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All photos by D.W. Leitner

I write this as Halloween looms once again, lining neighborhood stoops with scary pumpkins and pint-sized goblins targeting a sugar rush. Halloween is our Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, which Mexicans celebrate as an embrace of the role death plays in life, both as last stop and final transcendence.

Which got me to thinking: in a way, life is like a reel of film on a projector. There’s a beginning, middle, and end. Then the reel runs out and the projector’s empty gate flashes white.

The narrative of any technology is linear too, from first flickering to maturity to decline. It’s easy to trace an arc from Muybridge to Edison to Bell & Howell to Arriflex and Mitchell, then Éclair and Aaton. Likewise, Zworykin and Farnsworth to RCA, then Ikegami, Philips and Sony. (Neither reel has run out yet, by the way.)

Technology taken as a whole, however, is a meta-narrative (I’m using the term loosely here), an overarching historical drive with no end in sight, comprising endless individual births and deaths. In my brief tenure on the planet I’ve seen slide rules give way to calculators, then pc’s, now cloud computing. Whichever technologies my teenaged daughter shall take for granted in her old age, I truly can’t imagine.

There’s always a sadness in passing, isn’t there? Remember Ampex? For those who don’t, Ampex invented helical recording and videotape (originally an Ampex trademark) and the world’s first videotape recorder in 1956. For decades, through the 1980s, Ampex was the biggest name in TV recording, even inventing in 1967 the first magnetic-disk video recorder for instant replay, slo-mo, and video freeze framing.

In April, while on a shoot in Silicon Valley, I made a side trip to visit what remains of the once-sprawling Ampex campus in Redwood City. The streets and buildings of the campus, home to 6,700 employees in the late 1980s, are deserted, having been parceled and sold off (the main street was given away to the City of Redwood). Only the central building, adjoining a vast, empty parking lot, is still occupied by Ampex employees.

Haunted house.

I rang the buzzer several times and waited. The silent, forsaken headquarters felt as spooky as a haunted house. A lone engineer eventually emerged from a dark portal to the side of the abandoned reception desk and shuffled into view. Surprised to encounter visitors, he invited me into the lobby, where I learned that only 80-100 employees remain in the mostly empty building. He showed me decades of Monitor and Emmy Awards, collecting dust under a staircase behind the reception desk. He’d been there since 1967, he said.

Empty parking lot on a workday. Car in foreground is ours.

Today once-mighty Ampex, whose high-tech virtuosity captured the first images from the moon, maintains mostly data recorder contracts, government-issue I suspect, under Chapter 11 rules.

Cling to this industry long enough and you, too, will witness technologies, if not whole industries, bloom in living color, then wilt.

I once directed the optical printing operation at DuArt Film Laboratory in New York. I designed liquid gate systems and condensing optics, experimented with novel objective lenses, adapted 2000-ft. Mitchell magazines for large loads and initiated photometric monitoring of light valves. Who knew, with the triumphs of CGI and eventually D.I., that the estimable art and craft of motion picture optical printing (look up Linwood Dunn), along with the market value of my expertise, would someday, soon, be gone with the wind?

DuArt owner Irwin Young at the dry end of the “last bath” on August 26, 2010.

On August 26th, DuArt, founded in 1922 and the oldest continuously operating film lab in the U.S., ran its “last bath.� With the flick of an off switch, eighty-eight years of mastery in motion picture film processing was scattered to the wind.

Come this December 30th, Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, the only commercial lab developing Kodachrome, will run its last Kodachrome bath. (Super 8 Kodachrome was discontinued in 2005; all other Kodachrome products, last year.) National Geographic will air a special in Spring 2011 about the last roll of Kodachrome manufactured by Kodak and processed at Dwayne’s.

Sprocket projection, based on optical and mechanical principles in place since the 19th century, is being swept aside. I’ve written elsewhere about the preponderance of DCP (Digital Cinema Package) files screened at September’s New York Film Festival. Most of the selected dramas were shot on 35mm negative at the wide 2.40 aspect ratio—notably the festival’s longest at 5 ½ hours, Olivier Assayas’s Carlos—yet digitally projected from a server.

Final daily processing reports after 88 years of continuous motion picture film developing.

Follow the money if you don’t understand why this trend is accelerating. Compare the costs of a 5 ½ hour 35mm print—lab fees for duping and printing, worldwide shipping of steel ICC cases (four reels to a case, at least four cases), inventory costs and reel replacement, projectionists’ time building and breaking down platters—to the costs of a single USB hard drive. And what do you get for your trouble when you choose to incur the not-incidental costs of a 35mm print? How about jitter, weave and buckling; splices, scratches and surface abrasions; fixed keystoning…

35mm prints, in other words, will soon go the way of 16mm prints. By the beginning of this year, 20,000 of the 150,000 35mm screens worldwide had been already converted to digital projection, with half that total in the U.S. This was before AMC, Cinemark, and Regal Entertainment announced a joint venture to convert another 10,000 U.S. screens of the 16,000 they operate. I’m told that my local AMC 25 megaplex on 42nd Street is already 100% digital.

2010 was a tipping point for digital projection in another way, too. Attending a series of New York Film Festival press conferences, I encountered, for the first time, twenty-foot talking heads answering back from the big screen.

Not Big Brother. Filmmaker Patrick Keiller in London interviewed via Skype at a New York Film Festival press conference in September. His film Robinson in Ruins concerns his own fictional alter-ego, the researcher Robinson, wandering the south of England while making notes about “agriculture, architecture, the collapse of late capitalism and the extinction of the planet.”

For the entire history of sound motion pictures, out-loud conversations with onscreen personae were the daft province of the delusional and deranged. No longer, courtesy of Skype.

Perhaps this is a response to the skyrocketing costs, not to mention mounting indignities, associated with flying. So much easier, isn’t it, for a director to roll out of bed in Copenhagen or Bucharest and be interviewed via home computer? (Remember when jet-setting was the epitome of glamour?)

Once upon a time only the cartoon detective Dick Tracy wore a two-way picture phone on his wrist. Now Skype, as you probably know, grants similar capabilities to iPhone 4 and Android users, with Apple’s marvelous FaceTime in hot pursuit.

Will my teenager someday communicate via dimensional images emanating from a finger ring? Will she fondly recall the iPhone the way I do a rotary phone?

Births, lives, deaths—of seasons, people, things, industries, nations—form the natural rhythm of change that marks not only the passage of time but the forward sweep of progress. One door closes, another opens to the future.

Make that countless doors, constantly swinging.

The print magazine world I encountered in the 1980s–that’s when I began writing reviews for Millimeter–is a bygone. The explosion of online media (by which you are reading this column) and alternatives to print have relegated both lucrative ad sales and substantive writing fees to the storied past. The ethos of our information-wants-to-be-free moment can be exhilarating, but everything comes at a price.

Thus ends, with this 25th entry, Leitner’s Cinematography Corner. Thank you for reading. Hope we meet up again in the Infosphere.

Whatever the future brings, I’m looking forward to it.

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Operator side of new PMW-500.
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A couple weeks ago at the first Vimeo Festival—a showcase of digital shorts based in the curvy, white-glass Frank Gehry headquarters of Vimeo’s parent company, IAC/InterActiveCorp, run by Barry Diller and trendily located near Manhattan’s Chelsea art galleries—I moderated a keynote discussion between two of the brightest stars in the HDSLR firmament, Vincent Laforet and Philip Bloom.

The discussion was entitled “DSLR Cinema: The new dawn of filmmaking?” and took place in the IAC Building’s narrow, futuristic lobby. Behind the dais were multiple images of the three of us on a 118 foot-long video wall reminiscent of Blade Runner, while seated before us were several hundred young filmmakers, clearly evangelical in their fervor for all things HDSLR.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that inexpensive HDSLRs—principally Canon’s EOS flying wedge of 5D Mark II, 1D Mark IV, and 7D—have rapidly seized a respectable chunk of short-form production: commercials, industrials, music videos, and all manner of indie projects, especially short films.

I took advantage of the occasion to remind the audience that 35mm-size sensors are not nirvana, that in many situations smaller sensors are preferable. Shallow depth of field can be a wonderful tool in portraiture but can wreak havoc in trying to follow a fast-moving documentary subject.

In the exchange with Vincent and Philip and a talk I gave later that afternoon—”Filmmaking and Large Sensor Cameras: What’s Next?”—I underscored the practical fact that going forward, small-sensor and large-sensor camcorders will coexist—neither will supplant the other—with each type exploited for its intrinsic advantages.

I showed stills from Citizen Kane, illustrating the point that “deep focus” is equally cinematic (once exceedingly difficult to achieve). I posed a hypothetical: what if—as was indeed the case with motion picture film, where 35mm preceded 16mm and 8mm—35mm-size sensors had been developed at the outset, and only lately had 2/3in.,1/2in, and 1/3in. sensors arrived as miracles of miniaturization, like the iPhone? Wouldn’t we be celebrating small sensors as a liberating breakthrough?

Almost indistinguishable from a PMW-350. (Clue: Power HAD FX.)

Sony’s latest XDCAM HD family member, the PMW-500, achieves exactly what I think a tapeless, shoulder-mount 2/3in. camcorder must deliver in 2010 at the brink of the large-sensor era: an integration of low weight and power consumption with high-performance sensors and long record times.

In fact the PMW-500 is a mash-up of an XDCAM Professional Disc series PDW-700/F800 front end (my PDW-F800 review here) and an XDCAM EX PMW-350 rear end (PMW-350 review here). It essentially outfits the short-bodied PMW-350—the 2/3-in. 3-CMOS XDCAM EX camcorder Sony introduced a year ago—with top-shelf, 1920×1080 progressive Power HAD FX CCD sensors and high-end compression from the Professional Disc format.

