Death of Kodak; Death of Film

imdjay said:
ya know, i may not have read into it much, but why is RED doing hdr using alternating shutter speeds? i would think using alternating ISO would be far more sensible and not be affected by the motion issue. yes it would mean possible differing noise issues, but only if you're shooting in unreasonable light conditions
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Well I am not Red, so I cannot speak authoritatively on their exact reasoning, but I can tell you what they've told me with regards to other questions. They do not use adjustable analog gain. All ISO changes happen post process after recording. They tune the gain of their signal path to what they consider is the absolute best performance. They believe there is nothing to gain from making it adjustable because all you are doing is amplifying the noise up and if your bit depth is deep enough in what you store from acquisition, then there is no real benefit based on how the A/D is designed.

If you were to use parallel gain paths, which I believe is what Alexa does, then it comes down to a question of how your A/D works. I've not studied it specifically, but my rough guess would be, use two smaller bit depth A/D converters for performance reasons and have a high and low gain path to put the portion of the image you care about into a smaller bit depth A/D that you will combine later in the path through digital means. You are still ultimately limited by the size of the pixel storage capacity in this case for DR, so the gain to me would seem to be also in the A/D performance of a smaller bit depth design (as A/D converters induce noise).

With alternative ISO, like the magic lantern idea, you are still talking about 2 frames in time that are not the same. If you combine them, you are going to get motion issues between both frames. Not the method I believe you are talking about though, I think you are talking about what Alexa is doing.

RED has not said specifically what they are doing. My suggestion was that you just run one long exposure and make a copy of that exposure in the middle to get the information from areas that are going to be blown out as it keeps exposing. With the ISO and shutter speed methods, you still have two time differences which always can lead to artifacts. But, if you don't reset the frame, at least the long frame will have hopefully motion blur in it to help hide the artifacts.
 
What I find interesting is this one:

In a bid to demonstrate some of that patent power, and collect licensing fees, Kodak recently filed lawsuits against smartphone makers HTC and Apple over camera technology. The lawsuits assert that Apple infringed on four Kodak patents and that HTC infringed on five.
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It sounds like a last-ditch effort in getting some cold cash on the table.
 
This thread reminds me of "rubber neckers at a car accident where a death has occured".

Tragic in every sense.
 
Shooter said:
This thread reminds me of "rubber neckers at a car accident where a death has occured".

Tragic in every sense.
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More like this thread could see the accident about to happen, called it in, and then could do nothing but watch it unfold. I started this thread almost 14 weeks ago. The stock was about 4x the price it closed at yesterday, when I/the world/everyone but kodak saw it coming. They've been bleeding cash for almost 10 years and in the last dozen or so years turned a profit maybe once or twice. I follow stocks in the film industry very carefully, and I really had a gut feeling this was going to happen. Kodak defended they were ok all the way up to a couple of days ago. Sheesh. It's super sad, but this was no rubber necking... this was watching a crash in slow motion.
 
Ryan Patrick O'Hara said:
when I/the world/everyone but kodak saw it coming.
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I'm absolutely positive most people 'in Kodak' saw this coming. Most people were sitting around their desks, wondering whether they would would make it to January with a job... at least on divisions that were not high on the profit category...

However, for a public company, no official statement could be made because of SEC rules on making certain announcements, and there are large classes of employees who can not 'legally know' the state of things... without requiring a public statement.. and so, the public party line, was 'how about another round of "Nearer, My God, to Thee"'...

I've worked at 3 companies that ran financially ground, in 2 cases, I 'left' before the ship began to list so badly, any exit was better... the one occasion I got 'caught' was when the new buyer of the company decided to 'liquidate' 3 divisions... one of which was the one I worked in... had maybe 3 days of 'clue' notice... workers who had more friends in high places would spend more time talking in their cubicles in 'hushed' tones... etc...

This develops in to an attitude of 'why bother... the 'downsizing' management is going to axe this department anyway, so why try to do something different'...

Since I've been involved mostly in 'development' of new products for all of my career... I'm in the first to go category...
 
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