Ryan Patrick O'Hara
Veteran
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/imager/tr/2013/SimpleLensImaging/
This was posted to CML today. Now it was not posted by a fanatic suggesting we all dump our lenses and this is the future, but as an interesting document showing where some of the lens market is going. I for one simply wanted to dissect this new methodology for use in cinema application. I quickly discovered it would never, ever work.
I am not an expert on optics, as some are (including the people who are doing this very interesting work), so I hope my comments can serve as a launching point of conversation, and I wish for anyone to please correct me where I am wrong.
This is very interesting article about optics and is no doubt partly where the future of some optics will go, first and foremost consumer models where driving down cost is more attractive. I am not saying film and television producers do not appreciate less expensive rentals, however, but the good producers value reliable and safe methods of capture over cheap. The lens rental side of a budget is pretty small in comparison to the talent, location, and salary of crew. It seems to me producers, (needless to say as well as cinematographers), would rather not shoot with bad and utterly cheap optics to sharpen in post. Why would you not give your digital negative the best you can? After all, it is the image and all that other money you spent is for nothing if it's not on the negative.
Of course, it appears this link was not given as a suggestion of replacing cinema lenses. It seems this is just an interesting article given to a bunch of film guys and gals on CML. However, since CML is about cinematography, I just wanted to examine the reasons why this process really won't apply to cinema for quite some time... not until it's very flawless, done in real time on the camera, and is reliable. But even then I do not see this still replacing what we have. Why do it?
Now I am talking about high-end professional cinematography. Not things such as corporate video and etc.
To examine this process for cinema use, if anything, this technology will be used WITH high quality lenses today to remove the subtle issues we experience today. Perhaps with less expensive professional lenses? An example would be the CA the CP.2's suffer from when wide open. Perhaps the post-technology these guys are pioneering can be used in conjunction with high quality lenses to eliminate the tiny issues instead of with absolutely horrific glass to clean it back up to snuff.
Before I further examine why professionals and producers will reject this type of acquisition, I'd like to quickly examine their infomercial like liberty of the statement, "highly complex systems consisting of up to two dozen individual optical elements". How many lenses have that many elements? Most professional cinema lenses I know of seem to be 7-12 elements, if a prime. Obviously more if a zoom, and perhaps approaching the two dozen level of elements, but that is a zoom! Their solution is using a simple lens (one element)... which is obviously a fixed prime! If they want to produce cheap zooms they will be needing multiple elements as well. So I thought it was a bit misleading from the start. If you know anything about lenses, you know that modern primes (the big heavy expensive ones they wish to eliminate) are not over a dozen elements, no less two dozen. You can not make a zoom lens with one element, so I'm not even sure they could make a zoom lens and apply their mathematics/algorithms to it.
Back to cinematography,
- Producers won't like the idea of capturing a very flawed and distorted negative only to be corrected in post. It seems like paying your actors millions, in a location that costs 20k/day, and you are paying 50+ crew members Union wages, you'd want to make sure you captured the image the best you could the first time around. Shooting with very mucky lenses and relying on post sharpening algorithms seems way to risky. Just spend the extra $500/day. I mean... really. This really applies all the way down to 250,000 or even 100,000 films where everyone is making nothing but you CAN'T afford to reshoot. Why risk this?
- AC's will still demand pulling focus off of lenses with marks. I don't know how or want to know how you'd pull focus off a single element lens. Even if it were a couple elements, you'd still need to properly house them, give accurate witness marks, and there goes the low pricing! haha.
- No zooms. I don't see how they could do a zoom lens like this. They would have to use multiple elements which would destroy their main purpose of cheap simple lenses and I'm not sure if even their algorithms could work on the compounding nature of the issues using low quality and cheap lens designs would present.
This is more of an appreciation of lens technology but also rant of how this could never work on a cinema set. We don't want cheap. Everything else is too expensive to risk it on cheap optics. Especially of this nature.
I can see this technology being utilized to correct for the issues we still have even in top notch glass. Such as minor distortion, CA, edge sharpness, etc. I don't see why we need to fall back on bad optics.
