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Big-screen LCD TVs are not going away any time soon. Given the economy of scale, the LCDs in our homes and studios work well enough and will continue to work well enough for several more years. But given the advances in LED display technology, especially microLED, the writing of sub-micron size pixels is literally on the wall.
In terms of new broadcast cameras, if the recent virtual IBC convention is any indication of how the industry is supporting broadcast and TV studio customers, buyer confusion reigns supreme. Gone are the days of one-camera-fits-all applications.
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“‘Chris,’ she said, ‘it’s about an order of nuns who’re protecting the world.’”
Now the CRT is history, we have to justify the retention of gamma on its performance as a perceptual compression codec. That requires its effect on human vision to be considered.
Director of photography John Christian Rosenlund has at least a three-decade history with director Bent Hamer. Their most recent collaboration, The Middle Man, depicts a town in the northern United States during a post-industrial depression. It’s perhaps not a subject instinctively associated with Rosenlund and Hamer’s Norwegian roots, though when we learn that the production is based on a book by Norwegian author Lars Saabye Christensen, the link becomes clear.
Before pandemics and the downsizing at traditional, broadcast news operations, many news and non-fiction DOPs were already assuming a significant role in post-production. Whereas frame rates, f-stops, and the character of our lenses, once formed the backbone of our expertise and practice, DOPs in the non-theatrical realm increasingly find ourselves in a different kind of ditty bag, as correspondent, writer, director, and ersatz editor – all rolled into a one-person-can-do-anything-and-everything mode.
For a long time, selecting camera gear has been fairly easy. For twenty years, digital cinema cameras have never quite had everything we wanted, and the choice often boiled down to comparing the compromises. That’ll always be true to a degree, but for the last year or two it’s felt like we’re arriving somewhere. We can’t have anything, but we can have more than enough, and those compromises are boiling down to a zero-sum game.
It’s perhaps a little unfair to blame modern visual effects people for the fact that audiences are becoming a little jaded about green screen. If we’re to conclude that there’s some sort of quality problem with VFX, we’d need to be sure that we were noticing each and every use, so we know how big the sample is. Many of the applications of VFX, in modern movies, are actually comparatively simple fixes or paint-outs of inappropriate details that nobody ever notices – the boom reflected in a window, the anachronistic sign in a period piece. If we’re not aware of these VFX, they can’t really be objectionable, and we have no idea what proportion of VFX are actually a problem.