Film is dead--and a few big-budget movies won't save it

Last July, after lobbying by directors including J.J. Abrams, Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, the major U.S. movie studios signed a deal with Kodak to continue to purchase motion picture film for several years, whether or not they actually use the film. Kodak, which emerged from bankruptcy in September 2013, had planned to shut down its (and the industry's) last remaining motion picture film manufacturing facility. Between the virtually total replacement of film cameras with digital and the almost complete transition of U.S. theatrical projectors to digital from film, Kodak's shipments of motion picture film fell 96% between 2006 and 2014.

Why do this relative handful of directors continue to insist on shooting film? There are two primary reasons:

1. Film can capture a bigger range of colors than digital camera--the equivalent of 16 bits of resolution. By comparison, Arri's Alexa, the most popular camera for high-end cinematography, captures color information with 15 bits of resolution, but then may lose bits of resolution when it converts the video to a color space for editing and viewing.
2. Under ideal conditions, 35mm film has an image resolution of around 5300 x 4000 pixels, while the Digital Cinema standard for 4K acquisition and projection is 4096 x 2160 pixels. However, many movie theaters are still using 2K projectors, which limits the resolution to 2048 x 1080. Compared to either digital standard, film (hypothetically, at least) provides far more image detail.

So, those directors who still want to use film have a solid rationale for doing so, even if most of the increased resolution and color space are lost once they're projected on digital projectors or watched on HD, or even Ultra HD TVs. However, the vast majority of directors and cinematographers have switched to digital for several reasons:

1. Digital cameras have dramatically more dynamic range (the ability to capture bright and dark subjects at the same time) than does film. Typically, the dynamic range of movie film is 1,000: 1 (approximately 10 bits or 10 f-stops.) Even video cameras costing a few thousand dollars can capture 10 f-stops or more, and the Arri Alexa has a range of more than 14 f-stops, or better than 16,384:1.
2. Digital media is much less expensive than film over time, because it can be reused. Movie productions typically offload recorded flash media to hard and flash drives during the day, then erase and reuse the flash media. Digital's much lower costs also enable directors to get coverage from a variety of angles and framings.
3. 35mm film magazines usually only allow a maximum of 1000 feet of film to be loaded, due to size and weight. That means that magazines have to be changed every 11 minutes of filming (at 24 frames per second.) Depending on the image resolution, dynamic range and color depth, a single piece of digital flash media can hold hours of video. That allows for long continuous shots and far fewer interruptions to change media. 
4. Digital cameras have an enormous range of sizes and weights, many of which are smaller and lighter than any practical motion picture film camera can be. This gives filmmakers enormous flexibility for shooting in tight quarters and in sports and action situations. It also makes lightweight drones feasible for shooting, where previously only helicopters and airplanes were viable platforms for aerial photography.
5. Specialized digital cameras can provide much higher frame rates than are either economically or technically feasible for film cameras. For example, Vision Research's Phantom Flex4K digital camera can shoot Digital Cinema 4K at 1,000 frames per second, or 2K at 1,950 frames per second. By comparison, film cameras usually shoot 24 frames per second.

There's a technology coming down the pike that's likely to make film obsolete, even for the directors who still insist on using it. I wrote about High Dynamic Range (HDR) video two weeks ago, and I won't repeat all the arguments I made in that post. Here's a summary of HDR's advantages:

• Much greater dynamic range; Dolby says that its Dolby Vision HDR system will have as much as a 200,000:1 dynamic range. Many current digital cinema cameras can be adapted to shoot HDR video when there are commercially-available ways to view it.
• Color spaces that are as big or bigger than motion picture film.

However, there are several problems with HDR, beyond what I stated in my post:

• There are no current theater projectors, film or digital, that can project HDR images. Film is only capable of 1,000:1 dynamic range, and film can't project a true black because even the blackest part of an image can't block all the light from the powerful xenon bulb in film projectors. Digital projectors use a similar xenon light and have the same problem. It's possible that laser-based digital projectors could project both the dynamic range and color space of HDR, but to my knowledge it hasn't been demonstrated yet.
• With the exception of the handful of expensive professional Organic LED (OLED) displays in use, today's current HDTVs can't provide either the dynanic range or color space of HDR. However, LCD HD and Ultra HD TVs can be engineered to have a separate LED backlight for every pixel, and most LCD displays are capable of displaying a bigger color space than is currently used. Dolby, Technicolor, Philips and the BBC are all either in talks with or have already licensed technology to consumer electronics manufacturers to implement their HDR formats in future HD and Ultra HD TVs.

