From Hand Crank to HD24p

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From Hand Crank to HD24p

• A brief history of movie cameras

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• Cinema has been astonishing audiences for over
  100 years and has provided film artists with an
  outlet to voice their imaginations in unique and
  innovative ways.
• The medium is a dynamic art form that allows us
  to see, hear, feel, and experience complex
  stories in ways only possible by film's visual
  nature.

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• Over the years, the technology to create film has
  changed from Muybridge's array of cameras to
  Silicon Graphics workstations used for the
  digital creations of Lord of the Rings and Matrix
  Reloaded.

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• Improvements in technology have allowed
  generations of filmmakers to produce film with
  more complexity and visual impact.
• Many stories being told today by filmmakers could
  have not been achieved in the yesteryear because
  of limitations in technology.

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• Digital effects and non-linear editing have been
  a great tool for film's expanding scope for
  almost 30 years.
• Yet, the technology for principal photography of
  films has not changed drastically over film's
  history.

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• The basic concept of chemical-based film has not
  changed from Muybridge's experimental film system
  used to capture the gallop of a horse to the
  "state-of-the-art" Panavison 35mm film cameras
  used in the production of Hollywood's top
  grossing films.

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• Film cameras have gained many helpful
  sophisticated features and the sensitivity of
  film stock has increased drastically, but the
  process of acquiring an image onto a negative is
  basically the same.

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• This is how it all started, the Camera Obscura

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• The camera obscura was basically a box with a
  hole in one end and a viewing mirror at the
  other.
• This was used as the basis for the first still
  cameras when photograohic plates were invented in
  the 1840s

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• Although we think of photography as a relatively
  modern invention, the principle of the camera
  obscura is however ancient.
• If a small hole is made in one wall of a dark
  room an upside down image appears on an opposite
  wall. This is described by Plato in the 6th
  century BC.

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• The history of optics and the making of lenses is
  similarly ancient, there are examples of Egyptian
  cast glass lenses in the British Museum.
• The Roman philosophers Ptolemy and Seneca were
  very interested in optics and Nero is reputed to
  have watched the Roman games wearing glasses.

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• However, no-one thought about putting these two
  ideas together until 1000 year later when
  Dutchman Hans Lippershey made the first telescope
  in 1550.
• It took almost another two hundred year before
  the first camera was invented.

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• In the 1820s, a Frenchman called Joseph Niepce
  was experimenting with ways of making a permanent
  record of the image seen in a camera obscura
  (what we would now call a pinhole camera).
• Using a glass place coated in bitumen, he
  eventually succeeded in producing a very faint
  print of the view from a window of his house in
  1827.

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• Movie cameras then developed out of the advances
  in still photography.
• The main difficulty was to get the film emulsion
  through the camera at a fast enough rate and yet
  stop it in front of the lens to allow for the
  exposure of the image.

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• After some early experimental designs, most
  cinematograph cameras used a claw mechanism to
  pull down the perforated film.

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• Typical camera interior showing film boxes and
  film path. Film capacity was usually 400 feet, or
  just over 6 minutes at 16 frames (pictures) per
  second

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• This Gaumont camera of c.1907 has external film
  magazines.
• The whole thing is made of wood.

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• This Pathé Studio camera was popular in the early
  days of Hollywood.

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• All these early cameras were incredibly heavy and
  cumbersome. They had to be mounted on huge heavy
  duty tripods that meant movement was virtually
  impossible.

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• Also, zoom lenses were not available yet. Lenses
  were fixed and were quite slow by todays
  standards.
• Coupled with emulsions that were not particularly
  sensitive meant that a lot of light was needed to
  produce a decent image.

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• All of these technical problems meant that
  filmmakers were limited in what they could shoot
  and how they could shoot it.

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• Things started to change around the time of the
  first world war 1914.
• Cameras were being made smaller and lighter, and
  were being made out of metal.
• It meant that filmmakers had more freedom in how
  they could shoot.

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• However, one of the most important advances came
  at the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1937.
• The Arriflex 35 set an historic precedent as the
  world's first reflex motion picture camera.

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• Prior to this, all movie cameras had suffered
  parallax errors due to the viewfinder being
  offset to the taking lens.
• Although the idea of a 45 degree angled mirror
  reflecting light into a viewing prism worked for
  SLR photography, it was not feasible to flip a
  similar mirror up and down inside a motion
  picture camera.

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• It took the combined skills of Erich Kastner
  (Chief Arriflex engineer) and August Arnold
  (Co-founder of Arriflex) to design a method,
  whereby this mirror rotated with the revolving
  shutter.
• Thereafter, the Arriflex 35 was born, a small and
  compact hand-held camera, simple to use and
  popular with both news cinematographers and
  feature film-makers.

