pills that have eluded every other video camera manufacturer who also makes the still cameras masquerading as video cameras that have captured all the attention of digital filmmakers. Yesterday they announced the AF100, a “professional” video camera based on the 4/3” sensor from the GH1. Rumored price is to be in the $6,000 range, and although the internal codec is the much-maligned (and, by definition, non-professional) AVCHD, it’s maxed-out 24mbps AVCHD, so it should do better than the GH1. It also will have uncompressed HD out (which your could capture with, say, an AJA Ki-PRO), bypassing the ACVD codec entirely. I hope it also has some buttons.

UPDATE: Oh look, it does:

Jan Crittenden, Product Manager at Panasonic, had this to say about the camera on DVXuser: “There will not be aliasing as we actually have a clue about what causes that.” Nice.

Update on Monday, April 12, 2010 at 12:25PM by Stu

The press release is up now—Blackmagic Design announced today a software-only version of the DaVinci Resolve color grading system, starting at $995. If you think Apple’s Color is immensely powerful and nearly impossible to use, wait until you see Resolve’s user interface. Still, this is pretty much the coolest thing anyone could have imagined doing after acquiring DaVinci last year.

Update on Monday, April 12, 2010 at 8:48PM by Stu

Sony getting in on the game, with a direct dig at RED. 

Sony - New Prototype Digital Cinema Camera from camera department on Vimeo.

Update on Monday, April 12, 2010 at 9:11PM by Stu

Let’s round out the Best Monday Ever with something super cool: Magic Bullet Looks as a plug-in Module for RedCine-X:

As the long-awaited 24p firmware update for the Canon 5D Mark II draws near, I joined Mike Seymour on episode 57 of the Red Centre podcast to talk about how excited I am that it marks the end of painful workarounds for the 5D’s no-man’s-land frame rate of 30.0 frames per second.

For as long as I’ve had my 5D Mark II, I’ve avoided using it for any projects that I could not shoot 30-for-24, i.e. slowing down the footage to 23.976 fps, using every frame. My 5D has been a gentle overcrank-only camera. There are plenty of occasions to shoot 30 frames for 24 frame playback—we do it all the time in commercials to give things a little “float,” or to “take the edge off” some motion. I still do this often with my 7D. Whatever frame rate I shoot—24, 30, 50 or 60, I play it back at 24. Just like film.

Folks ask me about 30p conversions often. Twixtor from RE:Vision Effects is a popular tool for this, as is Apple’s Compressor. Adobe After Effects has The Foundry’s well-regarded Kronos retiming technology built-in. All of these solutions are variations on optical flow algorithms, which track areas within the frame, try to identify segments of the image that are traveling discretely (you and I would call these “objects”), and interpolate new frames based on estimating the motion that happened between the existing ones.

This sounds impressive, and it is. Both The Foundry and RE:Vision Effects deservedly won Technical Achievement Academy Awards for their efforts in this area in 2007. And yet, as Mike and I discuss, this science is imperfect.

In August of 2009 I wrote:

I’m not saying that you won’t occasionally see results from 30-to-24p conversions that look good. The technology is amazing. But while it can work often, it will fail often. And that’s not a workflow. It’s finger-crossing.

On a more subtle note, I don’t think it’s acceptable that every frame of a film should be a computer’s best guess. The magic of filmmaking comes in part from capturing and revealing a narrow, selective slice of something resonant that happened in front of the lens. When you use these motion-interpolated frame rate conversions, you invite a clever computer algorithm to replace your artfully crafted sliver of reality with a best-guess. This artificiality accumulates to create a feeling of unphotographic plasticness.

Of course, it’s often much worse than a subtle sense that something’s not right. Quite often, stuff happens in between frames that no algorithm could ever guess. Here’s a sequence of consecutive 30p frames:

Right-click and select View Image to see full-resNothing fancy, just a guy running up some stairs. But his hand is moving fast enough that it looks quite different from one frame to the next.

Here’s that same motion, converted to 24p using The Foundry’s Kronos:

Right-click and select View Image to see full-resBlech.

Again, don’t get me wrong—these technologies are great, and can be extremely useful (seriously, how amazing is it that the rest of the frame looks as good as it does?). But they work best with a lot of hand-holding and artistry, rather than as unattended conversion processes.

(And they can take their sweet time to render too.)

I’m so glad we’re getting the real thing.