Aaton bankrupt?

Considering they were working on a 35mm 3.5k DNG raw camera in the $120k range, and Black Magic went and knocked out the 4k cinema camera for $4000 that does 90% of what the Delta can, they could very well have been forced out of the competition before they even began.
How much of a premium does a rotary shutter and pixel shift really add to a camera? To be honest though, it would have been a very fine piece of physical engineering, which the BMC lacks entirely.
 
In a professional surrounding the price tag on a camera becomes relative soon. Over here even a usual TV-Movie costs about 1.3million €. Cost for technical equipment (lighting, lenses, dollys, cameras) is about 80 to 100 K €. Costs for the camera alone will be something around 2% to 4% of a budget at the most. In such a case: Do you believe that a production company will base its decision which camera to use on the costs of the camera alone? Or will they base their decision on handling, reliability, quality, the preferences of the DoP (!) and how both the camera itself and what it produces is a integral part of the work-environment and the work-flow?

Lose a day of shooting and the production company may lose the money an Alexa would have cost for a complete 23 day shoot.

Sad to read this. If true, I'd hope they can work with ARRI or else to stay afloat. Loved their 16mm cameras.
 
That's terribly sad news, though in some ways it's not a big surprise. It's a damn shame they weren't able to bring the Delta Penelope to market sooner it was announced 5 years ago and the digital world and market moves to fast for that.
 
According to my financial contacts they are still trading as normal but are struggling for capital. They are currently in talks with a few companies about raising finances but in the current climate it looks like they will likely go under, or possibly be bought out. The latter option being preferable as it means the present catalogue may continue.
 
Rolf Silber said:
In such a case: Do you believe that a production company will base its decision which camera to use on the costs of the camera alone? Or will they base their decision on handling, reliability, quality, the preferences of the DoP (!) and how both the camera itself and what it produces is a integral part of the work-environment and the work-flow?
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At such a high production level, perhaps, but no one has even used a digital Aaton before, so who knows about things like reliability. I haven't been able to process Aaton files on any major NLE or Davinci, there isn't even any software support yet. The Alexa wasn't Arri's first digital camera, so going in, people had an idea of what to expect.
 
Kolor-Pikker said:
At such a high production level, perhaps, but no one has even used a digital Aaton before, so who knows about things like reliability. I haven't been able to process Aaton files on any major NLE or Davinci, there isn't even any software support yet. The Alexa wasn't Arri's first digital camera, so going in, people had an idea of what to expect.
Click to expand...

Okay, I may be a bit over-confident that Aaton would deliver. Not to the least because when they started with their 16 mm cameras a lot of people thought the could not do it .. and then delivered graciously. Call me an aficionado. The point was that I think the grown up cams play in a league of their own .... And what a BMC can or can't is of no great importance for the members of that league because costs of a camera becomes a very relative factor relatively quickly and reliability rules... And Penelope was designed for that league....
 
Rolf Silber said:
And what a BMC can or can't is of no great importance for the members of that league because costs of a camera becomes a very relative factor relatively quickly and reliability rules... And Penelope was designed for that league....
Click to expand...

Agreed. Aaton had prototyped high quality sensors that were all pass, the minute they roll off the production line - issues that they couldn't afford. If those same sensors came out clean the situation would most likely be very different (i'd hope so anyway).
 
Rolf Silber said:
Okay, I may be a bit over-confident that Aaton would deliver. Not to the least because when they started with their 16 mm cameras a lot of people thought the could not do it .. and then delivered graciously. Call me an aficionado. The point was that I think the grown up cams play in a league of their own .... And what a BMC can or can't is of no great importance for the members of that league because costs of a camera becomes a very relative factor relatively quickly and reliability rules... And Penelope was designed for that league....
Click to expand...

Theres a video still that was shot with the Delta Penelope at the top of my article here:

http://www.redsharknews.com/business/item/670-aaton-reportedly-out-of-business

I think it looks great and a lot nicer than anything I've seen from the blackmagic cameras, and I really, really like the blackmagic cameras (especially that new pocket camera!) :)

Freya
 
Kolor-Pikker said:
At such a high production level, perhaps, but no one has even used a digital Aaton before, so who knows about things like reliability. I haven't been able to process Aaton files on any major NLE or Davinci, there isn't even any software support yet. The Alexa wasn't Arri's first digital camera, so going in, people had an idea of what to expect.
Click to expand...

It will be a few years yet before computers get powerful enough to handle high resolution raw directly at full motion frame rates. Cinema DNG is and should be treated as a negative format that is processed and transcoded to a digital intermediate video codec for editing. I was able to open the Penelope sample frames in standard raw photo processors, Raw Therapee and Adobe Camera Raw.
 
Freya said:
I think it looks great and a lot nicer than anything I've seen from the blackmagic cameras, and I really, really like the blackmagic cameras (especially that new pocket camera!) :)
Click to expand...

If there is a chapel of cinematography somewhere, we should light a candle for Aaton and pray. Deep in my heart I want to believe that technical elegance should be an important factor for products we use in creating moving pictures.... and Penelope is even more elegant than Alexa .... ;-)
 
Statement from Jean-Pierre Beauviala

Dear friends,

AATON YESTERDAY
Over the last couple of years, Aaton devoted its energy and resources to the development of a new high-end camera, Delta Penelope. The prototype got rave reviews for its crisp but still velvet image structure, and its outstanding chromatic finesse resulting in exceptional skin tones and subtle hues.
The CCD sensor used, though its imaging was excellent in the prototypes, has not allowed us to ensure the same perfomances in industrial production. This is particularly regrettable, since many orders have been placed for the camera.

AATON TODAY
Aaton is not closed; the company will be taken over by new owners.
At this stage, finance will not in itself solve the Delta Penelope problem, but it will allow us to continue on other developments (based on Aaton
patents) already in the pipeline.

AATON TOMORROW
The new Aaton will focus on two new products to start out with:
the CantarX+ audio recorder (the current crop will be maintained), and the D-Minima documentary style reflex-viewfinder digital camera.

Many thanks to those who send me their personal "encouragements"
and to those who offered us their dreams about the new Cantar, I think you will love to play/work with it.
--jp
 
Sensor issues seem to be-devil many a company. If it weren't so diversified, I'm sure Blackmagic Design would be neary bankrupt too.
 
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