Thursday 27 January 2011

www.definitionmagazine.com/databank/


Dan Mulligan has new blog with Definition Magazine

Welcome Dan Mulligan with a new Blog - Databank, musings from the datacentric world, starts with a look at Hassleblad http://bit.ly/h2aQRA

Dan Mulligan is an experience cinematographer, but more than that Dan is interested in pushing the boundaries of his art. Since HD cameras became commonplace Dan has been designing workflows and pushing for the best practices to create a digital industry based on rock solid skill sets.

The Databank Blog will reflect Dan's discoveries and include his musings on the way data recording is changing the face of digital production. While Dan works on the biggest movies and TV productions, his Blog won't exclude the technical advancement in other industries. In fact his first posting below talks about the progress of the Medium Stills Format and what video could possibly learn from it. This format is designed to encourage feedback and comment so please take up the opportunity.

Enjoy the new blog.

Rogue Element Films Jan 2011

Wednesday 26 January 2011

Pure Imaging - True uncompressed

Roge Element Digital has been involved now for many years with fully uncompressed data workflows and capture. We have been pioneering an approach to digital where we see the capture of fully uncompressed DPXs and the delivery of a true full bandwidth digital negative as the way to record digital as if it was film, that is the full amount of image data possible.

Recording the complete output from the camera and the full sensor resolution and bandwidth gives the customer and the client the complete amount of information to manipulate, s you would with film.

Pure Digital, Pure Images, Pure Rogue Digital.....

Tuesday 25 January 2011

Arriraw Arri posting on CML - Rogue beta tests ARRIRAW

Below is an email from Neil Fathom regarding the status of ARRIRAW right now. Rogue Element Digital has been involved in the beta testing of the ARRIRAW format as mentined below providing kit and support. We are committed to ARRIRAW and now have full v3.0 Alexa support and full post workflow options for 2011, right now.
Regards Rogue Element Digital, Jan 2011
"Firstly a thank you for all the interest on CML regarding the status of ARRIRAW, which is a very important part of ALEXA™ ongoing development during 2011.
To clarify where we are at the moment - ALEXA with ARRIRAW is Beta testing successfully world-wide for several major Feature and Commercial productions, most of which are due to enter principal photography in the coming weeks. The various camera crews, DoPs and Cinematographers involved in testing are extremely happy with the reliability of the Beta software, and the quality of the ARRIRAW footage they are capturing is of the highest standard.
We are convinced that ALEXA™s ARRIRAW recording capability will offer a dependable digital solution for the Commercials and Features market and will position itself as the uncompromised, uncompressed RAW recording format of choice.
More news about ARRIRAW performance, certified recorders, workflow options and the full extent of the ARRIRAW partner/post-production support program will be posted early in February when the ALEXA v3.0 software update is formally released ... so please bear with us until then and in the meantime, if you are Beta shooting ARRIRAW, thanks for your commitment, support, and feedback.
Neil Fanthom
Head of Global Strategy,
ARRI Digital Camera Systems

Tuesday 18 January 2011

Arriraw - Testing 2011






















Rogue has been testing Arriraw now for a while for capture, on-set delivery and post. We now have a full pipeline for the V3 raw from the Alexa.
The images look fantastic and the debayer is one of the crucial aspects to the workflow.

Rogue Digital

Sunday 16 January 2011

F35 - Visa adverts


VVVisa Black Card recently released their newest national TV ad campaign featuring a female “James Bond” type character and the finest in luxury props. Brain Farm Digital Cinema produced the campaign top to bottom as well as did all post production. Directed by Curt Morgan, the commercials were shot all digital using the Sony F35, Cineflex V14 and Phantom Gold. Special thanks toDonna Feldman who is the amazing model that gave the commercial the perfect flare. The spots are now airing on Fox, Travel Channel, NBC, Bloomberg and more. You can also see the campaign on YouTube. Stay tuned for the next installment of the Black Card adventure coming out Fall 2010.


F35 - Red Tails & George Lucas




With his With his new production Red Tails George Lucas pursues a specific technical approach: For the first time a large scale Hollywood project will be entirely digital from start to finish – including the projection in the theatres. This represents the only way to really control the visual quality throughout the entire production chain, claims the renowned perfectionist.

Rick McCallum, who already acted as producer for George Lucas on the Star Wars sequels and the Young Indiana Jones films, decided on the F35 for the new project of Red Tails.

Fred Meyers, technical supervisor and responsible for the digital recording flew in, and installed the very elaborate workflow of Lucasfilm and ILM. Three weeks of intense work were necessary to set up, update and refine the workflow at the FGV premises.