I believe that when the aforementioned film-holdout directors see HDR, they're going to want to use it--and that's when film dies, once and for all, for movie production. (Film is already dead in movie theaters, despite some last-gasp attempts to keep it viable.) The problem, of course, is that there's no easy way to implement HDR in movie theaters. However, as I wrote in my previous post, if past experience is a guide, it make take as long as ten years for HDR to become standardized and available to consumers at an affordable price. That will give theater operators and digital projector companies time to figure out a way to make HDR work in theaters.

Why I'm not racing to buy a Ultra HD TV...yet

Over the last 18 months, there's been an explosion of products for creating and editing 4K video, from cameras and switchers to editing and compositing software. Costs have declined dramatically: A few years ago, there was only a handful of cameras that could do 4K, and they were priced in the mid- to high-five figures. Today there are 4K cinematography-quality cameras priced as low as $2,000, and GoPro is said to be planning to release its 4K HERO 4 sport camera the week of October 5th, probably at a price below $400. (Update, Sept. 29) GoPro announced three new sports cameras today, with prices. The new HERO 4 Black is the 4K/30fps model, and it will sell for $500, not the $400 I estimated. However, it will ship on October 5th.

4K consumer televisions are becoming more common, and again, much less expensive. In late 2012, there were only two 4K televisions for sale in the U.S. market, and they were priced at $20,000 and $25,000 respectively. Today, the average selling price for an Ultra HD TV (the new name for 4K video) in North America is just under $2,000, and 50" Seiki and TCL models can be had from Amazon for under $450. Vizio has just started shipping its P-series Ultra HD TVs, which are claimed to be comparable to more expensive models from the top manufacturers; its 50" model sells for $1.000.

The better models from the first tier TV manufacturers (including Vizio) should have excellent picture quality, refresh rates of 120Hz or more, and a good upscaler that resizes conventional HD video to Ultra HD without distortion. However, independent researchers have found that, at the normal distances that viewers sit when watching their televisions, there's almost no meaningful difference in the perceived quality of a HDTV and Ultra HD picture. This chart explains how it works:



There was a huge jump in quality between analog TVs and even 720p HDTV. If you had a 50" set, you could see the full difference at 10 feet; with 1080p, you saw the full benefit over 720p at about six feet. However, with Ultra HD, you won't even begin to see any improvement over HD until you're about five feet from the TV, and you won't get the full benefit until you're only about 3 1/2 feet away (a little more than a meter.) At that distance, the television picture is filling most of your field of vision. So, I'm not planning to buy any of this generation of Ultra HDTVs. The reason is that there's a new technology not too far down the road that will provide a much more dramatic improvement over conventional HD picture quality than Ultra HD provides by itself.

This new technology is called High Dynamic Range, or HDR. HDR expands the contrast range of television pictures. Imagine that you're outside on a bright sunlit day. You can see well-illuminated objects quite clearly, and you can also see what's in shadow. That's because your eye has a contrast range of about 1,000,000:1 (20 f-stops.) LCD televisions have a much lower contrast ratio--Rtings.com tested a variety of 2014 HDTVs and found that the highest contrast ratio, 5,268:1, was measured on a Toshiba L3400U. Manufacturers like to claim much higher ratios--for example, in its current E-series, Vizio claims a contrast ratio of 500,000:1, but Rtings.com measured it at 4,581:1. Still very good for a current-generation HDTV, but less than 1% of the advertised contrast ratio.

Even video cameras don't have the same contrast range as the human eye. The Arri Alexa XT. one of the most popular cameras for episodic television and high-end movie production, has a 16,384:1 contrast range. However, through HDR technology the contrast range can be extended significantly, to as much as 262,144:1 (18 f-stops.) That's still not as wide as what the eye can see, but it's dramatically better than anything ever seen on consumer television sets. Even plasma TVs, which have a much wider contrast range than LCDs (up to 13,000:1) are nowhere near what HDR can represent.

One of the several companies developing HDR technology for consumer television, Dolby, claims that its Dolby Vision technology will provide a dynamic range of as much as 200,000:1. Other companies developing HDR technology for video include Technicolor, Philips and the BBC. In addition to more dynamic range, Dolby and its competitors are implementing bigger color spaces (simply put, displays built using their systems will be able to display more colors than current televisions.)

