The future of motion pictures - Lytro cinema

[The Terminator]

This might belong in off topic instead, if so move away

I will start off by saying, I think I have fallen in love, with a camera technology. Imagine using a camera in a scene, and in the best take, the main main character/object is out of focus, what if you could change the focal point in the depth of field. Well apparently now you can :wacko Oh and forget blue/green screens, those are(will be) a thing in the past.

What is this post about? This:

A prototype camera, 755 megapixel, 16 Stops, 300 fps

Interview with Academy award winner David Stump

Changing perspective, frame rate, motion blur, focal planes, aperture - in POST.
3D converted movies - BYE BYE(that is newer films shot with a camera like this at least)

I did have a scary thought though. Imagine all the CCTV cameras around the world - functioning like this.

Thoughts, opinions???

EDIT:
Wanted to add this NAB 2016 keynote 360 VIDEO

Where you can look around the room

 

[DaddyfromNaboo]

That opens many, many doors. But it also makes it harder to actually choose the door that you want to walk through ...

What I am talking about is that many directors already try to change a lot of things on set at the very last minute. So what if you have someone who does not need to lock his vision in at some point?

It is a great tool and I see a lot of applications, but what I am really curious about is how it will change the way movies are actually made. It may mean even higher quality TV content.

But it also means that we cannot be sure about how real our reality is, in a not so distant future. We cannot trust images anymore already and we won´t be able to trust live footage anymore. That aspect does indeed worry me a bit.

 

[The Mad Professor]

Well, at least we are one step closer to CSI style image enhancement...

 

[The Terminator]

I am most of the time in the middle, of everything. So I definitely see a LOT of pros and a LOT of cons with this. A bit like handing a film maker an unlimited budget. And by unlimited I mean, UN-limited, want to shoot it on the surface of the moon? Sure! :lol It can be good, but it can also be terrible.

Oh I did hear that it apparently takes up quite a bit of storage.... like a lot. By a lot I mean 400 gb -PER SECOND. :wacko :eek :wacko
and I don't even want to try and imagine what the initial price tag will be like. But like most stuff, they get cheaper over time. Still.

 

[Wetwired]

Certainly an interesting tool. But if it only can do the same thing in post as you can do while filming the practical use seems limited.

 

[The Mad Professor]

Oh I did hear that it apparently takes up quite a bit of storage.... like a lot. By a lot I mean 400 gb -PER SECOND. :wacko :eek :wacko
and I don't even want to try and imagine what the initial price tag will be like. But like most stuff, they get cheaper over time. Still.

400GB/sec?

Wow... you'd need a server farm to film a movie like that.

A minute of footage would require about 25 TB of storage (400GB/s times 60 seconds = 24000 GB).

A single two hour video would need roughly 3 petabytes or 3000 TB of storage. To accomodate all the extra footage and multiple takes, you're looking at a conservative storage solution in excess of 20 petabytes, and most likely in the 70-100 petabyte range. This is for one film alone. When you start factoring in other movies being filmed the same way, the required storage space increases exponentially.

Assuming standard data redundancy, you'd need server space that would provide enough disks to properly execute that redundancy as well as provide backup. This will increase the number of required disks a minimum of six-fold, and more likely ten-fold.


Realistically, there's going to need to be a quantum surge in data storage technology before this new camera technology can be properly used. The storage requirements are just way too much at the moment to be able to realistically and reliably hold the data.

 

[The Terminator]

400GB/sec?

Wow... you'd need a server farm to film a movie like that.

A minute of footage would require about 25 TB of storage (400GB/s times 60 seconds = 24000 GB).

A single two hour video would need roughly 3 petabytes or 3000 TB of storage. To accomodate all the extra footage and multiple takes, you're looking at a conservative storage solution in excess of 20 petabytes, and most likely in the 70-100 petabyte range. This is for one film alone. When you start factoring in other movies being filmed the same way, the required storage space increases exponentially.

Assuming standard data redundancy, you'd need server space that would provide enough disks to properly execute that redundancy as well as provide backup. This will increase the number of required disks a minimum of six-fold, and more likely ten-fold.


