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.
Allowing one actor to play two roles in the same scene has been possible, at some level, at least since 1961’s The Parent Trap, in which one of Hayley Mills’ arms disappears visibly behind a soft-edged split screen. To put it mildly, techniques have improved, but keeping the necessary technology out of the way of a director whose tastes run to very freeform moviemaking is a challenge in itself.
It’d be easy to think that when Bryce Bayer’s name appeared on the Kodak patent for single-sensor color cameras in 1976, it was a new idea. Sufficiently new to be patentable, perhaps, but actually the idea of covering a sensor with a pattern of primary-colored filters goes back to the earliest days of color photography.
With Blackmagic recently introducing a new 12K camcorder, the question arises (once again) how much resolution is enough. After all, even the most fervent resolution junkie would have to agree there is a practical upper limit to resolution and how much is actually discernible and worthwhile.
Often, performers at a strip club are fleeting characters in a film or television production, sometimes reduced almost to the level of production design. P-Valley, produced for Starz by Chernin Entertainment, is based on Katori Hall’s stage play Pussy Valley, and defies that expectation by concentrating on the lives of the people who put on the show.
After a year like 2020, predicting the future is scary business. However there are several leading-edge technologies—many borrowed from the IT and consumer-facing industries—that certainly look to make a significant impact on video production and broadcasting in 2021. Here are some, in no particular order, that will see continued implementation and streamline production and distribution workflows. To date we’ve seen these new tools begin to alter the way video production and distribution is done, helping the industry move forward and media businesses grow, and that’s certain to continue in new and exciting ways.
According to International Civil Aviation Organization rules, if an airliner transmits a certain four-digit transponder code, the world should assume that it is being hijacked. The 2019 film 7500, directed by Patrick Vollrath, takes that code as its title and stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Aylin Tezel and Carlo Kitzlinger as the crew of an airliner during a hijack attempt.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: The pandemic has had a highly disruptive effect on video production and distribution in 2020 and many agree it will be felt for several years. The inability for people to gather safely has made it impossible for full-scale video production to go ahead as it did before. Yet, the industry has risen to the challenge in a myriad of ways and learned to be more efficient in the process.
The legacy gamma adopted in 709 and 240M has recently been supplanted by two more approaches to applying non-linearity to luminance, namely the Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) system developed by the BBC and NHK and the Perceptive Quantizer (PQ) developed by Dolby.