Camera rumors for 2016?

To me it's one of those Litmus test things. Before this it was people who would watch a 16x9 image squeezed tall & skinny on a 4x3 TV without noticing or caring. Drove me nuts and I couldn't believe it when people didn't even realize that there was anything wrong. No wonder all those 90s supermodels seemed so thin!
 
Josh Bass said:
many of those TVs have a high refresh rate/Hz option that people never turn off from factory settings. I hate it. Makes EVERYTHING look ultra cheap and cheesy. Some people for some reason prefer it or can't tell. I can tell easily and find it repulsive.
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I posted about it a while ago. I was at my friend's house, watching an old Mosfilm classic from the mid-70's on YouTube and, having seen the movie originally and then on my own screen, I knew something was wrong. And it's tough to go through the TV menu, while you're translating the dialog live. Finally, I had to pause the stream and try to figure out how to take the "soap opera" effect off.

My friend didn't care one way or another. She couldn't tell.

In any case, I think someone will figure out a way to shoot HFR, so it doesn't look like a daytime soap. And it'll probably be a $20 plug-in.
 
I think that technique has been use DELIBERATELY in cases to make people seem thin! Someone on here or "that other message board" mentioned CSI Miami (that's the Caruso one right) and how only SOME shots were "skinny"-looking to him. I watched a few minutes and I think he was right. Unless someone on the telecine end just screwed up somehow.
 
Mitch Gross said:
To me it's one of those Litmus test things. Before this it was people who would watch a 16x9 image squeezed tall & skinny on a 4x3 TV without noticing or caring. Drove me nuts and I couldn't believe it when people didn't even realize that there was anything wrong. No wonder all those 90s supermodels seemed so thin!
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Kate Moss, "Ya, sure, Mitch. It wasn't cocaine or nothing. It was the 16:9 to the 4:3 squeeze".

Now, most folks won't remember the "early HD" era when the 16:9 TV's had to stretch the 4:3 image. Some of those pans were literally nauseating.
 
Mitch Gross said:
To me it's one of those Litmus test things. Before this it was people who would watch a 16x9 image squeezed tall & skinny on a 4x3 TV without noticing or caring. Drove me nuts and I couldn't believe it when people didn't even realize that there was anything wrong. No wonder all those 90s supermodels seemed so thin!
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Haha. Yeah and I don't know how many times I have seen 4:3 stretched out to 16:9. Everyone looks like an NFL player or pro wrestler. And people often cannot tell anything is wrong :)
 
And, speaking of new cameras, the NHK will be showing the Olympic Games opening ceremony tomorrow in 8K.

In, as the line goes, selected theaters.

Get your reservations ahead of time (if you live in Tokyo and Osaka or can make it there by Friday).
 
The comprehension skills of the general public are pretty poor. They see, hear and read only certain things. It annoys me to no end. I see it on facebook all the time. Someone can post the worse 2005 cell phone quality snapshot of themselves in low light smiling and they'll get a billion likes. Because the only thing the general public is paying attention to is that it's a picture of someone they know, smiling. Meanwhile you can post a beautifully exposed, lit, framed, graded photograph of something else and you'll get one or two likes. So it doesn't surprise me at all if people are watching horrible quality TV and loving it.
 
People prize content over form, yes. But in my experience many of them notice that something is off. A few anecdotes:

- my mother, a nurse, agreed with me that soap operas look fake
- a group of classmates saw a TV commercial for our college, shot on video, and remarked that it looked cheesy (it wasn't the acting, they were just neutral shots of people in classrooms, etc.); one of those same friends watched a student film I shot on 16mm that had shots of the college and remarked how good it looked (It wasn't my lighting, since I used no extra lighting in those shots. The only difference was the capture medium.)
- a friend of mine on Facebook is an amateur photographer and often posts pictures of landscapes, birds, etc., and she gets compliments from her friends about what a great photographer she is

In my experience, the general public notices when something is wrong. They just can't put their finger on it.
 
Many of these things supposedly affect people subconsciously. You don't know that movie was poorly lit/graded/shot from a conscious technical standpoint, you just come away saying "meh, didn't care for it. For some reason." Kinda the same theory behind deliberate subtleties in cinematography (movie goes from a generally blue look to warm as character's circumstances improve, key light is overhead/higher than normal and casts crazy eye shadows and is gradually lowered to light more and more of that character's eyes as his/her situation improves, etc.)
 
Work dictates that I spend many a night in various hotels, & I often find myself digging into the TV's menus attempting to shut off the motion smoothing options. Too my eye this "feature" looks worse than footage originally captured at higher frame rates.
 