In other words, 50Mbps 4:2:2 MPEG-2 recorded to SxS cards for the first time.

As in case of the Professional Disc format, the PMW-500 uses MXF wrappers for clips captured to 50Mbps 4:2:2 MPEG-2 and 35Mbps 4:2:0 MPEG-2.

Alternatively, as in the case of EX camcorders like the PMW-EX1 and EX3, the PMW-500 also uses MP4 wrappers for clips captured to 35Mbps 4:2:0 MPEG-2 and HDV-equivalent 25Mbps 4:2:0.

Optional is MXF-wrapped SD video in the form of IMX 50Mbps 4:2:2 MPEG-2 and DVCAM, as well as MP4-wrapped DVCAM.

Like I said, a mash-up.

By eye, a PMW-500 is indistinguishable from a PMW-350. Body only (sans lens, viewfinder, mic, battery) weighs 7lbs. 15oz., hardly half a pound more than the lightweight PMW-350. While the PMW-500′s 29W power consumption (body only) exceeds the PMW-350′s 18W, it nevertheless marks a practical advance over the 40-watt average of the PDW-700/F800 series. Any way you slice it, impressive for a Full HD 3-CCD 2/3in. camcorder.

The PMW-500 incorporates all recent Sony pro camcorder capabilities, including standard 1080p and 720p frame rates, undercranking and overcranking, 15-second cache recording, time-lapse, slow shutter and frame accumulation, 2X focus magnification while shooting, Automatic Lens Aberration Compensation, glass ND filters with electronic CC filters for white balance, and the four HyperGamma curves common to all Sony CineAlta camcorders. Four channels of uncompressed 24-bit, 48kHz audio are provided.

New 64GB SxS-1 card equals 2 hours of 50Mbps HD422 or 4 hours of HDV equivalent.

The PMW-500′s dual SxS slots accept Sony’s just-introduced new generation of SxS-1 cards, featuring a 64GB card (SBS-64G1A, $900 list) that can capture 2 hours of 50Mbps HD422 MXF or 4 hours in 25Mbps mode. There’s also a new 32GB SxS-1 card (SBS-32G1A, $600).

Both new SxS-1 cards boast a 50-percent-faster 1.2Gbps maximum transfer speed compared to the 800Mbps of the blue SxS PRO and original SxS-1 cards. This may hasten on-location backups (other factors are involved, your mileage may vary).

They share the orange color of the earlier SxS-1 design but bear a distinctive red stripe on both their label and protective box. Note that with the exception of the recent PMW-320, earlier XDCAM EX camcorders will require firmware updates to use the new SxS-1 cards. A compatibility chart can be found here.

Case for new, faster series of SxS-1 cards features distinctive red stripe.

Sony’s XDCAM HD422 PMW-500 is a racehorse disguised as a durable workhorse. Its base price of $27,900 (even B&H; I checked) is not the pocket change of an HDSLR, but its seasoned underlying technologies won’t be different a year from now either.

Available early November.

Large outdoor 3D display at Sony’s NAB booth in April.
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All photos by D.W. Leitner

Last November I wrote a column, EX3 x 2 = DIY 3D, about two talented and resourceful New Jersey filmmakers who fashioned a homebrew 3D rig from two Sony PMW-EX3s in order to film a striking 6-minute paean to Newark in the mold of Paul Strand’s classic Manhatta (1921) for the Newark Museum.

What a difference a year makes.

Avatar hit theaters in December, becoming, in one month, the highest grossing film of all time.

April’s NAB waxed giddy with 3D fever. Nothing like a box office bonanza to plant dollar signs in the eyes of broadcast manufacturers, consumer electronics giants, Hollywood, anyone seeking the next big thing.

A few weeks ago, the business section of The New York Times hit the next-big-thing trifecta: 1) “The Sofa Wars: It’s Cable Fees Vs. Online Shows; So Far People Would Rather Pay,� 2) “Crowded Field for Bringing Web Video to TVs,� and 3) “TV Makers Predicting a Bright Future for 3-D Sets.�

Regarding 1) and 2), broadcast and broadband are destined to joust for years—iPad anyone? And it will be fascinating to watch free mobile DTV take hold later this year. But “Bright Future for 3-D Setsâ€? signals something else, a broad new product category for gadget makers, one commanding premium prices.

Panasonic’s introduction of twin-lens handheld AG-3DA1 3D camcorder at last April’s NAB was widely noted. Area of Panasonic booth showcasing AG-3DA1 was jammed.

3D tends to require double the amount of everything: lenses, optical paths, sensors, DSPs, resolution. For 3D production to become routine, new cameras, camera rigs, and camcorders are called for. Ditto, new switchers, displays, and NLE capabilities.

For consumers, 3D means new flat-panel TVs and viewing glasses. If electronic, those glasses won’t come cheap. Families whose kids routinely break and lose cell phones can’t be thrilled by this prospect. (Kids are probably critical to the success of 3D TV. Let the advertising begin.)

No wonder NAB salivated. And based on the recent raft of IBC press releases in my email inbox—Amsterdam’s IBC starts today, Sept. 9th—3D fever is raging there too. Unfortunately I can’t attend this year, but if you’re at IBC, mark Monday, Sept. 13 as Stereoscopic 3D Day, capped by—what else?—a screening of the new Special Edition of Avatar. If you’re in Shanghai early November, you also won’t want to miss C3D World, the 6th China International 3D World Forum & Exhibition
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How to edit 3D? Beta demo of Tim Dashwood’s Stereo3D Toolbox 2.0 for Final Cut Pro at Panasonic’s NAB booth.

At the risk of being subtle, my point is that when it comes to digital 3D, we’re well past the tipping point. 3D’s recent traction with manufacturers and standards organizations alike has created real momentum, enough inertial force for 3D to be considered its own niche industry.

In February I attended Panasonic’s sneak-peek in New York of its handheld twin-lens AG-3DA1 AVCHD camcorder. Seemingly cobbled together from ¼-in. CMOS camcorders—six chips!—it was, at that time, a nonfunctional work-in-progress. Working models however soon appeared at NAB, memorably deployed in a semicircle at Panasonic’s booth for attendees to test—an area never less than jam-packed. Last week I attended a Panasonic press conference at the US Open in Flushing Meadows, New York, where AG-3DA1s were deployed in 3D broadcast coverage by CBS. That’s lightning-fast development, my friends.

Closer look at Dashwood Stereo3D Toolbox 2.0 for Final Cut Pro, which creates paired AG-3DA1 QuickTime clips and enables keyframe adjustment of convergence.

At the US Open, Panasonic also demonstrated an upcoming 3D AVCHD camcorder for consumers, the HDC-SDT750, retail circa $1400. The camcorder itself is soda-can sized, featuring a vestigial viewfinder, typical flip-out LCD, and 1920×1080 3-CMOS ¼-in. sensors capable of 60 progressive images a second. When its compact 3D conversion lens is attached, the HDC-SDT750 transforms itself from an ordinary consumer camcorder into a 3D marvel, using a side-by-side recording scheme (in effect, each eye’s view is captured by the equivalent of a 1/8-in. sensor).

Panasonic’s chief technology officer Eisuke Tsuyuzaki quipped that Panasonic intends to excel at everything 3D, from “camera to couch.� While Panasonic touts its own plasma technology for 3D displays, everyone else touts large LCDs. I had a chance in early July to test-drive two 46-in. 3D LCD displays, a Sony Bravia and a JVC, during the Spain-Germany World Cup match (event courtesy of B&H).

Shiro Kitajima, president of Panasonic Consumer Electronics, introduces a 3D consumer camcorder, the HDC-SDT750, at the 2010 US Open.

In a nutshell, the Sony Bravia, which required active shutter glasses, ghosted with each slight tilt of the head, accompanied by a subtle color shift along the blue-yellow axis. Nor was it as bright and saturated as the JVC, which demonstrated neither drawback and required only cheap plastic polarized glasses. Guess which one I spent my game time in front of? Caveat emptor.

With my interest in 3D spiked (also thrilled for Spain), the following week I attended SMPTE’s two-day International Conference on Stereoscopic 3D for Media and Entertainment in New York. This was the full monty, with sessions on 3D acquisition, spatial authoring, production, post, transmission, display, dimensionalization of 2D into 3D, and more. I learned all about monocular occlusions and digital artifacts, prospects for holographic TV and 3D motion depth imaging with LIDAR. To give you a taste, the kick-off paper was in Russian, describing a single-lens system on a Vision Research Phantom 65 that produces side-by-side stereo pairs, based on a decades-old Russian 3D 70mm film system popular in the 1960s.

Innovative 3D lens module that converts HDC-SDT750 camcorder body to stereoscopic mode.

But for me, the real revelation at SMPTE’s 3D conference was autostereoscopy—3D without glasses—specifically the Mitsubishi 3D cell phone demonstrated by Paul Panabaker of MasterImage 3D, based on a technology called Cell Matrix Parallel Barrier invented by his company. Designed to be viewed on-axis and 15-16 inches away—a typical hand-held distance for cell phones—MasterImage’s TFT control layer orients itself as the phone is held vertically or sideways, providing an entirely convincing 3D experience in both viewing positions. I’m here to tell you that it works great. And if I understood correctly, Panabaker said that 300,000 such 3D phones have been produced, mainly for Korea.