One of the big reasons why HDR isn't in the consumer market yet is that existing formats for transmitting video don't support the increased dynamic range and bigger color spaces from the HDR system developers. These formats, if they're used for over-the-air broadcasting, usually have to be approved and standardized by each country's governmental broadcasting authority (the FCC in the U.S., Ofcom in the U.K., etc.) These standardization processes take time, and they take more time when there are multiple vendors competing to set the standard. In the U.S., it took almost five years for the competing companies to agree to work together on one digital television standard, and another five years for manufacturers to begin shipping digital televisions that were compatible with the standard.

Implementation of HDR is likely to be much less painful and take significantly less time than the move from analog standard definition television to digital HD. However, it will take several years, and it's likely that some TV manufacturers will release HDR TV sets using different, incompatible formats. HDR system vendors also have to design their HDR formats so that they're 100% compatible with today's formats, so that HDTVs already in use will simply ignore the HDR portion of the signal. Backward compatibility is never easy to do, and that's why digital HDTV had to be a clean break from the earlier analog SD formats.

So, unless my HDTV dies prematurely, I'm not going to buy an Ultra HD until the television industry settles on a single HDR format, either through government agency decisions or the rise of a de facto standard. There's a huge quality difference between HDTV and Ultra HD with HDR--a difference that you'll clearly see in retail stores and in your living room.

Blackmagic adds studio cameras to its live production suite, makes its switchers 4K

Blackmagic Design has long been known as a post-production hardware vendor, starting with its DeckLink cards in 2002. In 2010, the company moved into live video production when it acquired switcher manufacturer Echolab's assets out of bankruptcy. Together with its Videohub routers and video & audio monitoring hardware, Blackmagic built a fairly complete line of live production products. Then, in 2012, Blackmagic introduced its first camera, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera (BMCC). Many people wondered if the Cinema Camera could be used for live production since it has an HD-SDI output, but Blackmagic cautioned against using it that way. The BMCC's color output is so flat that it can't really be used without color correction, and Blackmagic's subsequent camera models launched prior to this year aren't much better suited for live use.

However, at NAB earlier this week, Blackmagic introduced a line of cameras designed specifically for live production, the Studio Camera HD and Studio Camera 4K (which outputs video in Ultra HD and HD.) The Studio Cameras are designed around 10" LCDs that do double duty as viewfinders and menu displays. The company claims that the viewfinders are the largest offered by any manufacturer. Unlike the Cinema Camera and Production Camera, the Studio Camera's display isn't touch-sensitive; a row of buttons below the display is used for user inputs. The company claims that by eliminating the touch-sensitive layer, the Studio Camera's display is brighter.

On the back of the display, there's a wedge that contains all of the camera's connectors, the lens mount (active Micro Four Thirds), imager and most of the camera's electronics. The result is a very strange looking camera, but one with significantly better features than previous Blackmagic models. For example, the company's previous cameras have become known for their poor battery life, but Blackmagic says that the battery in the Studio Camera will last for four hours, and a standard four-pin power connector allows users to connect external batteries for more runtime, or AC power for continuous operation. The single minijack or dual 1/4" jacks used for audio input in the previous cameras have been replaced with dual XLR connectors with phantom power.

The Studio Cameras also have several new features:

• A LANC interface for connecting a remote iris, focus and zoom control (if your lens is compatible)
• Dual jacks for connecting an aviation headset for intercom use; Blackmagic claims that aviation headsets are much less expensive than video production headsets with comparable features
• A bidirectional optical fiber connector that's compatible with the ATEM Studio Converter and provides the same functionality as the $595 ATEM Camera Converter. This enables the Studio Camera to send and receive HD or 4K video, stereo audio, talkback/intercom and tally lights over cable runs as long as 28 miles
• A software-based Remote Camera Control that works with any ATEM Production Studio. All of the settings on the camera can be monitored and controlled with this software. In addition, a full copy of DaVinci Resolve's primary color corrector is included for live color balancing

You may be thinking, "These Studio Cameras are better than Blackmagic's first-generation models in almost every way, and they're the same price, so why would anyone buy the earlier models?" One big reason is that the Studio Cameras have no storage. No SSD, no CFast, no SDXC, nothing. You can, of course, add an external recorder such as Blackmagic's HyperDeck Shuttle, and you've got other options using the Studio Cameras' SDI connections. However, an external recorder adds to the size, weight and cost of the cameras.

The Studio Camera HD is shipping now and is priced at $1,995 (U.S.), while the Studio Camera 4K is expected to ship in June and is priced at $2,995. Given Blackmagic's track record with cameras, don't bet your life on that June ship date, and expect some problems with the cameras that are shipped for the first several months.

