Still waiting for true innovation

[Dick Roadnight]

The art of camera design is the art of intelligent compromise, and I don't mean deliberately limiting quality or functionality, but...
Graeme

One theory of marketing is to try to avoid supplying anything that will do everything that anyone will want it to do for a decade... I think Red do not use that theory.

Another theory of marketing is to make something that will do everything that anyone will want it to do for a decade, but price it so that not everybody will buy it immediately.

I have recently bought my first "pro" digital camera, with the option to upgrade, as, until they invented 60 Mpx cameras that you could use as a point-and-shoot or on a view camera, I was not tempted.

Looking forward to the red 617.

[James R Russell]

Yup, I fully understand that type of compromize occurs. I wish it didn't. I much prefer trying to do the best you can!

Graeme

Graeme,

Since I come at this from a commercial photographer's point of view (when your a hammer, everything is a nail), I look at the still and motion cameras we have today vs. what was around 7 to 8 years ago and honestly I don't see much difference.

Maybe costs have plummeted on comparable systems like the 5d2 compared to a 1ds3 or a digital back, or the RED vs. what was available with a 35mm cinema camera, but as far as being able to offer up anything to a client that is really different or unique for advertising and marketing we're still pretty much producing, concepting,  working and delivering imagery the same way we were 10 years ago.

Right now the economy has put everything into sharp focus as to what works, what doesn't what's needed, what's expendable and now more so today than anytime I can remember, I get this feeling that the advertising world is kind of sitting on their hands waiting for the next big thing, or the next big idea that will drive their clients into spending and clients are sitting on their hands waiting for that something that will drive their customers into opening their wallets.

when I look at real innovation, something like the new Iphone just blows away compared to  what we have in professional equipment.

Shoot video, shoot stills, one button click to e-mail them to one person or the world, blog em, web em, comment on them get responses all while you can talk to your boyfriend, check the weather, hell it's such a different mindset compared to the professional equipment side of life.

With our equipment and software, we're still working traditional and nothing cross purposes that well.  Sure a 5d2 on manual focus will shoot a video image, a RED with manual focus will produce a still image out of the motion clips good enough for reproduction and though both cameras are quite amazing, they don't really offer 1/2 of the usability of something like the iphone I mentioned and this somewhat stumps me.

Why nikon has a d3 that has amazing focus for stills, shoots 10fps almost for long periods but can't just ramp up and shoot 30 fps kind of confuses me.  As somebody that works on the camera design side you probably know the answers to all of this, but how expensive and difficult is it to make take that Nikon or Canon, add another processor, a large buffer and let it rip?

The professional world is still living in this historic past.  A 1ds2 nor Nikon D3 looks and works pretty much like a film camera, a RED pretty much like a film camera and even finding common ground on software is almost impossible.

Your much better versed and studied in this than I, but why we can't put a video clip in lightroom and use it's familiar functions and controls to work video as we post process the stills is kind of perplexing that Adobe isn't working day and night to get this out in a week.  (maybe they are).

Maybe your next RED will have autofocus, high iso, lenses from 300mm to 10mm, familiar to use post processing software, or even better, easy to use in camera color and tone correction, I don't know, you do, but I do know that if you make the rounds from AD agency creatives, to corporate CEO's even the ones with advertising budget to spend, today aren't really sure where to put it, what will work, what medium will have the most play.

I think all mediums from motion to still, blogging to web, web to print, print to broadcast all shot under one production will be the future, but as slow as most of the equipment makers work, it will be a long time until we have devices that will do this.


JR

[Graeme Nattress]

Great questions - and I'm probably not the right guy to answer most of them. I can talk a little on the readout speed sensor and image processing stuff though, as that's an area I've had to investigate.

With a stills camera, we have a physical shutter, which means readout from the sensor can be comparatively slow, without causing visual artifacts. When the readout needs to go faster, you need to read and reset either the whole sensor or line very much faster. From what I understand, to reduce this read/reset time is a non-trivial task. To avoid visual artifacts, the read/reset time needs to be fast enough so that the whole frame can be read out much faster than the goal fps for the sensor. And that is why, for instance, the 5D2 appears to only read out a third of the lines per frame as it just doesn't have a fast enough read/reset time to do more.

Adding a buffer to extend record time would be great - but how big a buffer and what sustained data rate? For the RED One, uncompressed data rates at 4096x2304x12bits at even just 24fps are quite large - over 330MB/s, so for even just a 4minute load you'd need not just that very fast sustained rate but 80GB storage too. So that's why we went down the REDCode RAW compression route, which puts all that onto a 8GB CF card.

So to get stills quality at video frame rates means you need a much faster sensor, and either new compression technology or very fast storage. It's not actually too much a function of "processing" if you're going un-compressed, or very much a function of special processing if you use a compression technique.

Why not Lightroom type processing on traditional video? Video is very rarely recorded RAW, and hence Lightroom style processing just wouldn't work, as that needs the larger dynamic range an lack of burned in gamma and matrix to function as it does. The second issue is that many things we take for granted in stills processing are made tricker for movie processing due to that movement inherent in movies, tracking windows / masks / grads as the image moves, for instance. Finally, of course, it's not to bad to get real-time feedback on a single image, but to do so at 24fps (at a minimum) for moving video is quite a trickier computational problem.

The digital stills "problem" has traditionally been a far easier one to solve than video. For over 50 years, although video cameras got better, they were still fixed at "standard definition" resolutions. Look at how slow the adoption of HD has been compared to the leaps in resolution we've seen in digital stills, and how digital has had the benefits of raw for ages, where video is mostly still in the "JPEG" type of processing. However, computing power is catching up, and now we can see what a stills / movie convergence can do. And I think once that parity of image quality is achieved, we'll start to see the innovations that are possible.

Graeme

[gcs]

I agree that Canon/Nikon/Sony should bring the best and new features to the hi-end cameras, but we photographers need basically 2 things to obtain the best work:

 a) Good lenses
  Outstanding film, in the digital world a very good sensor

Today the above 3 companies have excellent lenses, but on the sensor side, still need to make improvements, such as Sony  A900 with D-max noise.

The rest of the goodies help you take thousands of pictures to select from, but best of them will need a) and  to be outstanding, and above all, your eyes.

Gonzalo

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

Did you try to shoot in the night using sensor based Live View?

Erik

True innovation for me will be tossing out the 3::2 rectangle.  Tossing out the mirror too.   Why DSLR's still use it is beyond me.

[Dick Roadnight]

Hi,

Did you try to shoot in the night using sensor based Live View?

Erik

Bring back the wire-frame viewfinder ... and does anyone know of one that zooms auto as the lens zooms? (or an auto-zooming lens shade?)

[grepmat]

A few innovations that should be coming down the pike very soon (we are starting to see the first one in a few cameras):

* Genuine automatic dynamic range expansion. This one is actually fairly easy, but may require being on a tripod to get right, since multiple exposures are required in the most obvious method.

* Super-resolution - obtaining a higher genuine resolution than the sensor has. This one is also fairly well developed, and it could be implemented using the same mechanism as in-camera sensor-shift image stabilization.

What seems to be tough, but is needed pretty badly:

* Better automatic white balance.

And now a difficult one, but one which would truly be the next, er, dimension in photography:

* True distance encoding per pixel. This would be "true" 3-D. That is, not stereo, but 3-D in the sense that each pixel would be red, green, blue plus distance.

Cheers.