So I’ve grown excited by the potential of 3D—Pixar’s recent Toy Story 3 set a new highwater mark for 3D storytelling, starting with its sublime short, Day and Night—but I’ve noticed a tendency among older, more experienced directors, producers, DPs, camera operators and film/video cognoscenti to dismiss 3D as a passing fad yet again. In other words, those from generations that didn’t grow up with 3D. Is this a simple case of old dogs resisting new tricks?

Consumer HDC-SDT750, foreground, compared in size to professional AG-3DA1 introduced at NAB.

It’s facile, for instance, to make the case that Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia would be little improved, if not trivialized, by 3D. (Although work on dimensionalizing Star Wars has been underway for several years. I’ve seen the resulting 3D clips, and they’re impressive.)

Or, instead, is there another reason entirely, an underlying reluctance hard to define or give voice to?

I’ve given a lot of thought to my recent 3D viewing experiences and I think I’ve hit upon an insight.

It’s about freedom.

Recorded music and radio didn’t require eyeballs. The listener was free to pursue other tasks while enjoying the phonograph or a radio narrative like The Guiding Light. One could even be in the next room!

When The Guiding Light moved to television in 1952, eyes were required, at least from time to time. TV began as a chatterbox, eschewing dramatic silences common in theater and cinema (think Ingmar Bergman) in favor of wall-to-wall dialogue. In fact, early television invented the laugh track—never used in radio—to enhance, absurdly, the viewing experience. The idea being, you could iron and fold your clothes, even drag a hamper into the next room, and not miss a thing. Radio with pictures, it was called.

If television began as a glance-at medium (today’s best television delivers the pacing, drive, and spectacle of the best cinema), 3D in all its forms requires rapt, undivided attention. To achieve the 3D effect, glasses lock our gaze to the screen. In so doing, they inadvertently act as blinders, dividing us from the community of viewers in the same room, rendering the 3D experience an intensely personal one.

Ordinarily we rely on peripheral vision, which imperceptibly informs every move our body makes, every step we take. Ordinarily we glance at those around us, to gauge their expressions. In a theater or cinema we glance sideways at our spouse or date or friend, to see if they’re enjoying the show. None of this is possible in an audience of accidental Anna Wintours hiding behind oversized dark shades.

For all of 3D’s claims of reproducing a more realistic-looking world, the world it injects into those polarized or flickering glasses could not be more removed from unadorned, ordinary experience. It’s a simulacrum of natural vision at best, perhaps all the more disappointing because it claims to be more naturalistic than 2D. But it’s not, really. Although dimensionalized, it’s another artifice, one requiring greater viewer restraint. You’re not going to jump up during a commercial break wearing 3D glasses and do a kitchen run or bathroom break (at least, sober). You will have to disengage first, by removing the dark glasses. Disengagement was never necessary with radio or conventional TV.

Is 3D, all things considered, the visual delivery system ideally suited to our solipsistic iPod age? A palliative for ADD?

There was a time, only recently, when proponents of 3D production were starry-eyed impractical dreamers, but by now it’s obvious 3D is here to stay and grow. It will never “take over� broadcasting as some claim (TV didn’t obsolete radio either, fears to the contrary), nor will it remain an obscure niche. Audiences (younger?) like it too much.

Where human sight needs to be transported, digital stereoscopy is poised to explode: mobile robot control, microsurgery, aerial reconnaissance by drone, underwater exploration—anywhere we wish to see better.

For entertainment however, two dimensions or three is no longer a religious question. Just a format choice—for maker and audience alike.

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Shadowstone’s Paul Distefano demonstrates ARRI’s compact LoCaster, with onboard selection of six color temperatures from 2800K to 6500K and continuous dimming.
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All photos by D. W. Leitner

NAB’s show floor last April signaled new directions in LED lighting. I’ll get to them below, but first a few thoughts on the evolution of electric lighting itself.

We complain we live in a time of dizzying change, but the 1880s were equally disorienting. Edison had patented his carbonized filament and Eastman his flexible roll film within a few years of each other. Electric lights, practical photography, motion pictures had arrived all at once it seemed. Modern times at mach speed.

It’s happening again, as digital imaging eclipses photochemical and filaments white-hot from electrical resistance yield to cool, compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and LEDs five times as energy efficient.

In fact Edison’s familiar screw-in bulb is being phased out around the world. I was in Havana in 2006 when Cuba banned incandescent bulbs and required their replacement by CFLs. Brazil followed suit, joined by the United Kingdom with a 2011 deadline and the European Union with a staggered schedule.

Even the United States has climbed aboard. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandates that general-purpose incandescent lamps match CFLs in energy efficiency by 2020. (Physics makes this impossible, but tell that to a legislative body which conceives of laws, natural and otherwise, in terms of loopholes and attachments.)

Litepanels LP-1×1 at Shadowstone. Left knob provides continuous adjustment between 3200K and 5600K. Right knob provides continuous dimming.

Like the European Union’s mandate, the U.S. mandate excludes, for the foreseeable future, special-purpose incandescent bulbs such as those used in appliances, projectors, and motion picture lighting. No need to list those Blondes, Totas, and Mole Fresnels on eBay, at least not yet.

(Read this superb obituary for the incandescent bulb by Jane Brox, author of the new book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light.)

CFLs, in turn, are at best a stopgap on the road to reduced energy needs. Slow starts, flickering, humming, phosphor aging, ballast failure, fragile glass, mercury vapor, complex dimming circuits—drawbacks to all fluorescent lamps–are circumvented by solid-state LEDs.

Venerated name in motion picture lighting embraces LEDs at Shadowstone. Mole-Richardson’s sturdy MoleLED 12-Pack softlight contains 240 OSRAM LEDs. One head each for 3200K and 5600k, both dimmable.

The writing on the wall is therefore clear as LED illumination itself: our everyday lit environment—interior spaces devoid of natural light—is poised at the brink of an historic leap to solid-state lighting.

(Outdoor areas at night are already lit by energy-efficient low-pressure and high-pressure sodium vapor lamps, up to twice as efficient as fluorescent. So what if they’re yellow/pinkish with the worst possible Color Rendering Index? You can brush up on the basics of CRI here.)

LEDs deliver white light using one of two methods: 1) grouping individual red, green, and blue LEDs (sometimes additional colors) into tight clusters, with a collateral benefit that tint or color temperature can be trimmed by adjusting R,G,B values, and 2) employing blue or near-UV LEDs to excite phosphor layers that emit white light. The near-UV approach is similar to fluorescent, with similar spectral distribution.

Shadowstone supplies architectural LED floodlights like this Philips eW Reach Powercore, bright enough to light a building facade. An RGB color version, ColorReach Powercore, is popular for deep-color architectural illumination.

For those of us who do motion picture lighting, there’s the rub: a discontinuous spectrum and resulting CRI that often falls short.

Once before, with the introduction in the 1980s of HMIs and Kino Flos, we encountered the anomalies of discontinuous spectra. The purpose of HMIs and Kino FLos, respectively, was to mimic daylight or blend with existing 3200K or 5600K sources while cutting power requirements 75%, perhaps eliminating location tie-ins.

These however were professional lighting technologies touting refined mixtures of rare earth gases (HMIs) or phosphors (high-frequency fluorescents) finely tuned for precise correlated color temperatures and maximum CRIs. They weren’t predicated on technology under development for mass markets.

ETC Selador series control software to match Lee Filters, as shown at Shadowstone. Selador Lustr LED light, same width as ARRI LoCaster, comes in lengths of 11, 21, 42, and 63 inches and uses 7-color LED arrays to achieve broadest possible spectrum.

Ever marvel at the cacophony of cool white, warm white, “daylight,� and indeterminate fluorescent hues in the average institutional ceiling?

I doubt tomorrow’s solid-state lamps will provide any more color consistency across the lit environment than today’s fluorescent tubes. When incandescent bulbs someday become as antique as gas lamplight, so too will the standard orange glow they both once gave off. I suspect ours is a future lit hodgepodge, a jumble of tints in which a broken spectrum is the common denominator. (Anticipated by contemporary film & television lighting styles.)

I, for one, have relied on fluorescent Kino Flo fixtures for years, and more recently, LED units from Litepanels. I never go anywhere without a set of compact Litepanels Minis or Micros. I remain fascinated by luminaires I can hand-hold without burning my fingers, dim without shifting color temperature, run for hours off light-weight batteries, then slip into an attaché case.

Prism Projection’s RevEAL CW (Revolutionary Entertainment & Architectural Lighting) uses a simple lens to throw a bright, even field at Shadowstone. Color temperature of white is adjustable from 1800K to 10,000K. Colors can be output too.

With all this in mind, I prepped for NAB by attending an LED open house in March at Shadowstone Lighting in Clifton, New Jersey. Shadowstone is a rental and sales company that services film and theatrical productions in the New York City area as well as architectural projects. I was introduced to them four years ago through my interest in LED lighting, in which they were early players.

The open house in March took place at Shadowstone’s rental facility, a huge hangar with tall, neatly organized aisles of heads, stands, cabling, lifts, generators, a capacious repair department—you name it. Limitless shelves stacked with everything from tiny HMI Joker-Bugs to lumbering 18Ks and all manner of tungsten–open-face, soft, PARs, ellipsoidals, Fresnels—plus of course LED devices. Closest thing to a full L.A. lighting rental facility I’ve seen on the East Coast and worth a visit to explore.

A pair of Pixel RANGE PixelPar 44s at Shadowstone. LEDs are RGBA which includes red, green, blue, and amber, a popular combination for colorful architectural lighting.

On this trip I encountered the latest LED products from Lightpanels, ARRI, Mole-Richardson, Rosco, Philips Color Kinetics, ETC Selador, Pixel RANGE, The Light Source, Strong Entertainment Lighting, and Prism Projection.