The signal is recorded with dual link 4:4:4 on SRW-1/SRPC-1 machines that are connected via fiber optic cable, and parallel to this uncompressed on a Codex disc recorder, which is capable to handle two 4:4:4 streams at the same time. For the first time a Codex portable working with JPEG 2000 compression with dual link 4:4:4 is also utilized. Two additional SRW-5800 HDCAM SR recorders are used for back-up and additional play-outs.

A mobile ‘technical center’ was specifically installed into a truck to enable the fast change between locations and the studio. A color consistent control of the images is provided through two new Sony BVM-L230 class 1 monitors with 4:4:4 inputs. With the remote controls RMB-750 and MSU-950 aperture, gain, black level and color are set remotely.


F35 shoots 'Modern Family'


Veteran cinematographer James Bagdonas ASC has chosen F35 to shoot the new season of “Modern Family” on ABC.

F35 shoots 'The Defenders" in LA


Veteran cinematographer Alan Caso, ASC, has chosen the Cine 75 HD camera fluid head from Sachtler to support the Sony F35 cameras used to shoot the CBS one-hour drama series “The Defenders.” The series, starring James Belushi and Jerry O’Connell, is shot in Los Angeles.

Saturday 15 January 2011

F35 3D - Resident Evil


http://www.theasc.com/ac_magazine/December2010/ResidentEvil-Afterlife/page1.php#

F35s on another 3D shoot, also shooting and have shot Tron:Legacy and Transformers 3 all in 3D.

Rogue Digital

Stwo OB1 - 444 on the move



It's here – The lightest, smallest self-contained uncompressed recorder for HD, HD444 and raw production. Weighing in at under a remarkable 7lbs (3Kg) (including the removable FlashMag) and drawing under 20W of power, the OB-1 completes any digital cinematography camera, making them un-tethered, light enough for handheld or Steadicam operation, and powered directly from the camera. Not only is it light and low powered, the OB-1 is fully solid state and is completely silent in operation with no fans for those close up sound shots.

OB-1 fits onto most cameras and supports their native shooting modes. Use with ARRI D-21 and Alexa for uncompressed ARRIRAW recording to 3K including anamorphic support or shoot up to 60P with full ramping and variable frame rate support. It even allows multi-cam support for 3D and advanced recording formats.

As it’s from S.two, OB-1 reflects our unparalleled on set experience garnered through more than 80 feature movies and hundreds of other projects shot around the globe. It has full external timecode support, dual channel analog sync guide audio inputs and full trigger and tally I/O. With a host of easy, intuitive operating modes, the OB-1 is designed for any user to walk up to it and get it going without training or experience. The main screens reflect the operating modes with color codes (Red = Record, Green = Play, Blue = EE / ready to record) allowing the operator to tell status even from across the room.

OB-1 features the removable FlashMag – S.two’s new solid state high capacity high bandwidth on board storage magazine. It features up to 30 minutes of uncompressed DPX file storage. Unlike other flash based solutions, the FlashMag is designed for the rugged environment of shooting film in any situation. Featuring multiple levels of internal media redundancy the FlashMag can shoot for years of trouble free production.

Current Stwo Productions



Television
Lie to Me··· (FOX)
Brothers and Sisters · (ABC)
Law and Order LA ·· (NBC)
Nurse Jackie· · (Showtime)
Bored to Death··· (HBO)
Running Wilde············(FOX)

Feature Films
Killer Joe·· (starring Matthew McConaughey)
Mr Poppers Penguins·· (starring Jim Carey)

Thursday 13 January 2011

Pure Digital Services -2011 launch

Brand new 2011 website launching their services. Arriraw, S-Log, F35 and fully uncompressed image delivery, sounds really cool.

http://www.puredigitalservices.com/

Wednesday 12 January 2011

D21/Stwo OB-1s tapeless on Lie to Me



The series is shot locally in Los Angeles on the Arriflex D-21. During production, digital assets arrive from set on OB1 data drives and are ingested daily onto the SAN. Utilizing a proprietary DiTV workfow, Lustre is employed to color correct and create selected takes for dailies. Final conform is done on Smoke shooting in Arri Log C. The files are published for Ascent Colorist Pankaj Bajpai to color grade the final picture in Lustre. At this stage, the show benefits from the flexibility of having access to the dailies color metadata as well as the full range of original images.


This tapeless workflow is very efficient, in a large part because of how well Lustre and Smoke talk to each other. Because everything remains as data throughout the process, we can do concurrent servicing of our workflow.Ascent was already moving toward file-based workflows, and its purchase of Postworks helped accelerate its move into the tapeless world. Ascent’s adoption of a fully digital pipeline has helped accommodate multiple television episodic projects with tight budgets and short turnaround schedules.


