FEATURE | SMART LENSES
SMART GLASS LENS DATA IS INCREASING IN USE FOR THE POST-PRODUCTION INDUSTRY, BUT WHICH LENSES OFFER IT AND HOW MUCH DATA IS AVAILABLE? WORDS PH I L RHODES
M odern cinematography cameras record hundreds of megabytes of data every second. Adding a few more numbers to that payload is no great technical feat, but even so, it’s been nearly 20 years since the genesis of current lens metadata systems, and uptake is still patchy. Visual effects people, though, are increasingly keen to get their hands on lens information, and the technology seems poised for widespread adoption. Hendrik Voss is a product manager at Arri whose experience dates back to the original release of the WCU-4 lens control unit. He understands the caution within the industry. “Metadata is a buzzword,” he explains. “Some people feel scared when they hear the word metadata. Engineers and product managers say it’s so cool and useful, but in the end it depends on the people who use it.”
adds: “They save time, and with time, save money.” COOKE /i TECHNOLOGY The need for a single, standard approach is echoed again and again. Les Zellan of Cooke Optics was generous enough to put the company’s lens electronics on hold in 2001 and 2002, since Arri had developed the LDS system. “We always thought the world needed one system rather than seven,” he explains. Having originally developed the Cooke /i technology after 2000, Zellan eventually concluded the best way to encourage uniform adoption was to make the specification cheap and available. “We licence /i for a pound a year,” Zellan says. “That is very attractive to a lot of companies. Early on we made an agreement with Red. The first Red cameras were the first real /i cameras and then
VFX houses have well-defined pipelines for their work and metadata must take its place in that model, according to Voss. “If you make a workflow for a movie and you imagine you have different cameras, or even different lenses, and you find that some lenses have metadata and some don’t – on some cameras you can capture lens data and some of them you can’t. Then you have gaps in your workflow.” Arri’s approach was born in the days of film, when encoders mounted on lenses or external electronics could be used to record lens data. Any lens could, therefore, become part of the fledgling Lens Data System (LDS), which was originally built to provide extra information for the focus puller. Applying that data to VFX work was a natural evolution, creating what Voss describes as “a camera system that helps Arri customers to work more efficiently”. He
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