Blackmagic has also made a number of changes to its ATEM line of switchers (all of which are shipping):

• The original HD-only models of the ATEM 1 M/E and 2 M/E have been discontinued; the sole HD-only switcher that remains in the product line is the $995 ATEM Television Studio, which is primarily intended as a "personal" switcher for webcasts and small productions
• The new ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio and 2 M/E Production Studio support 4K and HD on all inputs and outputs (except the monitor outputs, which are HD only)
• Last year's ATEM Production Studio 4K, which has similar functionality to the ATEM Television Studio except it supports 4K, remains in the product line at $1,695
• The ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K is priced at $2,495, and the ATEM 2 M/E Production Studio 4K is priced at $3,995, $1,000 less than last year's model

With the Studio Cameras and its 4K switcher line, Blackmagic now has just about everything needed to build a live production facility.

Panasonic's GH4 lowers the bar for 4K pricing, but are the compromises worth it?

Panasonic’s flagship GH series of Micro Four-Thirds ILCs has developed a strong reputation as cinematography cameras, starting with the GH2, which had its firmware hacked to enable much higher bit rates than the stock model. The GH3, introduced last year, took many of the capabilities added by third parties and built them into the base camera. Last month, at the Consumer Electronics Show, Panasonic showed a prototype of a new GH that looked almost identical to the GH3 but supported 4K video. As of this weekend, we’ve learned the specifications for the new camera, called GH4, but not the price or release date.

The GH4 16.05 megapixel CMOS imager doesn’t break any records for still imaging, but it does support 4K video at both standard resolutions: Ultra HD (3840x2160 @ 30p,) the broadcast/video 4K standard and the resolution of consumer Ultra HD displays, and Cinema 4K (4096x2160 @ 24p,) the baseline standard for theatrical production, post-production and exhibition. In 4K mode, it uses IBP compression with I and B frames at 100mbps, while in 2K mode, it supports All-I compression at 200mbps.

The GH4 has an interesting (and confusing) approach to how it handles storage of 4K video: When using an SD card, video is stored in 8-bit 4:2:0, and is output to the HDMI terminal as 8-bit 4:2:2. If you remove the SD card and use an external recorder, the HDMI output is 10-bit 4:2:2. You can also opt for a dock (Panasonic refers to it as an “interface unit”) that provides two XLR audio inputs with LED meters, four SDI outputs (two of which are 3G) and a 12VDC power socket. The SDI outputs can presumably drive an external recorder and monitor simultaneously at 10-bit 4:2:2. The dock won’t win any design awards—it just about doubles the size of the GH4—but it does add the interfaces that professional users need (or are forced to add with third-party hardware.)

Panasonic’s approach to storing 4K video means that an external recorder will be a necessity. In this regard, Blackmagic Design’s Production Camera 4K (the camera most likely to be compared to the GH4) has an advantage, because users can insert a SSD directly into the Blackmagic camera, eliminating the need for an external recorder.

I have to admit that I’m disappointed with how Panasonic chose to implement storage on the GH4. It would have been nice to be able to use the camera in a handheld mode without a lot of additional hardware, but in 4K mode, the SD card is only good for proxy recording in 4K mode. (To be clear, you can store 4K video on the SD card, but if you're serious enough about 4K to put up with all the other issues you'll need to deal with in post-production--massive storage, faster PCs, bigger monitors, etc.--8-bit 4:2:0 won't cut it.)

At CES, Panasonic representatives said that they expect the GH4 to be priced less than $2,000 in the U.S. That price won’t include the dock, which is likely to cost at least $1,000. So, Panasonic could get the GH4 plus dock to market at around $3,000—but I wouldn’t be surprised if the pair launches at closer to $4,000.

Update (March 10, 2014): Panasonic has revealed prices and availability dates for the GH4. The GH4 body's suggested retail price is $1,699.99 (U.S.). The dock (officially called the DMW-YAGH XLR/SDI Interface Unit) is priced at $1,999.99. If you buy both the GH4 and dock as a bundle, it's priced at $3,299.99. I’d love to see a third party develop a more elegant (and cheaper) dock, but there may not be a big enough market for it to make financial sense.

The GH4 is one of the least expensive ways of getting into 4K, if not the least expensive way. However, as we’ve learned from Blackmagic’s cameras, inexpensive means compromises, and the GH4 is no exception. It remains to be seen if the GH4’s compromises are ones that you can live with.