Last time, we talked about the history that created modern digital cinema technology, and particularly the factors which lead to the modern push for ever larger sensors. It’s been going on in some form for twenty years, to the point that we’re now asking for bigger imagers than cinema has ever commonly used, achieving more resolution than cinema commonly achieved, with greater sensitivity than was ever available to directors of photography in the twentieth century. To get that we’re tolerating all kinds of inconveniences in terms of the lenses we must use and the light levels, or sheer accomplishment in focus pulling, that big chips tend to demand.
It’s not controversial to say that film production in London has been booming for a few years, and there’s no real secret as to why: in 2006, Gordon Brown’s government introduced tax incentives that have played at least a part in provoking a doubling of production spend since 2009, and the post-financial crash and post-Brexit-referendum state of the pound has probably helped too. There are all kinds of arguments to be made about whether tax incentives for film production actually represent public funding of private enterprise, and whether they drive a race to the bottom in which various jurisdictions vie with each other to give away the largest amount of potential public money.
HDR is taking the broadcasting world by storm. The combination of a greater dynamic range and wider color gamut is delivering images that truly bring the immersive experience to home viewers. Vibrant colors and detailed specular highlights build a kind of realism into broadcast productions that our predecessors could only have ever dreamed of.
Now the inaugural hype around Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) has subsided, deployments are ramping up, setting the stage for rapid growth over the next few years.
Bob Dylan was riding a crest of social change when he wrote those lyrics in 1963. But the words popped back into my mind as I thought about several recent conversations with friends who complain of their struggle to stay afloat in today’s video production business.
The rg color space served to document the chromaticity gamut of the HVS, and so was a great step forward in understanding color and color vision. However, it was based on a certain set of primaries. As no set of primaries can embrace the whole of the HVS gamut, it is inevitable that the color matching functions have negative excursions. The CIE set out to remedy that by taking the color matching experimental data and representing it in a different way. The color space they developed is a cube having three orthogonal axes, X, Y and Z. The white point was defined as the equal energy point, otherwise known as Illuminant E (for equal).
The push to create the ideal digital cinematography camera has now been going on for, arguably, two decades. There were a couple of standout attempts in the 1980s involving high definition tube cameras, but the introduction of Sony’s HDCAM tape format in 1998 served more or less as the starting point of recognizably modern digital cinema. Since then, a huge effort has been made to meet the standards of a century of conventional, photochemical moviemaking. Arguments about whether that’s been achieved, or ever will be achieved, seem likely to rage forever, but in 2019 there seems at least some interest in going way, way beyond (some parts of) what 35mm film could ever do. The question is why.
People have been making pictures for both the big and small screens for almost a century. In an industry with a history that long, it’s no surprise that the perpetual search for something new has long been tempered by a certain respect for tradition. Or, to put it another way, directors of photography are very often looking for ways to make pictures look different, and different in a way that’s somehow appropriate.