There were softlights, spotlights, nine lights, nook lights, broads, tiled 1x1s and more. Some white, others color-variable. Most, with the exception of architectural floodlights, would also be showcased the following month in Las Vegas at NAB.

Prototype at Shadowstone of The Light Source’s flat 6-in. Fresnel LED light. Intriguing.

The photos accompanying this column highlight products at Shadowstone that impressed me. All of these companies have websites where their innovations can be examined in greater detail.

Were there any surprises left at NAB? You bet there were!

Fresnel LED lights were introduced by Litepanels and Gekko. This is a big development for two reasons. On the technical side, it signals the arrival of LEDs powerful enough to serve as single point sources for Fresnel lenses. On the production side, it means true focus and controlled-beam operation of LED instruments for the first time.

SolaENG, tiniest of three Litepanels Sola Fresnels at NAB. Draws 30W and outputs 250W tungsten equivalent. Two big rings at rear are for focusing and dimming.

Litepanels and other LED manufacturers have, in fact, discovered that paper-thin plastic Fresnel lenses akin to those long sold in Barnes & Noble as cheap close-up magnifiers can be used for LED beam control. (Which is why the lenses in front of Litepanels’ new Sola series Fresnels appear to lack concentric rings.) Litepanels and others, of course, have chosen better plastics, shapes, focal lengths.

Sola12 with 12-in. lens, largest Litepanel Fresnel at NAB. Consumes 250W, matches 2K tungsten, weighs 14 lbs. Smaller Sola6 sports a 6-in. lens.

(Nothing new: I used flat plastic Fresnels in the late 1990s with sources cool enough not to burn holes in them. I also experimented with low-wattage pinpoint sources behind 10-in. and larger Fresnel glass lenses. See photo below of K5600’s 24-in. lightweight Fresnel polymer lens, which thrilled me. Brilliant!)

Videssence tacked in a different direction, unveiling an innovative 100-watt LED spot, flat as a pancake, octagonal, about fifteen inches across. The lamp’s open face is divided into four quadrants, each containing nine high-intensity LEDs grouped in a square. The crowning innovation is that each of the four quadrants can be mechanically adjusted to toe in toward the light’s beam axis, creating a four-way concentrated overlap at long throws. Videssence says its ExceLED 100 has the punch of a 1K Fresnel. Testing it on the show floor, I’m inclined to agree.

Business end of a Litepanels Sola12. Focus and dimming are controlled by touchscreen. There’s also a focus crank. And remote DMX control. Did I mention no ballast?

Which brings us to the we-knew-it-was-coming department: since most LEDs are manufactured in China, guess who showed up to show off their own LED products? For the first time, five Chinese lighting and LED manufacturers set up a “Beijing Creates for the Worldâ€? trade stand in the Las Vegas Convention Center’s North Hall. Each company’s booth featured what at first glance appeared to be a Litepanels 1×1 but was instead a knock-off. There were also more compact square LED panels and what can only be described as 2x1s.

Gekko says its fixed-focus kezia 200W matches 1K tungsten. Beam angle is convertable to 20, 60 or 80 degrees by interchanging thin Fresnel lenses. Smaller 50W version was introduced too.

With the Chinese government pushing green technologies harder than our own, you can bank on explosive growth in Asian LED design and technology. Why build five power plants to burn incandescent lights when one will yield the same amount of LED illumination, if not more?

Interior of K5600′s lightweight Big Eye Fresnel. Its 24-in. molded plastic Fresnel lens certainly caught my eye. Same diameter as 18K HMI. All it lacks is a super-bright LED source!

To those who complain of dizzying change, I say we in film and video production have the best seats in the house in these “interesting times� (the purported Chinese curse). How can it not be exciting to participate in the evolution of solid-state lighting as it grows ubiquitous, gets lighter, cheaper, and more imaginative in design and utility?

Now you see it, now you don’t. Zylight demonstrates prototype of electrically controlled Active Diffusion, which they compare to Half 216 with 1/2 stop loss at maximum density. Subtle degrees of diffusion can be dialed in or varied during a shot.

A high CRI in the 90s would be nice, though…

Chinese LED lighting manufacturers sharing a stand for the first time at NAB will no doubt soon need their own larger booths.

Got that, Brightcast and Beijing Feiyashi Technology Development Co. Ltd.?

Upcoming Sony consumer camcorder with interchangeable E-mount lenses and 14.2 megapixel CMOS sensor.
CLICK PHOTOS TO ENLARGE
NAB photos by D. W. Leitner unless otherwise indicated

Announced just yesterday, May 11, half the world already knows about the NEX-5, Sony’s impossibly slim new HDSLR (in-depth review here) and upcoming AVCHD consumer camcorder based on the same sensor and lenses.
Such is the contagion of the Internet that nothing is bottled for long, as Apple recently experienced to its chagrin. Heated rumors of affordable (no bank loan) large-sensor HD camcorders from Canon, Panasonic, and Sony have been circulating for months. While much of this speculation has been dodgy, Panasonic and Sony did fan the flames at NAB with sneak-peaks at nonfunctional mock-ups of large-sensor camcorders.

At its traditional press conference on Sunday prior to the exhibition opening, Panasonic surprised journalists with the AG-AF100 (photo below). It will feature a 12.1 megapixel Micro Four Thirds CMOS sensor and lens mount, with capture to SD cards using AVCHD compression (24mbps max). Available by end of 2010, it’s expected to sell for about $6,000 without a lens.

Prototype of Panasonic AG-AF100 under glass at NAB.

(Micro Four Thirds is a 2008 standard launched by Olympus and Panasonic to shrink DSLRs. It entails a smaller sensor than full-size DSLRs.)

Power requirements are suggested by the fact the AF100 will use the same battery as an AG-HVX200. In fact, the AF100 looks a lot like an HVX200 with the lens section sawed off. Presumably the AF100’s 12.1 megapixel CMOS sensor is the same as that in the DMC-GHI, Panasonic’s popular Micro Four Thirds HDSLR ($1,900 sans lens).

I say “presumably� because neither design nor fabrication of large CMOS sensors is trivial or cheap. In contrast to CCDs, however, CMOS sensors are versatile and readily repurposed. To spread large-sensor development costs across as many products as possible is business common sense.

What did Sony VP Alec Shapiro have up his sleeve at Sony’s NAB press conference?

Which is why the mysterious prototype (photo at right) unveiled by Sony Senior Vice President Alec Shapiro at Sony’s NAB press conference (immediately following Panasonic’s) surely uses the same 14.2 megapixel CMOS sensor as the NEX-5 HDSLR and unnamed AVCHD camcorder above. Sony said this concept camera, which resembles a Sony HVR-Z7 on steroids, would feature a PL mount and use XDCAM EX MPEG-2 compression. More than that, their lips were sealed.

The PL mount is significant, made practicable by Sony’s choice of APS-C (Advanced Photo System type-C) sensor size. (See last week’s column about the flood of new PL-mount lenses at NAB.). APS-C, while smaller than legacy 35mm still film, is typically 30-40% larger than Micro Four Thirds (depending on manufacturer), virtually a match to 35mm motion picture film. Compare the size of the Exmor CMOS sensor in the NEX-5, 23.4mm x 15.6mm, to 35mm standard Academy aperture, 22mm x 16mm.

The new E mount announced yesterday for the Sony NEX-5—evident also in the depiction of the consumer camcorder–has a shallow 18mm flange focal distance (FFD). Micro Four Thirds FFD, likewise, is 20mm. Almost all prior lens mounts, still and motion picture, have FFD’s considerably deeper than these two. Don’t be surprised by the coming avalanche of inexpensive E-mount and Micro Four Thirds adapters made possible by this circumstance.

Much as last year, HDSLRs were in evidence everywhere at NAB. A year ago, however, HDSLRs were a novelty, flaunted by young bucks on the show floor as a badge of rebellion. This year HDSLRs occupied the mainstream, enlisted at countless booths to demonstrate new lenses, support, and lighting.

This is disruptive technology as kudzu, blanketing the landscape at an alarming rate. As anyone paying attention to such things already knows, the last episode of this season’s House on Fox was shot entirely with Canon EOS 5D Mark II HDSLRs.

PL-mount conversion of Canon EOS 7D introduced by BandPro at NAB.

So it must be noted that that virtually all HDSLRs at NAB were Canons. I saw no Nikons, and while Panasonic GH1s certainly must have circulated, I didn’t come across them. I did see lots of Canon EOS 5Ds, like last year, and the newer Canon EOS models introduced last fall, the 7D (APS-C like the Sony NEX-5) and 1D Mark IV.

At Canon’s booth, directors and DPs experimenting with HDSLRs shared their experiences and screened their work. Particularly impressive was the short film shot at night under streetlights by Vincent Laforet to tout low-light capabilities of the 1D Mark IV. I’ve seen it before, streamed from the Internet, but it was considerably more convincing on the big screen at Canon’s booth, as was Vincent in person.

For those hankering to convert their Canon 5Ds and 7Ds to PL, Illya Friedman of Hot Rod cameras wandered the show with a sample of his new 5D PL-mount conversion. I happened to sit next to industry legend Joe Dunton of Joe Dunton Cameras Ltd. at Saturday’s Digital Cinema Summit (this year’s topic: 3D), and handed him a Hot Rodded PL-mount 5D for his inspection. A thin smile crept across his face as he turned it over in his hands, fingered the controls, and focused the 50mm Zeiss Compact Prime. That’s Joe’s version of two thumbs up. (For more about 7D conversions by Illya Friedman and Hot Rod Cameras, see my column, “HDSLR Rebellion in Park City.�)

BandPro announced their own 7D conversion, performed by Munich rental house FGV Schmidle. Schmidle’s modification involves removing the 7D’s mirror and optical viewfinder and installing a single-piece steel chassis that combines a PL mount, 3/8-in. threaded mounting bracket, and fortified surface for remounting the APS-C sensor. A 3-pin Lemo connector at the rear of the 7D adds start/stop for a remote camera control. Because this extensive modification obliterates Canon’s warranty, BandPro includes a one-year warranty of its own.

