BEYOND 4K | GEAR
Screen Films and the Giant Dome Theatre Consortium and, to make it, they used more or less every tool in the box. “We shot on all the Red cameras going back to the Dragon, the VistaVision 8K camera, Helium and the 8K Monstro. We had the Sony F65, F55, the Phantom Flex 4K, Alexa 65, and the LF. And those are just the live-action cameras,” says Chang. “We also had a bunch of time-lapse cameras – the Nikon D810, D850 and the Sony A7R series. Resolution is always our priority, unless there’s a camera that can do something that other things can’t.” Though, it isn’t solely about numbers. “8K would be great,” Chang continues, “but it’s also about higher frame rates. My understanding is that the Blackmagic 12K will do 8K at 120 frames per second. One of the most demanding types of shots for the IMAX formats are aerials, and it’ll be exciting to see what that 12K camera can do when we put it up in the air, and you can record for more than a minute and a half at a time!” But focus pullers might be blanching slightly at the idea of keeping things sharp on a format intended to replace 15-perf 65mm, which has been described as resolving 15 to 18K, and Chang confirms that challenges for a crew can be extreme. “In post, sometimes, we’ll have a shot that’s in focus all the way up to 4K, and then you go beyond and put it on a 100- foot IMAX screen and it’s not any more,” he says. LENS RESOLUTION Keeping things in focus is one thing; choosing lenses capable of satisfying such high-resolution sensors is another. Relating lens resolution to sensor resolution isn’t always an exact science, with concerns of contrast and chromatic aberration key, but Fujifilm’s Marc Cattrall is confident that “pixel “ 8K WOULD BE GREAT, BUT IT’S ALSO ABOUT HIGHER FRAME RATES ”
ABOVE The Blackmagic 12k can shoot 8K at 120fps
large format lenses. These range from the System 65 series built, like Arri’s Vintage 765, for 65mm film origination, all the way through to the Primo 70 lenses, with built-in focus motors, metadata encoding, and cleanliness intended to keep aberration out of the way of high- resolution images. Similar things are possible outside the Panavision ecosystem, courtesy of Red’s own Monstro 8K VV, which may share some technological lineage with the DXL2. Big-chip options continue with Sony’s Venice, which has a 6K full- frame sensor, and Kinefinity pops up
again with the MAVO Edge, boasting a generous 3:2 aspect ratio sensor capable of 75fps at 8K. Someone with a particular reason to be interested in these cameras is Peter Chang of Golden Gate 3D, whose production history includes the famous Venice launch footage (yes, shot in Venice) and what he calls “a number of giant- screen films”. He explains: “They were all designed for large format IMAX screens, so there was an emphasis on resolution.” Chang’s recent production is entitled Cuba . It was produced by his company in association with BBC Earth, Giant
DECEMBER 2020 | DEF I N I T ION 25
Powered by FlippingBook