The image of a director crouching to line up a shot with an optical viewfinder is one that’s been pushed aside somewhat by the less romantic modern image of a director squinting at an LCD monitor. The monitors have a lot to recommend them – in an ideal world, they can show color, exposure, and contrast in a way that’s close to how the final production will appear, for some value of “close.” It’s enough to make us forget that the cameras of decades past – film cameras – didn’t even need batteries to make a picture that has lots of extra look-around room, miles of resolution, no rolling shutter, a completely accurate depiction of lens flare and depth of field. And, of course, no issues handling all the dynamic range and color of the real world.
People are not just flocking to beaches and holiday resorts as lockdowns are eased but also to their TV screens for viewing of returning live sports.
In mid-May of this year, as countries such as Germany, England, and Spain considered easing COVID-19 restrictions to allow professional sports to resume, various professional sports leagues began discussions with broadcasters and production companies on the best way to televise games without fans in the seats. They’re called “ghost games” and finding the right recipe for presenting an engaging viewer experience was paramount.
Here we look at some of the origins of gamma in imaging and move on to introduce the peculiar characteristics of the cathode ray tube.
Broadcasters are far more upbeat about the impact 5G mobile networks will have on their services than they were in the case of 4G when that was introduced around a decade ago.
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For anyone who’s seen the first series to bear the title, the name Penny Dreadful will conjure up images of occult happenings in a shadowy, late-Victorian world. After twenty-seven episodes across three highly successful seasons, Showtime aired the last episode of Penny Dreadful in June 2016. By November 2018, the network had ordered a successor: Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, which premiered in April 2020 and looks very different to its gothic predecessor.
Twenty years ago, there was a clear divide between how you shot and finished a project for Cinema compared to the typical workflows used in broadcast TV. With the advent of streaming services that provide 4K/UHD to a broad audience the lines are now blurred between these two worlds.
Most film and TV jobs start with some simple questions, as Gregory Irwin puts it. “What is it, where is it, when is it.” In April 2018 Irwin found himself asking those questions of cinematographer Lawrence Sher, with whom he’d collaborated on five previous films beginning with John Hamburg’s I Love You, Man in 2009, as well as the 2019 production Godzilla: King of the Monsters, directed by Michael Dougherty, and the three Hangover films by director Todd Phillips. Sher’s call concerned another Phillips collaboration which would go on to gross over a billion dollars; it was to star Joaquin Phoenix and titled simply Joker.