Not just the beer. Solid as a tank, a working RED EPIC felt good in my hands at CML’s bash.
Photo by Mark Forman

RED didn’t have a booth this year, but as mentioned in last week’s column on lenses, I encountered RED’s founder, Jim Jannard, and a couple of working EPICs at CML’s beer/camera bash. EPIC is RED’s long-awaited second camera and introduces a new 5K sensor. I had seen prototypes and felt a lingering skepticism towards its heft and odd boxy shape—but I’ve got to admit, in the hands, it felt great.

EPIC is endlessly modular and the rig I test-drove in the boozy gloom of the Greek Isles lounge was stripped down to the basics. It resembled something like a Mamiya medium-format camera with attached handgrip joined to a compact RED 17-50mm zoom and sharp LCD viewing screen. Perhaps because of its solid build, it felt steady and inertial, and I flat-out enjoyed handholding it. (In real life I’ve done decades worth of handheld.) No one was more surprised than me at this revelation.

EPIC on the shoulder.

EPIC’s modularity was further demonstrated in a working shoulder-mount version (photo left). Despite appearances, it balanced gracefully and lightly. If there’s a whirring fan anywhere in this camera, I didn’t hear it. EPIC appears to raise RED to entirely new levels, image-wise and ergonomically.

Speaking of renown balance, Aaton revealed details of their forthcoming Digital Cinema back for the 2-perf/3-perf 35mm Penelope, which should be available by this time next year. As expected, it displaces Penelope’s film magazine, roughly the same size and shape. The stunning news is that it will contain a 3-perf Super-35 sized Dalsa CCD sensor.

What Dalsa Origin should have been? Aaton Penelope with Digital Cinema back containing 3-perf Super-35 sized Dalsa CCD sensor.

Aaton says the Dalsa sensor will provide “beyond 4K� resolution and offer dual sensitivies of 100 and 800 ISO. Images will be captured as uncompressed RAW DPX files or compressed DNxHD files to a pack of four RAIDed 2.5-in. solid state drives. Penelope’s optical viewfinder and spinning mirror will comprise a mechanical global shutter, as in the original Dalsa Origin. Watching Mitch Gross of Abel Cine Tech expound upon Penelope’s attributes, it was hard avoiding the sad thought that this is the camera Origin should have been in the first place.

As anyone following digital cinema cameras at NAB 2010 knows, the biggest splash of all was ARRI’s introduction of the Alexa. Five years of experience with the D-20 and D-21 are distilled in the Alexa and it shows.

How the operator can see beyond the frameline: ALEV III CMOS sensor in ARRI Alexa sees 3168 x 1782 pixels but uses only center section of 3072 x 1728 for capture to RAW.

What didn’t ARRI get right? A new Super-35 sized CMOS sensor with base 800 ISO and 13.5-stop dynamic range (similar to what RED and Aaton claim, by the way), native capture to QuickTime using Apple ProRes 422 HQ or ProRes 4444 to a pair of Sony SxS flash cards, simultaneous output of uncompressed HD or ARRIRAW files, a stunning 1280×720 LCOS color viewfinder with overscan to see beyond the recorded frame, an Exchangeable Lens Mount system for use of PL, Panavision, Canon and Nikon lenses, electronic control modules that detach from the camera body for future upgrading, even the promise of a spinning-mirror optical viewing system as an option.

Available in June and priced at 45,000 Euros for the basic body ($57,000 at today’s rates), Alexa is poised to take over as a television workhorse. It’s hardy build will appeal to rental houses everywhere. Rental houses may also wish to check out Phantom’s new Flex, due in July. It achieves frame rates up to 2,800 fps at 1920×1080—a perfect complement to Alexa’s 60 fps.

The first miniaturized movie format targeting the amateur, 16mm, arrived from Kodak in 1923 and was promptly branded “substandard� by the industry. Ten years into the 21st Century, the amateur/professional divide has blurred and affordable large-sensor moving image cameras are retaking lost ground. Ninety years makes a difference.

How much more exciting can this get? Stay tuned. NAB 2011 is going to be fireworks.

Fast T1.4 Leica Summilux-C 21mm prime lens on a Canon EOS 7D modified for PL mount by BandPro Film & Digital.
CLICK PHOTOS TO ENLARGE
All photos by D.W. Leitner

Shrinking in the rearview mirror like a signpost whizzing past at 80 mph, April’s NAB pointed to no less than four approaching upheavals in production technology. You had to have your polarized glasses on backwards at NAB not to see evidence of them everywhere. For those unable or unwilling to attend NAB, I’ll attempt a recap in my next columns.

These four areas of advancement involve not digital compression or recording but first principles of photography and sight itself: the light that falls on a subject, the lens that captures that light, the sensor that registers the image, the binocular experience of spatial depth.

Racing towards mainstream use, for example, LED production lighting is not only cool-running and energy-efficient but durable, lightweight, and compact. Much of it carry-on size in an era of airline luggage-charge gouging.

I’ll devote an entire column to LED lighting, at NAB and beyond, but for now suffice it to say, with the advent of innovative LED fresnels from industry leaders Litepanels and Gekko, LEDs are red hot (so to speak). Hot enough for Chinese manufacturers to festoon their NAB booths with shameless rip-offs of Litepanels 1×1 luminaires… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

As a long-time advocate of prime lenses and dollies to counteract the scourge of lazy zooming–mere magnification without exploitation of cinematic space–I’m overjoyed by a flood of new PL-mount primes at NAB.

Business end of a T1.4 Leica Summilux-C 21mm prime lens, showing four-flange PL mount.

How can something in our commodified, downsized world have gone so right?
The four-flange PL or “positive lock� mount was introduced by ARRI in the early ‘80s for their film cameras. PL-mount zooms and primes, as a result, are always cine-style, with wide-diameter barrels for precise follow-focusing to meet the needs of 16mm and 35mm motion picture production.

PL-mount primes tend to be expensive, regrettably, and typically you need a set of them to cover a workable range of focal lengths. However their optical quality is unmatched, even by expensive zooms.

Fast T1.4 Cooke 5/i series 32mm prime lens with illuminated focus scale.

Although ARRI’s D-21, Sony’s F-35, and Vision Research’s Phantom HD accept PL-mount lenses, RED gets the major credit for the birth of low-cost PL, as do P+S Technik, Redrock Micro, Letus, MOVIEtube and Cinevate, makers of PL-mount adapters for small-sensor cameras. Lately HDSLRs like Canon’s 7D are also opening new doors to use of PL-mount lenses. (More on HDSLRs at NAB in my next column.)

New sets of PL-mount primes at NAB were on display at booths of the usual subjects and arrivistes too. Band Pro hit a home run with a stunning set of Leica Summilux-C Primes, eight fast T1.4 lenses ranging from 18mm to 100mm, with identical width (95mm), length (142mm), weight (3.5-4 lbs.) and gear placement. Perfect for fast swapping in and out of follow-focus rigs. Sixteen lenses in total are planned, with a wide-angle 16mm promised in the first half of 2011. ($178K for the initial set of eight, available end of year.)

New Cine-Xenar primes from Schneider Kreuznach.

Cooke introduced a new hi-tech line of nine 5/i T1.4 primes, 18mm to 135mm, featuring LED-illuminated focus scales and Cooke’s /i Technology data management system for storage and retrieval of lens parameters. Also on display was Cooke’s new T2.8 Panchro series, a set of six lower-cost primes, 18mm to 100mm, based on the venerated Cooke S4/i series. They include /i Technology but sacrifice a stop of light to achieve smaller size and price point.

Schneider Kreuznach introduced a new series of Cine-Xenar primes in PL mounts (Canon, Nikon available too). The first set includes five focal lengths between 25mm and 95mm ($21K full set), with more planned. Heavier and slower (T2.0-2.2) than their Leica counterparts, they’re considerably cheaper to own.

uniQoptics added an 18mm to their Signature Series of PL-mount primes introduced last year at NAB, for a total of six lenses from 18mm to 100mm, and, in an interesting twist, announced a cut-rate “Razor 7D� series based on the same lenses but featuring Canon EF mounts for Canon’s EOS 7D HDSLR.

Luma Tech introduced a fast (T1.3) Super 35mm Illumina series made in Saint Petersburg, Russia–a set of five PL-mount primes from 18mm to 85mm ($34,500).

uniQoptics Signature Series PL-mount primes (on red fabric) with new Razor 7D with EF mount for Canon EOS 7D in foreground (black fabric).

At last year’s NAB, Zeiss introduced a series of seven PL-mount Compact Primes based on existing Zeiss ZF lenses for SLRs, thereby joining a trend of re-housing cheaper SLR lenses in robust, wider cine-style barrels for greater focus travel (in the correct cine direction). This year they returned with an updated series called CP.2 with interchangeable PL, Canon EF, and Nikon F mounts. (Street price around $27,400 for full set.)

Similarly, a small L.A. company, Focus Optics, introduced a re-housed Nikon 14-24mm T2.8 wide-angle zoom with focus travel extended to 126 degrees. At 3 lbs. and 5.5 inches long, it’s unusually compact for a PL-mount zoom and, per designer Stuart Rabin, remarkably sharp. At NAB, Band Pro announced exclusive distribution of this zoom. Expect further cine-style modified Nikon zooms from Focus Optics.

