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Origin Experiments

Apr 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

At press time, the scheduled presentation at the NAB 2004 Digital Cinema Summit of footage from Dalsa's experimental Origin digital cinematography camera was expected to create quite a buzz. But the real action took place in Montreal in February, when production company Zicatela Films involved five Canadian DPs in a series of Origin tests. They put the prototype into a rigorous production environment, shot film and digital images side-by-side for later comparison, and captured enough imagery to produce a short film called The Glove, directed by Kim Nguyen. Excerpts from that film, and separate test footage, were expected to be included in the NAB presentation.

Daniel Vincelette, CSC, initiated the project, served as co-producer of The Glove with Francois Leclerc, and is one of the five DPs who tested the Origin camera alongside an Arri 435 film camera. The other participating DPs included John Berrie, CSC; Eric Cayla, CSC; Serge Desrosiers, CSC; and Pierre Mignot.

Vincelette calls the project a valuable exercise for a variety of reasons. In particular, he loved capturing uncompressed 4k images with “film-like depth of field,” using true film lenses and a traditional, optical viewfinder. “It has incredible leeway in the highlights compared to other digital cameras,” he says, calling this capability the camera's biggest asset.

“We saw detail in the highlights that I'm not sure even film can give us, actually,” Vincelette says. “It was remarkable at the high end of the curve. The slowness of the sensor gave us problems in the lower part of the curve, in the blacks, but in the highlight area, it was excellent. We got lots of detail out of fluorescent light tubes, for instance.”

The camera used during the February tests retained the first-generation, 35mm-sized (17mm × 34mm), progressive-scan (24fps), 8-megapixel CCD sensor that debuted last year. (At press time, John Coghill, GM of Dalsa's digital cinema business unit, reported that a second-generation sensor would be ready for new prototypes sometime this summer.) For the Canadian tests, DPs had to work around the slow sensor — their biggest problem, Vincelette says.

“We rated it at about 64 ASA for inside or night shooting with tungsten lighting,” Vincelette continues. “That is a pretty slow speed. Next to it, we were shooting film with Kodak's new [5212, low-grain] 100 ASA stock, and so this approach is, of course, much heavier as far as lighting goes than what we would do with faster, modern film stocks in a normal shooting situation. This sensor was balanced for daylight, but then again, the next version will be balanced for tungsten lighting.”

The camera's mechanical shutter also presented some problems, according to Vincelette. “We had it running all the time, and this version of the camera was not completely accurate at 24fps. There was a little fluctuation there — very little, but some. But again, that's a mechanical issue they will be addressing.”

Filmmakers recorded from Origin over an optical cyber-link to an IO Industries data recorder in a nearby camera truck. Vincelette says this approach can be extremely laborious: “Every day, we had to download the data recorder to a different type of server in order to protect it to a RAID-safe data farm. But that step could be compared to going to a film lab and waiting for film to be developed every night.”

Beyond testing the camera, Vincelette worked closely with postproduction supervisor René Villeneuve at Meteor Studios, Montreal, developing post workflow methods. On the one hand, rendering and editing the imagery is proving to be a slow process. On the other hand, Vincelette says, “the quality of the images opens up the possibility of shooting at 4k and then coming up with, fairly soon, a workable, 4k postproduction chain.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.