Digital Film Direct-to-Disk with Viper FilmStream
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Chiolis: So that's the workflow for the Viper. The easiest thing to remember about the camera is the fact that you aim it, you focus, you expose it, and you record.
DMN: There's not a lot of white balancing, black balancing. As you said, in between each frame, as the shutter is closed, that's the camera's opportunity to do that for you.
Chiolis: That's the camera's black balance and there is no white balance. There's no optical color correction, either, because you're going to do that in post. Some people have been putting an 85 in front of it for outdoor scenes. That's a personal decision, we don't recommend for or against that. But there's no color correction filters, there's no white balance, it's compose, focus and expose. You have three things to do. And the recorder, since you're using disk, is nice -- it's an instant start. It's also an instant playback. You can see if what you've captured is what you're looking for. Some people on set say that's good and others say that's bad. You don't want your entire cast and crew looking over every time you're going to look at a captured scene.
DMN: Then sometimes the cast says, "I demand a playback, I want to have approval rights on the set."
Chiolis: That's a hole 'nother discussion. One of the first shoots we did, some shorts out in the field with the camera and recorder, we were seeing what we need to improve and where the workflow gets bogged down. The crew was mainly a film crew. The producer had done mainly film work. After the first shot, she said, "cut," but she couldn't quite figure out what to say next, so all she could think of was "check the gate."
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DMN: No gate to check there.
Chiolis: (laughs) She knew that, but she didn't know what else to say because that was the first thing that was said on a film shoot. But "check the gate" turned into meaning, "Let's take a look at playback." So we're still looking for a good way to say "let's take a look at playback" that everybody can get their hands around.
DMN: So this is actually being used on shoots, and has been for three months. But it's not shipping yet, right?
Chiolis: It will ship in about thirty days [that would be August 29, 2002]. What we're doing is trying to prove out the workflow, because it's a unique workflow, because you're spitting out 8MB per frame. There's not a lot of equipment that can handle that on a real time basis. One of those is the Specter Virtual DataCine that we make that's a companion to the Spirit DataCine. There are some other boxes made by other companies that can handle this, but not on a real time basis at full bandwidth. We're shooting, giving people a window burn and letting them go offline, and then coming back into conform and color-correct real time on the Spectre. We're testing the workflow on that, seeing where it gets bogged down, where people want to archive, how they want us to output this, and what it looks like when it goes out to film.
DMN: How does its quality compare to 4K film images?
Chiolis: It's 1920 x 1080 at 4:4:4 bit depth, 10-bit. It's not film. You can definitely see the difference on film. We think we've hit between what people are using for high definition now and film. You know, some people, depending on who you talk to, say that film ranges anywhere from 4 to 8K. I think I've even heard the argument made for 16K, but I don't know if I can swallow all of that. That's a lot of data. 8 MB per frame is a lot for a piece of electronic captured material. In the tests we've done, the images coming off the camera are amazing. I don't know how else to explain it other than that.
DMN: It's hard to put into words how it looks. I was going to ask you to tell me how you think this compares, if you can put it into words, how much better camera is than Sony's best CineAlta digital film camera, like the one Lucas used?
Chiolis: They did some tricks with that to make it better, and I don’t know if Sony has incorporated those into the released product. You'll have to ask Lucas exactly what they did. His people did some internal work as well as some external work with Sony and Panavision, so that wasn't quite an off-the-shelf camera. We haven't done any comparisons. We're trying to let the product stand on its own. Obviously, it's going to be better because, it's better than the tape format. The tape format is pre-filtered and compressed. What comes out of Sony's CCDs, we don't know, we've never seen the raw data coming out of Sony's CCDs. So what we're saying to clients is, look, here's all the facts, you make an informed decision.
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