25mm Zeiss CP.2 Compact Prime with PL mount.

This year I ran into RED founder Jim Jannard at CML’s beer/camera bash at the tawdry Greek Isles lounge (the faux Elvis crooning in the corner wasn’t bad). Jim was passing around a working EPIC with a similar short, compact zoom, 17-50mm, f/2.9. An upgrade or replacement of the current 18-50mm, f/2.8 RED zoom? Whatever the case, it signals that RED is upping its game where glass is concerned. EPIC, incidentally, will accept Canon EF and Nikon F mounts too. (At last year’s NAB REDuser SuperMeet, RED announced six low-cost, PL-mount T1.8 Pro Prime lenses, 25mm to 300mm.)

Excepting pinholes, all camera images are born of lenses. Subsequent processing and recording can only aspire to preserve the highwater mark set by the original optical image.

New RED 17-50mm, f/2.9 compact zoom on working version of EPIC at CML beer bash.

Which is why, despite higher costs, there’s something deeply satisfying about this year’s renaissance in superior optics at NAB.

Next: What’s igniting this burst of PL-mount lenses? Large sensors at NAB.

Illya Friedman of Hot Rod Cameras at Sundance, previewing his prototype PL-mount adapter for Canon EOS 7D. Dual Grip Hand Held kit is in foreground.
Photo D.W. Leitner

Before the lights dimmed at each Sundance premiere this year, a ribbon of text resembling a CNN news ticker marched across the lower third of the empty screen: “This is the recharged fight against the establishment of the expected.� “This is cinematic rebellion.� “This is the renewed rebellion.�

Virtually identical ad-speak marked the launch of Red Digital Cinema’s Red One in 2006. Red honcho Ted Schilowitz’s business card even read “Leader of the Rebellion.â€? Which raised eyebrows in an industry skeptical of H. R. Giger design if not pointed abandonment of conventional camera technology.

Calling yourself a rebel is like calling yourself a maverick—an exercise in preening if not brand marketing. Insurrection is serious business. Breaking with convention risks breakdown of convention, revolution sows chaos; both inflict unforeseen consequences. Which brings me to HDSLRs.

With Sundance receding in the rearview mirror and the gravitational pull of NAB upon us, I want to share one last bit of business from Sundance concerning these small cameras with supersized sensors—a topic that will figure prominently in any discussion of new digital cameras at Las Vegas two weeks from now.

50mm Zeiss Compact Prime mounted to Canon 7D using Hot Rod Camera’s unique PL-mount adapter.
Photo D.W. Leitner

Remember that very first time you heard the acronym “HDSLR�? Like, last year?

Too early to have impacted a major festival like Sundance, whose indie features represent a year or more of low-budget production and post. Not too early, however, to have made a splash at NAB 2009, as I reported last April:

“Has a single significant project been broadcast or distributed, no less captured, using a [Canon EOS] 5D [Mark II], which only arrived last fall? … It would have mattered less if Canon 5Ds hadn’t pervaded Central Hall during NAB.

“They seemed everywhere, at booths showcasing lighting (LitePanels Micro), rods & accessories (Zacuto), and of course, at Canon’s booth, where I road-tested a 5D with the fascinating new Canon wide-angle TS-E 17mm f/4. With a huge 104-degree diagonal angle-of-view, plus/minus 90-degree tilt-shift, rotating stages, and true circular aperture, there’s nothing else like it—and the 5D brings it into the fold of HD imaging.

“5Ds also floated across the show floor on various Steadicam-type and stabilizing rigs. … With competing HD-enabled DSLRs from Sony, Nikon, Pentax, and others, it’s only a matter of time before the HDSLR ring too, so to speak, gets crowded.

If HDSLR-originated features have yet to impact Sundance, the same can’t be said of “the street,� where interest in HDSLRs is, in fact, exploding.

A week ago, after filming a SoHo press conference announcing the re-introduction of instant film for vintage Polaroid cameras (The Impossible Project), I walked 10 blocks across Chinatown to meet a fellow producer for lunch. Along the way I encountered two separate crews of young people with shoulder-mount HDSLR rigs, filming on the streets of New York.

Illya demonstrates Hot Rod Camera’s snap-on PL-mount adapter for Micro Four Thirds HDSLRs like Panasonic’s Lumix GH-1 (pictured).
Photo D.W. Leitner

Talk to pro photographers or rental houses and you’ll hear stories of still photographers asked to supply HD services for the first time (good for their invoicing, bad for professional camcorder operators). In fact, last year’s introduction by Canon of the EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 7D, and more recently, EOS 550D (poor-man’s 7D), prompted extended backorders.

As my colleague Trevor Boyer noted last week in his pre-NAB round-up of cameras, Canon just released firmware to add 24p and 29.97p to the EOS 5D Mark II, as well as a new H.264 Log & Transfer plug-in for Final Cut Pro, to facilitate workflow.

Which is why Illya Friedman of Hot Rod Cameras (he’s an alumnus of the late, great DALSA Digital Cinema) found himself navigating the snowy sidewalks of Park City in January. Over brunch at the Eating Establishment on Main Street, Illya demonstrated to me and director Miguel Coyula (whose Memories of Overdevelopment at Sundance I produced) both his popular PL mount adapter for Micro Four Thirds cameras—no modification required–and a prototype of his new PL mount for the Canon 7D.

Director Miguel Coyula (Memories of Overdevelopment) test drives a Panasonic GH-1 with 50mm Zeiss Compact Prime mounted to Hot Rod Camera’s Dual Grip Hand Held kit.
Photo D.W. Leitner

Miguel, in his early 30s and enamored of cameras small, cheap, and digital—I gravitate towards film cameras with viewfinders—was intrigued if not infatuated with a PL-mount 50mm Carl Zeiss Compact Prime (about $4,500) attached via Illya’s Micro Four Thirds adapter to a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1 and cradled by Illya’s clever Dual Grip Hand Held kit, a shallow S-shaped bracket with unique ergonomic advantages. I must say, I too was impressed by the balance and handling of this light rig.

Adapting a PL mount to a Canon 7D, however, requires camera modification and warranty voiding—not for everyone. Which hasn’t stopped a virtual line from forming around the block at New York’s Abel Cine Tech, waiting for Hot Rod’s 7D-PL Deluxe Kit, touted as the only professional “shimmableâ€? PL-mount system for the remarkable 7D.

Well, the wait is over. Here’s an oven-fresh video of Illya demonstrating his new 7D mod to Andy Shipsides of Abel Cine Tech, posted yesterday, March 29.

Coyula likes what he sees.
Photo D.W. Leitner

Technical and operational issues aside, HDSLRs—barely into their second year—are poised to disrupt those who bill themselves as disruptive. Unprecedented affordability coupled with cinematic results is fanning democratic upheaval from below, this time sans leadership, business plan, or righteous posturing. With no limits in sight.

Turn your ears in the direction of traditional camcorder manufacturers and hear the gnashing of teeth. A sale lost is a sale lost, whether pro or mass market.

You don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict, within the year, a video industry reply to this HDSLR insurgency…

“What if Cinema had been invented 100 years earlier?� asks editor extraordinaire Walter Murch.
Photo D.W. Leitner

What if Cinema had been invented 100 years earlier, in 1789 not 1889?

Who would ask such a question?

If you’ve read his ontological discourse on editing, In the Blink of an Eye, or novelist Michael Ondaatje’s book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, you know the answer to the second question. (Ondaatje also wroteThe English Patient.)

Walter Murch is many things: poet-philosopher of the Moviola and lately Final Cut Pro, the guy who coined “sound designer,� recipient of two Oscars for sound mixing and one for editing for the likes of The Conversation, American Graffiti, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (parts II and III), The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Ghost, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain.

As a thinking man, a man of reflection, he is also a natural teacher, freely sharing his inspiring insights and intellectual inquiries with students near and far, from alma mater UCLA to the Berlin Film Festival’s Talent Campus for young filmmakers and now Sundance, where on the morning of Day 9—for those lucky enough to have stuck around—he held forth in the meeting room of the Elks’ Lodge on Main Street, part of a Sundance panel series called Cinema Café.

Maxim Gorky wasn’t impressed by the Lumière Brothers in 1896.
Photo D.W. Leitner

His accompanying slide show (quaint term for the endless flow of provocative illustrations emanating from his MacBook Pro and projected on a big screen behind him) began with a 1896 quote from Russian journalist, later dramatist, Maxim Gorky, who upon seeing his first motion picture, a Lumière Brothers production, remarked:

“Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without color. Every thing there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous gray. Gray rays of the sun across the gray sky, gray eyes in gray faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen gray. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless specter.â€?

Murch used Gorky’s complaint to develop a profound point: Cinema required two essential inventions, motion pictures (Edison et. al.) and editing. The forward march of technology—motion, sound, color—would eventually answer Gorky’s sensory deprivation but was, in itself, insufficient to establish Cinema as a narrative art on par with literature or the stage. Editing, invented 14 years after motion pictures—an accident turning off a camera too soon at a horse race in Bristol, England, in 1901, then restarting it led to the discovery of the first cut, per Murch—would provide the tools to shape motion pictures into a dramatic form, but what form would that be?