Bajpai credits the facility’s tapeless environment with providing a 30 percent time savings over tape-to-tape workflows. “The true benefit of the process is that regardless of how much time we have, we’re able to spend most of it working creatively,” he adds. “You’re not making compromises, and you’re allowing various people in the chain to have their say and contribute to the final outcome. It becomes a much more satisfying process creatively.”

Lie to Me and OB-1s


Lie to Me stars Tim Roth as Dr. Cal Lightman, a lie detection specialist who determines the truth by interpreting body language and psychology. To depict these small tics and “microexpressions,” the show takes advantage of the ARRIFLEX D-21’s full sensor and shallow depth of field for these extreme close-ups.

Lie to Me shoots with two to three cameras at a time and on Sidell’s set, the DP chooses to work without a Digital Imaging Technician (DIT). “Coming from a film background, I was really drawn to the D-21 because I didn’t feel that I needed to have an on-set DIT. I have the creative freedom to take a film approach to working in a digital environment and have control of the image. It became a no-brainer to use this camera system,” he says.
The show’s multi-racial cast presents a spectrum of skin tones, often with actors of contrasting tones in scenes together. Sidell’s deft visual style allows this diversity to be showcased -- an ability that he partly credits to the D-21’s handling of skin tones and the lenses that are used. “I have found that the flesh tones are much more pleasing on the D-21 compared to other cameras. They feel really beautiful to me. They are softer and have a much closer look to film. The other cameras truly have more of a video feel. We light different actors and different skin tones in different ways, but I don’t have a problem where one person ‘jumps out’ and the other person disappears, or one person is lit too harshly, the other not. The D-21 isn’t particular to one or the other, it actually picks out those proper skin tones,” explains Sidell.

Besides the D-21’s versatility in rendering skin tones, the cinematographer has been impressed with its capability in shooting night scenes and dealing with under exposure. “My gaffer and I have been very surprised with this system. We know it has an ASA 200 rating, but I go back and forth from 200 to 400 ASA all the time based on how I want to control the overall lighting balance and depth of field. We did some night work in our first episode shooting with the D-21 and I lit the front of a building two and half stops under key. I rated it at 400. I looked at dailies and the building was almost too bright at two-and-a-half stops under. I realized I can light much more under than I expected and have the confidence to know that I still have plenty of latitude in the under exposure. I’ve been doing some of the night scenes now where the key is two stops or two-and-half-stops under exposed and it looks amazing. The grain was still fine -- it held the color and information in the shadows. The blacks held and it was pretty amazing.”

Alexa Arriraw workflow


Rogue Element Films has now established a true pipe for the Alexas RAW format. Rogue, by incorporating fully endorsed recording systems, can now not only record the Arriraw format but also debayer and deliver to post Log-C DPXs at full 3K resolution.

Rogue Element Films is the only company in the UK capable of offering this service, be the first to shoot with this stunning format.

Rogue Element Films supplies Alexa and recording systems to capture and deliver fully endorsed Arriraw images.

T-Link capable recorders are available now.

New F35 Cine-EI software upgrade





Sony's F35 digital cinema camera now has a new software upgrade called Cine-EI. This new setting for the camera allows for 4 ratings of the camera but with full 800% output.

EI450, EO640, EI800 and EI1000 give you four new exposure settings and allows for faster exposures with very little noise in the images.

On the left we have examples of each setting, all exposed according to their EI rating, showing how little the noise is in the images at each speed setting.

Letting users expose at 1000EI with very small increase in the nosie gives the F35 a new ability to shoot at faster exposures without creating noisy images.

Rogue Element Films
New F35 available now.

F35 on set of Real Steel


Here is a publicity still of the new movie Real Steel shooting F35 with the new 12bit output to DFR recorders.

Rogue Element Films

Real Steel shoots F35 12bit



Dreamworks 2 motion picture Real Steel, starring Hugh Jackman, has been using the F35 digital cinema camera and its brand new 12bit output.

Have a look at the stills attached here and the link to the 1080P download from Apple's site, its looks tremendous.

Links below :

Rogue Element Films has brand new software upgrades for the F35 and supplies the data recorders for them.

Sony F35 Cine-EI upgrade


Rogue Element Films now has all its F35 cameras updated to the new Cine-EI settings. This allows for the camera to be set at EI 450/640/800 and 1000 at full 800% output allowing for exposures at 1000EI with a very limited noise floor meaning clean images at fast exposures.