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• Alongside these developments in camera and lens
  technology, the film emulsion itself was going
  through some important developments.
• Kodak pioneered the development of faster and
  more sensitive emulsions for still photography
  and these then became available for
  cinematographers.

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• Although we think of all early cinema as being in
  black and white, the colouring of films had been
  around since the late 19th century.
• The quest to produce motion pictures in realistic
  colors began the instant that that the first hand
  cranked cine camera turned.

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• A variety of assorted methods achieved varying
  degrees of technical and commercial success prior
  to the introduction of three strip full colour
  Technicolor in 1934.
• The earliest films were sometimes coloured by
  hand, frame by frame.

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• The example (right) is from a George Méliès film
  of 1904.

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• Tinting (which gave an overall colour to a whole
  scene) and toning (chemically changing the tones
  to a colour, but leaving the highlights white)
  could also be used to add colour effects.
• However, as films got longer, hand tinting became
  too time consuming and expensive.

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• 'Natural' colour arrived commercially in 1909
  when Kinemacolor was shown at the Palace Theatre
  of Varieties in London in February, at the Folies
  Bergeres in Paris in April 1909, in Berlin Garden
  in the autumn of 1909, and at Madison Square
  Gardens, New York, in December.

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• Financed and promoted by Charles Urban, and
  developed for Urban by George Albert Smith from
  earlier experiments by Lee and Turner, the system
  was ingenious and successful.
• The camera was fitted with a rotating wheel of
  red and green filters, and alternate frames of
  the black-and-white filmstock were exposed to one
  of the two colours.

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• The negative film was processed and printed, and
  the black-and-white positive shown in a projector
  also fitted with a filter wheel.
• The film was threaded so that the re-exposed
  frame was projected by red light, and the
  green-exposed frame by green light.

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• The system operated at 32 frames per second, to
  enable the colours to merge.
• The system gave a surprisingly wide range of
  colour. Subjects included the Coronation
  procession of George V, and the Royal Durbar in
  Delhi, shown at London's Scala Theatre - the home
  of Kinemacolor for some years - in 1912.

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• Becky Sharp (1935), the three-color feature film
  that eroded the widespread commercial viability
  of all other methods of colour photography for
  nearly 20 years.

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• The picture was produced by Pioneer Pictures in
  collaboration with Technicolor Corporation in an
  effort to demonstrate, to studios that had tired
  of imperfect and complex systems, that films
  could be photographed in full colour.

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• The jolts and shakes of handheld footage work
  well for certain scenes -- an unsettling chase in
  a horror movie, for example, or a bare-bones
  documentary -- but for the most part, filmmakers
  in the past shied away from handheld
  cinematography.

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• When a scene called for the camera to move, the
  crew attached it to a dolly, a wheeled platform
  that rides on a track or smooth floor. Dollies
  work great for a wide range of shots, but they
  have certain limitations.
• You can't use them on stairs, for example, and
  they are hard to navigate around obstacles. It is
  also extremely difficult to set them up on rough
  terrain.

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• In the early 1970s, a commercial director and
  producer named Garrett Brown began working on
  alternative stabilizing systems to get around
  these limitations.
• Brown wanted to build a highly portable device
  that would isolate the camera from the cameraman,
  as well as improve the camera's balance, to
  minimize shakes and shocks.

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• In 1973, Brown realized his goals with a
  revolutionary but remarkably simple machine.
  "Brown's Stabilizer," later renamed Steadicam.

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• Steadicam operators have helped create some of
  the most memorable shots in film history.
• In "Rocky" (1976), one of the first feature films
  to use Steadicams, operator Garrett Brown let the
  audience follow Sylvester Stallone as he ran up
  the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum.

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• This shot, one of the most memorable in the
  movie, would have been nearly impossible before
  the Steadicam.

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• In "The Shining" (1980), director Stanley
  Kubrick used a Steadicam shot to zip down the
  hallways of a haunted hotel, and another to
  follow Jack Nicholson through a snowy hedge maze.

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• Steadicams have given filmmakers and movie-goers
  alike a new freedom of movement. With a
  Steadicam, a director can float the camera (and,
  by extension, the audience) into a forest,
  through a crowd of people, or down into a cave.

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• In TV shows like "ER," Steadicam shots put the
  audience in the middle of the action, as if they
  were another character in the show.
• This simple machine has truly changed the world
  of filmmaking forever.

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• The next big change is happening right now with
  the rise of digital cinematography.