Murch makes it his mission to share insights and experience with young filmmakers.
Photo D.W. Leitner

At this point in his slide show, Murch introduced the paradox of the Aztec wheel. The Aztecs produced a child’s toy, a dog with wheels, circa 1450, but never made the leap to producing wagons or carts to move burdens or people. According to Murch, the technological underpinnings were there, but Aztec culture wasn’t ready for the concept of the wheel. Similarly, the Greeks had toy steam engines circa 100 BCE.

Murch next turned to early motion pictures and identified three “fathers of Cinema.� Not surprising is his choice of Edison (with W.K.L. Dickson) as father of the mechanical. As father of the cultural, however, Murch named Beethoven, starting in 1803 around the time of the Second Symphony. Beethoven’s contribution to Cinema, Murch explained, was his development of dynamics. Composers before him, Haydn for example, had written compartmentalized sonatas in which the listener is conveyed from movement to movement as if traveling through rooms in a house, each movement a different architectural space.

Beethoven took leave of Baroque formality and architectural order to embrace instead the voluptuousness and violence of nature, from the pastoral solemnity of sunlit forests with twittering birds and soft breezes to sudden volcanic explosions of thundering passion. (Think of Alex’s fierce affection for “Ludwig Van� in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.) His was a highly personal expression of ups and downs, disdain for authority and social rank, charting the emotional and untrammeled. As one French music critic put it in 1810, Beethoven put doves and crocodiles together in the same cage.

The 19th century also produced, in the form of the novel, modern narrative realism. So Murch chose Flaubert as the third father of Cinema, the photographic DNA of which imposes an impression of reality, desired or not. Flaubert’s first novel, Madame Bovary, published in 1857 to great scandal, about a doctor’s wife who embarks on a course of adultery to escape bourgeois banality, was a finely observed, documentary-like description of provincial life, in which pages could be written about a day in which “nothing happened.� (Sound familiar?)

Where do video games fit? Murch thinks playing them combines experiential aspects of all four.
(Click to enlarge.)

So, according to Murch, in the 19th century two rivers, music and the novel, flowed together and by the 1890s had “emptied into the bay of Cinema.� In other words, even though the Zoetrope first appeared around 180 CE in China and again in the 1830s in Britain, motion pictures were destined to remain an Aztec wheel until Beethoven and Flaubert. Western culture wasn’t ready yet.
If Cinema had been invented 100 years earlier, in 1789 not 1889?

Answer: not possible. Culture precedes technology.

Murch had much more to say that day. As a member of a generation who witnessed the eclipse of film technology by electronic capture and editing, his thoughtful charting of the essential differences separating Cinema—which I capitalize, as he does—theater, video, and dreams speaks volumes. It’s worth pondering over time, on your own. (See illustration on right.)

Photo D.W. Leitner

“Cinema is a look into medium,â€? says Murch, whereas “video is a look at medium.â€? What he means is that Cinema is about “entering into the thoughts and emotions of the charactersâ€? compared to television that says “look at me, buy me.â€? These remarks are broad and unfair, as anyone who absorbed culturally acute comedies like Seinfeld or top-shelf HBO dramas like The Sopranos can readily attest. But what he’s talking about is a mind-set, a sensibility, an approach to filmed drama with roots a century long—regardless of display device.

Director David Lean, an editor himself, once remarked that editing is the soul of Cinema. Although a cinematographer, I’m inclined to agree. And after experiencing Walter Murch’s illuminating ideas on a snowy morning in Park City, I think I know who the soul of editing is.

Indie feature filmmakers set their calendars by Sundance.

Most of the world follows the Gregorian calendar, at least since the sixteen century, with the notable exception of indie filmmakers, who follow the Sundance calendar.

Sundance is so consequential to the career prospects of aspiring filmmakers that entire production schedules are calibrated to match the Sundance calendar. Would-be Sundance filmmakers, after all, must defy impossibly long odds. Out of 3,722 feature-length entries, Sundance in 2010 accepted 113, or 3 percent.

The Sundance calendar begins three weeks after the Gregorian and contains a season of submission, August to September, a season of announcement, early December, and for those lucky enough to be invited, a two-month tour through the outermost Inferno, leading up to the festival’s late-January opening night.

Inferno? How about a tenth circle of Hell so fearsome that even Dante, comprehensive in his taxonomy of sinners and sufferings, declined to describe it.

There’s last-minute locking of the cut, sound editing, ADR, Foleys, solving music rights, audio mixing, finalizing credits, designing titles and end credits, color correction, conforming a master, striking a 35mm screening print or HDCAM cassette. There might possibly be a D.I. in the mix too. And of course all goes smoothly. (Not!)

Posters, buttons, flyers, post cards, and press kits also take time to design and deliver.
(Design by R.D. Granados)

This being indie film production (likened to “not-for-profit activity� in my last column), there’s probably scant budget remaining to cover all this. And let’s not forget promotional costs. Those posters, buttons, flyers, post cards, press kits, and press releases take time to design and deliver, and they don’t come cheap, especially at the last minute. In the end most Sundance filmmakers, whether they really wish to or not, opt to hire a festival PR firm, a $10K decision. With so much on the line, they’re terrified of hobbling their big chance.

As you can surmise, this is a routine I know too well. Six times, since 1987, I’ve endured boiling pitch, flaming sands, winged demons, every scourge of post-production to hand-carry a screener to the festival in the nick of time. Those ragged zombies with glazed eyes descending on Sundance each year? Those are sleepless filmmakers, aching for their premieres but also their first night of shut-eye in weeks.

Once, for instance, I kept a New York film laboratory open all weekend as I hand-dipped strips of 35mm black & white hi-con in plastic milk jugs of developer and fixer, dried them from Luxo lamps, inserted the resulting white-core end credits into a dupe negative using an optical printer, then struck a print of Reel 5—the film can still warm in my hands as I bolted by taxi to JFK en route to Salt Lake City. I arrived the morning of the premiere, bleary but triumphant. (For All Mankind went on to win the Sundance Audience and Grand Jury awards for best documentary plus an Oscar nomination.)

At least twice more, once from New York and once from LA, I arrived at Sundance the evening before the premiere lugging twin aluminum ICC cases containing our one and only 35mm print.

This year, however, the night before the premiere I raced up from the Salt Lake City airport to the Sundance print services office in Park City, arriving at 7 p.m., closing time. Breathlessly I handed over an HDCAM cassette, 27 ounces at most, which I slipped from my briefcase. And therein lies a tale.

There’s no DIY or desktop path to producing a 35mm print. What I call industrial post-production is the only solution. Post house, audio studio, and lab accounts must be set up, credit reports run, estimates haggled, schedules mapped, checks cleared. And on occasion, items or procedures have to be re-done. All of this takes time, experience, a talent for scheduling, and not least, people skills.

This year, for my latest project, Memories of Overdevelopment, an adaptation of an obscure novel (published only in Spain) by an aging Cuban writer, there was precious little budget left in the till when Sundance called with the good news. Shot in HDV and XDCAM EX, edited in Final Cut Pro, we had purposely kept costs super-low, in the microcinema range. (See Cinematography Corner 11, Park City or Bust for more background.)

Early on we had made a 35mm test blow-up of several scenes at DuArt Film & Video in New York, which looked amazing, but for reasons of diminished funds this strategy was no longer in the cards. At 1 hr. 55 min., we knew we could fit the entire film on a large HDCAM cassette (max 124 minutes), which costs about $100.

Fortunately the director, Miguel Coyula, was also editor and DP. Shiva-like control of manifold creative roles in a feature film is usually a bad idea, but Coyula is that rare multitalent who not only excels at various tasks, but bends them successfully into a unified artistic voice. Assembling the directorial, editorial, photographic, and producing staffs for a meeting to discuss what to do next meant me getting Miguel on the phone. Low-rent, I’ll admit, but also exceedingly efficient.

How I spent Christmas day. Filming a final scene north of Miami.
(Photo by Fred Salaff)

We got the call from Sundance on November 30th. First order of business was to schedule shoots of the remaining scenes, of which there were several. (Sundance invited us on the basis of an incomplete rough-cut.) That’s how we wound up on Dania Beach north of Miami, filming an actress on Christmas day, and in Forest Hills Gardens in Queens on Jan. 4, filming an exterior in which the main character, a college professor visiting London, learns his brother Pablo (based on cinematographer Nestor Almendros) has AIDS. Forest Hills Gardens, you see, was modeled after Hampstead Garden Suburb in North West London.

All the while, day and night, we were rendering Final Cut Pro timelines. Memories of Overdevelopment took over four years to shoot, piecemeal, in five countries (six, if you consider southern Utah another planet). Many sections that originated in HDV were shot before Apple introduced ProRes. As a result, much of the film was edited as HDV, which initially worked well for complex effects in up to forty-five video layers because of HDV’s modest 25Mbps data rate, however at the cost of tonal banding and other artifacts.

You probably already guessed that, for output to HDCAM, we had no choice but to render HDV and XDCAM EX timelines to QuickTime using the high-quality ProRes 422 HQ codec. Our constraints included the fact that we were cutting in FCP 6.0.6—we were reluctant to upgrade such an intricate timeline in midstream—on an older Dual 2.7 GHz PowerPC G5 Mac tower. We couldn’t trade up to an Intel Mac over concern that multiple effects plug-ins would no longer function.

Our film contains a number of sequences with animated still photos, and we learned the hard way that large hi-res TIFF files, over 16 megapixels, are over the limit that FCP can handle, at least in ProRes 422 HQ. (The same TIFFs had worked fine in HDV timelines.) The result was weeks of frequent crashes and “out of memory� messages in the middle of long renders.

As a filmmaker you haven’t lived until, racing the calendar to your world premiere, you get timeline render estimates from FCP of up to two months…!!!

