I'm not sure the camera guys get it!

[Cranky]

This is 1997, people:

http://jlvideousa.com/Optura.html

 

[Eddy Robinson]

I found the BBC white paper that documents why they don't allow the 5D for broadcast. Essentially, when shooting a circular zone plate test chart, the chroma and luma aliasing and moire pattern were simply unacceptable to them.

Excellent find, good job Michael!

(...)I don't think still photography will ever go away. Yeah, you can pull stills from a video but there is still something unique about the process and the care needed to visualize and capture a singular moment in time. It takes special skills to be the best at that just like it takes special skills to be the best at cinematography.

Agree. even in the motion picture world, for a long time the smart thing was to have a still photog on set because frame grabs from film were not good enough - too small and grainy for print (a problem which remains true if you grab from HD) and also because 24fps + 180 degree shutter meant blur and saturation characteristics that weren't acceptable. In fact if you look at any film history book it's pretty easy to see the lower quality on frame grabs vs publicity stills.

That won't change much with the 7d, since 1920 x 1080 is still only 2 megapixels and begins to look ugly even at poster size - print and projected images are seen quite differently by the eye. It does give RED footage an edge, however - the shutterspeed/blur is still an issue, but I've seen some mighty fine still pulls.

And consider how things will go down the line - the 7d already shoots full-res stills at 8fps for as long as the mirror/CF card can handle it...anyone think that number won't keep going, or that when it hits 24fps people won't start using it for super-high quality moving images? It's too much data for CF/SD cards to handle continuously, but nothing you couldn't shove down a gigabit ethernet cable. At that point TV news/sports broadcasters turn into still photo suppliers, which is going to mess up a lot of pro photogs.

Of course, the converse is also true - get a 7d or equivalently capable camera, go where the news is, and suddenly you can be in the video business - but to do so effectively you've got to start thinking about audio, maybe a talking head, and a much more high-bandwidth pipeline, which the video people already have anyway. So the barriers for video people to enter the still marketplace are a lot lower than the other way round. Over the long term this has got to be worrisome for the still photographers.