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• Steven Soderbergh,Academy Award-winning
  director of "Traffic," and other box office hits
  including "Erin Brockovich" and "Oceans Eleven,"
  shot the feature "Full Frontal
• on the Canon XL1s

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• Digital cinematography arose out of the
  development of the video tape recording and the
  video camera.
• In the 1950s, Television was booming and there
  was soon an urgent need to find some way of
  recording television programs - particularly in
  the United States, where the country spanned
  several time-zones, and the evening news in New
  York would be received in the mid-afternoon in
  California.

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• The first solution was TeleCine, pointing a film
  camera at a TV monitor and filming the picture
  directly.
• But this was slow (since the film had to be
  developed) poor quality, and prone to distortion.

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• Magnetic tape recording was an obvious solution -
  it was actually invented in the 19th century, and
  had been widely used for recording sound since
  the war.

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• However, the equipment presently used in video
  camera production has a relatively short history.
  In the early 1960s a method of editing video was
  developed.
• The first attempts used the bulky and complex
  black and white image Orthicon cameras and two
  inch video tape equipment.

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• By 1969, amateur videotaping become possible with
  the invention of a Sony black and white Vidicon
  hand held camera, combined with a an open reel, ½
  inch videotape recorder.
• All these early video cameras used a tube similar
  to that in televisions to convert light to an
  electronic signal.

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• Even though these tubes became smaller and
  lighter, they had significant problems.
• The critical problem was their low light level
  sensitivity compared to film. The average three
  colour tube camera had an equivalent ASA or light
  sensitivity of about 1/100 of the fastest film
  stocks.

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• Also, tubes were susceptible to burn.
• When a tube camera was pointed at a high contrast
  light source, such as the sun or a spotlight on
  set, the surface of the tube became damaged and
  would then not respond properly to normal light.

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• Also because the cameras used three tubes to
  produce the picture, these tubes had to be
  precisely aligned, or registered in order to
  produce a clear picture.
• Any bumping or jarring of the camera tended to
  knock at least one tube out of registration.

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• To produce a viable alternative to film therefore
  the tube system had to go. It took until 1984 to
  develop a better system. The first camera was
  produced with a CCD, an electronic Charge Coupled
  Device.

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• CCDs are flat pieces of selenium and other light
  sensitive metal crystal pixels. Instead of using
  a beam of electrons to scan the chip, the new
  technology used a chip that is electronically
  reads as light falling across its surface changes
  voltages.
• These changes become the electronic equivalent of
  the picture at the same frame and line rate as
  the picture tube.

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• This development made video cameras a much more
  viable proposition not only for film and
  television crews, but also opened up the
  possibility of delivering a usable and cheap home
  video camera for the mass market.

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• Sony did in fact launch the worlds first
  camcorder, the BetaMovie BMC-100 which went on
  sale in 1983.

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• However, it was JVC who produced the best known
  and most successful of the early camcorders.

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• The GR-C1 probably qualifies as a design classic,
  perhaps even an icon of the 1980s

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• This revolutionised the way news was originated
  with electronic news gathering (ENG) the effect
  on film news gathering was significant.
  Cameramen could be mobile and react fast, as well
  as keeping good quality.

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• Since 1956 all video tape recording systems had
  used the FM analogue method of recordings but in
  1988 Sony and BTS introduced the first Digital
  Video Tape Recorder, the D1. This system recorded
  onto a small particle Cobalt Magnetic Tape

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• Since then we have seen significant advances in
  the consumer video with 8mm, S-VHS and Hi-8
  development, enabling low cost acquisition on a
  small cassette system.
• More widespread use of digital recording began in
  1992 with the emergence of digital Betacam and
  its backwards compatibility with analogue
  Betacam.

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• The last 5 years has seen a huge jump in the
  technology of motion picture cameras, with George
  Lucas leading the development in conjunction with
  Sony and Panavision.
• His move to a purely digital production process
  has galvanised the industry into accepting
  digital cinematography.

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• Lucas started the process when he asked producer
  Rick McCallum to explore the possibility of
  getting a digital camera built in time for
  shooting Episode II in Australia, in late June of
  2000.

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• In 1998, a technical working group was formed,
  made up of many engineers from Sony, Panavision
  and Lucasfilm.
• For the next three years this group met, on
  average, every two months thrashing out
  hundreds of system details which shaped all of
  the products and software that Lucas needed
  developed.

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• In late November of 1999, as promised, both Sony
  and Panavision delivered the first 24 frame
  prototype camera and lenses.

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• HDW-F900 fitted with the Panavision Primo lenses.
• This is the High Def 24p camera.

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• These cameras are being refined to shoot at
  higher and higher quality at lower compression
  rates.
• Lucas is shooting Episode 3 on the new Sony
  HDW-F950's with full-bandwidth uncompressed
  digital outputs recording the 444 output.

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• This is at the cutting edge of film production
  technology and shows just how far weve come in
  100 or so years.
• Who knows where we go from here..