Mitch Gross said:
The idea that there is only about a one or two stop aperture difference between sensor sizes is not true. It's more like six or seven stops, and this does not address the compression over space differential. There is a lot bigger difference.
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I've posted this before, & unfortunately no longer have the side-by-side tests, but there is a different look to images shot on a smaller format with a wider aperture than a larger format with a deeper, but (supposedly) equivalent aperture (in DOF terms).

It's more than resolution, rather it's the look, & the larger the difference in format the more it's apparent. Almost any professional still photographer that's extensively shot 35mm, 6x7, 4x5, & 8x10, would likely concur.
 
Bern Caughey said:
Work dictates that I spend many a night in various hotels, & I often find myself digging into the TV's menus attempting to shut off the motion smoothing options. Too my eye this "feature" looks worse than footage originally captured at higher frame rates.
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I was thinking about writing the exact same thing you said about hotels (since I do get to stay about 5-10 days a month in various ones), however for me I've seen too many TV's being locked so someone like me can't "correct" the TV. :(

Now I just bring my 10" tablet to watch TV on...
 
Mitch Gross said:
Great example! Interpolated to a 60p refresh, this subtley has a "video" feel, or whatever you wish to call it. As noted in other posts here, some people seem to prefer this while others absolutely hate it. But this has nothing to do with steak or cheeseburger level content. It is purely an association we make to a presented frame rate.
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It's a response not an association. Think about it. Why do 3 particular notes played together in a chord sound pleasing? Why do certain colors compliment each other while others clash? Association? No, physics. Why should motion pictures be any different?
 
Bern Caughey said:
I've posted this before, & unfortunately no longer have the side-by-side tests, but there is a different look to images shot on a smaller format with a wider aperture than a larger format with a deeper, but (supposedly) equivalent aperture (in DOF terms).

It's more than resolution, rather it's the look, & the larger the difference in format the more it's apparent. Almost any professional still photographer that's extensively shot 35mm, 6x7, 4x5, & 8x10, would likely concur.
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Can you elaborate? Are we talking depth of field? field of view? distortion? compression/depth?



DLD said:
Mutt Lang must have never met Igor Stravinsky.
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Name sounds familiar but won't claim to know exactly who that is. I'm dumb. I like rock music.
 
Bern Caughey said:
I've posted this before, & unfortunately no longer have the side-by-side tests, but there is a different look to images shot on a smaller format with a wider aperture than a larger format with a deeper, but (supposedly) equivalent aperture (in DOF terms).

It's more than resolution, rather it's the look, & the larger the difference in format the more it's apparent. Almost any professional still photographer that's extensively shot 35mm, 6x7, 4x5, & 8x10, would likely concur.
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Exactly. Just watch jacque Tati's Playtime on TV. It was shot on 70mm and you can see and feel a definite difference that you can't put your finger on.
 
Josh,
Mutt Lange was very influential in such orchestral classics such as "Pour some sugar on me".
You're welcome.
 
What's interesting to me about 24 fps, is that it was really a pretty arbitrary frame rate that happened to become the standard. It wasn't like 24 fps was chosen so much for aesthetic reasons, or even technical reasons really. That just happened to be the average frame rate movies were being projected at in theaters when sound was added.

From the early days of silent film (which were often shot at 16 fps) until the sound era, movie theaters gradually started to project films at faster frame rates than they were originally shot (in part to be able to fit in more screenings per day). And then of course directors and cinematographers, unhappy that their movies were being shown faster than intended, started shooting their films at a faster frame rate to compensate for what the theaters were doing.


By the time work on adding sound to movies really got serious, the average film projection speed in theaters had gone from the original 16 fps to somewhere between 20 to 26 frames per second (depending on the theater). And so 24 fps seemed like a reasonable middle ground, and was adopted for the Vitaphone system used for the Jazz Singer and later for other film sound systems.


Worth a read (if you're interested in the full history):
https://web.archive.org/web/20110724032550/http://www.cinemaweb.com/silentfilm/bookshelf/18_kb_2.htm

And now that cable networks have started speeding up various TV shows (in syndication) and even classic movies to fit in more commercials, I wonder if we will see another chapter in this battle of recording speed vs. playback speed:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fast-forward-tv-networks-speed-up-shows-to-play-more-ads
 
Syndicated TV shows have been sped up since the 80's. I remember the "Entertainment Tonight" was like that around 1985 or so (the actors voices were then EQ'ed out to their normal pitch).
 
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