[Originally posted April 26, 2006]

Yesterday I blogged that my eyes had seen the glory of the coming of 4K (hum that to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, you won’t get it out of your head) at Filmlight’s demonstration of 4K color grading of 4K Dalsa Origin clips over a Sony 4K SXRD projector. But that was yesterday. Today my eyes have a new hero: NHK’s Ultra High Definition Video, which delivers sixteen times the definition of HD. And seeing is believing.

Sitting maybe three screen heights from a large theater-sized screen, I could identify individual faces in stadium shots made with a wide-angle lens. A wide shot of a Knicks game from the nosebleed section of Madison Square Garden showed game details clearly. A 1:1 scale reproduction of da Vinci’s Last Supper, which filled the screen, was so photorealistic that the full tragedy of da Vinci’s rejection of conventional wet fresco in favor of dry plaster, which faded and flaked within decades, hit me for the first time. And I’ve seen the original.

We’re talking 7680 x 4320 pixels at 60p, not puny 1920 x 1080. And 22.2-channel surround sound. That’s not a typo! Every time the crowd at Madison Square Garden cheered, I thought applause was coming from the packed NHK screening room. But nobody’s hands were moving. It was spooky.

In the discussions Saturday and Sunday at the Digital Cinema Summit about the economical and logistical advantages of replacing heavy, fragile film prints with compact digital media, nobody mentioned (to my knowledge) the film format that would obviously benefit most. If you’ve ever seen a gargantuan IMAX print roar through a huge IMAX projector—a marvel of cine engineering, by the way—you’ll guess where I’m going with this. IMAX prints cost a king’s ransom to print, ship, replace. Isn’t NHK’s UHDV the digital equivalent of IMAX? With better sound?

Naturally I was interested in what beast of a camera created this impressive spectacle. The experimental NHK camera on display at NAB is not much larger than a bulky old-fashioned studio camera—good things here at NAB often come in small packages—but what intrigued me most was the optical block containing four, count ‘em, four 16mmx9mm CMOS sensors made by Micron Imaging. That’s right, 16×9 sensors that happen to be 16mmx9mm. You might call it a 3/4in. chip. Point is, it’s hardly larger than a conventional 2/3in. chip and nowhere near the size of the 35mm-sized sensors in Dalsa’s Origin, Arri’s D-20, or Panavision’s Genesis.

Why four? One CMOS is devoted to the red channel, one to blue, and two to green. Since our visual system registers image detail largely in the green band of the spectrum (about 70 percent; red or blue contribute merely 30 percent), the NHK camera sensibly doubles up on green sensors, then diagonally offsets both green sensors to obtain (I’m educatedly guessing) 50 percent greater spatial resolution. Such “pixel shifting” is common in broadcast cameras and especially recent HDV camcorders.

Why CMOS? Micron marketing manager Caleb Williams told me that CMOS is the only technology that can achieve such results at full 60p. Micron Imaging is world leader in commercial CMOS categories like cell phones and security cameras, and Williams admits he’s biased. Who am I to argue? My eyes say the proof is in the pudding.

Speaking of good things/small packages, here are the other two lust-inducing technologies that stopped me dead in my tracks today:

Litepanels’ new 1×1 LED light totally rocks. One foot by one foot square, blindingly bright, soft as a Chimera, thin as a paperback, no heat, fully dimmable with no shift in color temperature, weighs nothing. Native 5600ºK LEDs (flood or spot models) or 3200ºK LEDs (flood). No bulbs to replace ever. 100 percent safe: no tungsten or high-pressure discharge lamps to explode, no dangerous UV to shield. And low power requirements. Runs off 9V-30V sources such as standard 12V camera brick or car batteries, includes a worldwide 90V-264V AC adapter.

In terms of convenience and economy, Litepanels’ 1×1 is to hot, inefficient incandescent lights or ballasted HMI lights what plasma or LCD displays are to CRTs. Folks, it doesn’t get better than this.

And then there’s Kodak. Kodak? En route somewhere else, I caught in the corner of my eye an Arri 416 Super 16 camera, which debuted here at the show, in a plastic display box at Kodak’s booth. All joking aside about Arri finally having built an Aaton, a total lust object! Moving closer to get a better look, I then noticed a 15in. MacBook Pro, two of them, being used to demo Kodak’s Version 2 of its Look Manager System.

I took the bait, they reeled me in. My good fortune.

KLMS previsualization software enables cinematographers and filmmakers to predict the effects of their choices of colornegative, processing (push processing, skip bleach, etc.), glass filters, exposures, and print stocks on the basis of test shots made with a digital still camera. I’m here to tell you that Version 2 of KLMS is a quantum leap over the original KLMS in terms of interface design and utility.

There are many filter and processing combinations I’ve never tried, and I’ve been shooting for decades. KLMS depicts them all. Imagine how useful KLMS would be to a student studying cinematography? Imagine how useful it can be to me in the future! KLMS is a career’s worth of technical insight at your fingertips.

Next I noticed that Scott Stevens of Kodak was demo’ing the Windows version of KLMS, not the equally-featured Mac OSX version, on the MacBook Pro.

Bootcamp? Way cool, Kodak.