Realistically, there's going to need to be a quantum surge in data storage technology before this new camera technology can be properly used. The storage requirements are just way too much at the moment to be able to realistically and reliably hold the data.

I think the word you are looking for is "astronomical" :lol :lol
400 gigs/second is just insane. But hey, it's not my problem so, I will just sit back and wait for some other genius to figure it out :angel

 

[Boba Debt]

Oh I did hear that it apparently takes up quite a bit of storage.... like a lot. By a lot I mean 400 gb -PER SECOND. :wacko :eek :wacko
and I don't even want to try and imagine what the initial price tag will be like. But like most stuff, they get cheaper over time. Still.

400GB/sec?

Wow... you'd need a server farm to film a movie like that.

My first desktop was amazing and it had 386 processor, 256k of ram and I can't even remember how small the hard drive was.

You guys sound like the people that use to think that would was the pinnacle of computer technology.

 

[The Terminator]

My first desktop was amazing and it had 386 processor, 256k of ram and I can't even remember how small the hard drive was.

You guys sound like the people that use to think that would was the pinnacle of computer technology.

That is so far off even though my first comp is a super computer compared to a 386 :lol
Pentium 3, 500 mhz, 128 MB RAM, 16MB video card, 13.4 GB harddrive :lol :lol :lol

But either way you put it 400 freakin gb PER second is a lot. And it will probably be quite a bit still ten years from now.

 

[The Mad Professor]

My first desktop was amazing and it had 386 processor, 256k of ram and I can't even remember how small the hard drive was.

You guys sound like the people that use to think that would was the pinnacle of computer technology.

That is not what I'm intending at all. I'm talking about sheer amounts of resources needed to properly set up a data storage system for that.

Consumer needs and available resources go hand in hand to drive each other and push the envelope, with small breakthroughs in technology fueling increased demand on systems, which in turn fuels larger storage requirements, which then creates demand for more technological breakthroughs. This is the cornerstone of the technology industry.

Think of it in terms of child rearing. We know that babies grow at a relatively fast pace, requiring regular updates to their clothes as they outgrow them. However, imagine you put your toddler to bed one night and the next morning you wake up to find that they've grown to the size of Texas. There's no way that you could realistically afford to feed and clothe them. The sheer amounts of food and clothing would be, as Terminator pointed out, astronomical.

Well the same situation applies here.

 

[Darth Lars]

Not everyone is going to need 300 fps. I am sure that some cinematographers are going to opt to perform some basic transformations "in camera" to keep the bitrate down.

 

[batguy]

If 300fps = 400 gigs/sec?

Then 24fps = 32 gigs.
48fps = 64 gigs.

Still some pretty colossal figures for commercially available hardware in the foreseeable future.




I wonder about the cost of the actual camera hardware to do this. Probably something pretty wild.

If this comes into common usage it may end up being a situation more like what they had in decades past. Productions would rent $100,000 film cameras from the big studios, and wasting film was a real no-no.

I could see this coming into usage for SFX, occasional important shots, etc. The cost/benefits probably don't pay off for full-time shooting throughout a movie (yet).

 

[DaddyfromNaboo]

...
I wonder about the cost of the actual camera hardware to do this. Probably something pretty wild.

If this comes into common usage it may end up being a situation more like what they had in decades past. Productions would rent $100,000 film cameras from the big studios, and wasting film was a real no-no.

I could see this coming into usage for SFX, occasional important shots, etc. The cost/benefits probably don't pay off for full-time shooting throughout a movie (yet).

There usually are companies that rent out equipment, no production or production company that I know of has their own equipment, at least over here in Germany, and I am sure that it´s the same world wide. So the investment lies with those equipment rental companies, with old equipment getting a refurbishment and then sold off.

 

[Darth Lars]

BTW, are we talking gigaBIT/second or gigaBYTE/second.

For comparison, SDI for UHD (almost or practically Cinema 4K depending on aspect ratio), stereoscopic, 60 fps would be 24 gigabit/second and that is sometimes dumped into MXF files without compression.