Emerging standards are making the best of existing pixels. Understand the principles of HDR, learn how to build workflows to simplify production, and deliver the highest quality HDR pictures possible.
Many people and cultures celebrate special New Year dates. Organizations designate fiscal years. Broadcasters traditionally mark their new technology year mid-April, at annual NAB Shows. Old habits die hard.
In this final part of the series, an attempt will be made to summarize all that has gone before and to see what it means.
Read too much film and TV industry technical literature, and it’s easy to get the impression that everything about the technology is built to carefully considered specifications. As Philo Farnsworth’s wife was probably aware, though, as he tinkered with the electronics while she sat in as a test subject, it’s often the other way around.
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There aren’t many positions in the film industry which have the prerequisite of spending an hour sunken in the waters off San Diego in a classic diving suit with a blacked-out helmet. To be fair, it wasn’t so much the film industry that made Pete Romano do that; it was the U. S. Navy, who were interested in finding out if prospective dive school candidates could handle confinement.
Spending a few weeks in southern Italy is a popular idea. For cinematographer Angus Hudson, BSC, an opportunity to soak up the Puglian sun would come in the form of The Life Ahead (in Italian, La vita davanti a sé), a film directed by Edoardo Ponti and starring Sophia Loren in her first role since 2010.
Floating-point notation and gamma are both techniques that trade precision for dynamic range. However they differ fundamentally. Gamma is a non-linear function whereas floating point remains linear. Any mathematical manipulations carried out on floating-point encoded data will be correct whereas manipulations of gamma-encoded luma cannot be. Gamma was intended to linearize a cathode ray tube whereas floating point encoding was designed from the outset for mathematical manipulation.
Possibly one of the last features to wrap before the global pandemic effectively shut down production was Fatman, a dark action comedy directed by Eshom and Ian Nelms and starring Mel Gibson as the kind of Santa Claus who would probably exist in 2020 if one existed at all.
Most people are aware that the amount of detail in a photograph is dependent on a few things. Assuming focus is right, it’s easy to assume it’s a combination of how well the lens was made and the number of pixels on the sensor, give or take the quality of all those things. Now we’re starting to hit issues with what we might almost think of as the size of light.