In the end, as you know, we made our Sundance premiere. We learned to render the animated sequences separately using the 50 Mbps XDCAM HD422 codec. A young, hip New York audio mixing facility, The Lodge, came to our rescue, matching sound levels and equalizing sound design and dialogue tracks over a single weekend. (They did a great job.) DuArt Film & Video was wonderfully responsive to our challenges, transferring our ProRes/XDCAM QuickTime to HDCAM in a single edit session.

Scrolling our end credits in Adobe After Effects 9.0.2 (CS4).
Click to enlarge.

Me? The night before our DuArt session—T-minus two days and counting before our premiere—I finalized the credits, compiled them in Excel as center-column and dual-column text, transferred them to Photoshop to create a document 1920 pixels wide by 15,460 pixels long, and animated the results in Adobe After Effects 9.0.2 (CS4) as a five-minute scroll. I admit to burning midnight oil, and early the next morning we were at DuArt joining a QuickTime of the end credits to the body of the film. As someone who, since the 1970s, has designed and photographed credits on Oxberry animation stands, I remain astonished at the speed and ease of this process.

At the end of “Dante’s Inferno,� Dante and his companion, the Roman poet Virgil, escaped the underworld, and so did we. Ours was a squeaker however—nips and tucks took place at DuArt the morning before we boarded our 1 p.m. JetBlue to Salt Lake.

What did we learn? In an increasingly DIY world in which you can find yourself alarmingly on your own, indie-friendly facilities like The Lodge and DuArt matter more than ever, especially en route to Sundance and beyond.

Wait-list line in front of the Eccles Theatre.
Photo D.W. Leitner

Sundance remains the preeminent festival for independent filmmaking anywhere. I ought to know. I’ve attended virtually every one since 1987.

In past years I’ve written daily blogs from Sundance for Millimeter, but this year, with a dramatic feature in the New Frontier section (my sixth Sundance premiere as producer), reporting wasn’t in the cards. So I’ve decided to dedicate the next four columns to a look in the rear view mirror at Sundance 2010.

In these paragraphs I’ll note tech trends and shifts in the culture of indie filmmaking, last-minute techniques invoked to finish our own super low-budget film, differences between cinema and video as elaborated by legendary editor Walter Murch before a packed morning session at the Filmmakers’ Lounge, and a brunch on Main Street I had with Illya Friedman of Hot Rod Cameras, for a sneak-peek at his Canon EOS 5D Mark II mod for PL-mount lenses.

Sundance was once a laid-back gathering of the indie film tribe in a declining 19th Century silver mining town. Then came Miramax, Hollywood, a dot-com bubble, the 2002 Winter Olympics, major corporate sponsorship. As quaint Main Street was doubled in length, development exploded in the surrounding Wasatch Mountains. A local library, a high school, a hotel, a racquet club, even a synagogue were pressed into service as screening venues for the ballooning festival.

This year, brakes were applied. Younger management led by new festival director John Cooper took charge. Features screened dropped from 120 to 113.

Fewer films is a good thing, since the greater the number of films, the easier it is for any single film to get overlooked (especially those without $10K in loose change for festival publicists). This year, in addition to five screenings of my film, Memories of Overdevelopment, I attended 12 others (and failed to get into two more, sold out). My personal best for the 10-day event is a cool 30 films. A mere quarter of all films programmed however. Which is why I say that no two people ever experience the same Sundance.

What wasn’t much reported this year, but inescapable if you were there, is that attendance was way, way down. (I have yet to see published attendance figures…) Although popular films were packed as usual, Main Street was eerily empty, devoid of the madding crowds Sundance is famous for. Even the overpriced taxis that cruise Main Street were plentiful. Thinking back, I’m not sure I saw a single stretch limo this year. Or Blackberry.

Swag was minimal to none. No free copies of the New York Times, no daily print version of indieWIRE. Free WiFi was as scarce as ostentatious parties. Even Charlie’s Place, the indispensable Sundance watering hole at the Yarrow Hotel, was shuttered mid-fest because, it was explained, of a change in management. In the middle of Park City’s biggest annual revenue-producing event?

Inside the Eccles, an on-screen crawl incites the well-heeled audience with slogans like “This is the recharged fight against the establishment of the expected,� and “This is cinematic rebellion.�
Photo D.W. Leitner

Watching festival shuttle buses disgorge passengers one day, I noticed that many if not most festival attendees now sport gray hair (like me). I couldn’t decide if it were a matter of the $750 weekend festival passes and $15 tickets—hardly recession prices—or a sign that the heyday of film festivals is behind us.

As a hedge perhaps, Sundance, in partnership with Google-owned YouTube, experimented with placing five films online for ten days concurrent with the festival. As reported in the New York Times, even the superb The Cove, nominated for an Oscar as best documentary feature, drew hardly more than 1,000 views from the Internet’s infinite viewership. The other four drew only a third of that.

Just another reason I think indie filmmaking should be categorized as not-for-profit activity. I’m not kidding.

As for industry participation at Sundance, each year I try to keep an informal tab on which manufacturers and rental and post houses attend. This was once a robust scene, but like festival attendance, the trend is downward. The New Frontier lounge, a past showcase for Panavision, Canon, and Sony, was vacant of production gear this year, save for the Sony products I used in a presentation on the creative use of small handheld camcorders.

A contingent from New York rental house LVR (Liman Video Rental) was on hand, as were reps from Arri, although for the first time in several years Arri declined to demonstrate cameras in the New York Lounge on Main Street. JVC did however, showcasing indie-friendly flash-memory camcorders—their handheld GY-HM100 and shoulder-mount GY-HM700 with HZ-CA13U PL-mount adapter—along with LCD monitors and an intriguing Blu-Ray/Hard Disk Drive combo recorder that inputs HDV, AVCHD, and 25Mbps XDCAM EX.

Reassuringly, Kodak’s annual party was jammed and Technicolor held its usual cocktail on Main Street. (Indie mainstay DuArt Film & Video as an original presenting sponsor—or whatever it was called back then—seems so 1980s. These days it’s corporate blue chips like HP, Honda, and Entertainment Weekly.)

Which brings up the perennial topic of film vs. digital at Sundance. My sample of twelve films viewed at Sundance is too small to draw overarching conclusions but I’ll share informal observations.

Film and digital projectors operate side by side in most Sundance venues.
Photo D.W. Leitner

Digital projection at Sundance, provided by sponsor Digital Projection since 1998, is so effective that I, having set up many film and digital projectors over the years, can no longer easily tell the difference in many of Sundance’s venues. I mean this as a compliment to the quality of Sundance’s platter film projection too, since clean, rock-solid titles—a typical clue to digital projection—now typify both types of projection at Sundance.

The upshot, however, is that many films shot on color negative, having undergone a D.I. post, are skipping the step of being recorded back to film. They’re being premiered at Sundance via plain-vanilla HDCAM, the only HD format Sundance accepts. And on screen, they all look better than terrific.

Examples include actor Diego Luna’s touching Abel (further info about Sundance films here), Lisa Cholodenko’s affectionate and bittersweet The Kids Are All Right, and if memory serves, the World Cinema Jury Prize winner, The Animal Kingdom, a stunning Martin Scorcese-like debut for Aussie director David Michôd. (I wish I’d kept better notes.)

A reverse example—shooting digitally and projecting 35mm—is Argentina’s The Man Next Door. I was at least halfway through this dark film, a class tale of neighbors at odds—one decides to add a house window in full view of the other, a snob who happens to occupy the only house Le Corbusier designed in this hemisphere—before I realized that it had to have originated digitally. The give-away was microscopic stair-step aliasing, which I caught for an instant in a highlight. It confused me, because I had already guessed it to be a film shot mostly on 500 E.I. color negative in a solid, journeyman style.

The Man Next Door co-directors Mariano Cohn, foreground with Sony EX1, and Gastón Duprat.

Imagine my surprise at learning the directors, Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, shot the film chronologically over twenty days in Le Corbusier’s landmarked Curutchet House in La Plata, Argentina, using a Sony EX1. Digital-to-film was completed in Buenos Aires under Cohn’s supervision.

The Man Next Door won the Sundance World Cinema Cinematography Award. You can see it March-April at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, since it has been invited to participate in New Directors/New Films 2010, co-sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Given the radical corner-cutting necessary to produce indie films at all, it should come as no surprise that RED was well represented this year. And having watched a substantial number of RED-originated films, I came to a realization during Sundance that there is no RED signature “look.� No two RED films appear the same.

Take Obselidia, director Diane Bell’s maiden voyage, shot by New York DP Zak Mulligan. A boy-meets-girl projectionist, boy-loses-girl projectionist story with a twist—he’s a shy recluse writing the Obselidia, the Encyclopedia of Obsolete Things—shot in and around Death Valley. It’s gorgeous, sensuous and lyrical, with stylish picture-postcard scenes of dusty sunbeams, romantic bike rides in slo-mo, and impossibly luminous desert landscapes.

Looks nothing whatsoever like Cyrus, the latest risible mumblecore caper from the brothers Duplass, Jay and Mark, this time featuring Hollywood talents John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, and Jonah Hill. Sure enough, despite the IATSE bug at the end, scenes appear as if shot with a DV camcorder circa 1998, all shaky, juddery, and muddily exposed. How do you do that with a RED One, anyway? (Better question, why bother? There are still plenty of worn PD-150s around.)

Both captured with RED One. Both projected digitally. Both visually from different planets.

Just wait until HDSLRs hit the Sundance beachhead! Around next year, I’d say.

Next: Sundancing Part 2, A Squeaker. Cheap tricks to a photo finish, delivering an HDCAM screening master in the nick of time to Sundance.