And expensive? I know this technology is still in its infancy, but the results shown are hardly as good as some of the better photography lenses in the $200-$300 range. Yes, that is not cheap, but it's also not that expensive. Maybe I've lost touch with what is expensive considering an Arri screw for a MB is like $60 and the dumb side knob of an FF-4 follow focus is $700+.... but there are decent photography lenses that are decently priced. I am not sure I even see the use for this technology for professional photographer, no less professional cinematographers.
Again, I think I've beaten a dead horse considering this was never proposed to replace lenses on motion picture sets. I'm just thinking if there was any use for this technology on our side of the fence.
-ryan
This was posted to CML today. Now it was not posted by a fanatic suggesting we all dump our lenses and this is the future, but as an interesting document showing where some of the lens market is going. I for one simply wanted to dissect this new methodology for use in cinema application. I quickly discovered it would never, ever work.
I am not an expert on optics, as some are (including the people who are doing this very interesting work), so I hope my comments can serve as a launching point of conversation, and I wish for anyone to please correct me where I am wrong.
This is very interesting article about optics and is no doubt partly where the future of some optics will go, first and foremost consumer models where driving down cost is more attractive. I am not saying film and television producers do not appreciate less expensive rentals, however, but the good producers value reliable and safe methods of capture over cheap. The lens rental side of a budget is pretty small in comparison to the talent, location, and salary of crew. It seems to me producers, (needless to say as well as cinematographers), would rather not shoot with bad and utterly cheap optics to sharpen in post. Why would you not give your digital negative the best you can? After all, it is the image and all that other money you spent is for nothing if it's not on the negative.
Of course, it appears this link was not given as a suggestion of replacing cinema lenses. It seems this is just an interesting article given to a bunch of film guys and gals on CML. However, since CML is about cinematography, I just wanted to examine the reasons why this process really won't apply to cinema for quite some time... not until it's very flawless, done in real time on the camera, and is reliable. But even then I do not see this still replacing what we have. Why do it?
Now I am talking about high-end professional cinematography. Not things such as corporate video and etc.
To examine this process for cinema use, if anything, this technology will be used WITH high quality lenses today to remove the subtle issues we experience today. Perhaps with less expensive professional lenses? An example would be the CA the CP.2's suffer from when wide open. Perhaps the post-technology these guys are pioneering can be used in conjunction with high quality lenses to eliminate the tiny issues instead of with absolutely horrific glass to clean it back up to snuff.
Before I further examine why professionals and producers will reject this type of acquisition, I'd like to quickly examine their infomercial like liberty of the statement, "highly complex systems consisting of up to two dozen individual optical elements". How many lenses have that many elements? Most professional cinema lenses I know of seem to be 7-12 elements, if a prime. Obviously more if a zoom, and perhaps approaching the two dozen level of elements, but that is a zoom! Their solution is using a simple lens (one element)... which is obviously a fixed prime! If they want to produce cheap zooms they will be needing multiple elements as well. So I thought it was a bit misleading from the start. If you know anything about lenses, you know that modern primes (the big heavy expensive ones they wish to eliminate) are not over a dozen elements, no less two dozen. You can not make a zoom lens with one element, so I'm not even sure they could make a zoom lens and apply their mathematics/algorithms to it.
Back to cinematography,
- Producers won't like the idea of capturing a very flawed and distorted negative only to be corrected in post. It seems like paying your actors millions, in a location that costs 20k/day, and you are paying 50+ crew members Union wages, you'd want to make sure you captured the image the best you could the first time around. Shooting with very mucky lenses and relying on post sharpening algorithms seems way to risky. Just spend the extra $500/day. I mean... really. This really applies all the way down to 250,000 or even 100,000 films where everyone is making nothing but you CAN'T afford to reshoot. Why risk this?
- AC's will still demand pulling focus off of lenses with marks. I don't know how or want to know how you'd pull focus off a single element lens. Even if it were a couple elements, you'd still need to properly house them, give accurate witness marks, and there goes the low pricing! haha.
- No zooms. I don't see how they could do a zoom lens like this. They would have to use multiple elements which would destroy their main purpose of cheap simple lenses and I'm not sure if even their algorithms could work on the compounding nature of the issues using low quality and cheap lens designs would present.
This is more of an appreciation of lens technology but also rant of how this could never work on a cinema set. We don't want cheap. Everything else is too expensive to risk it on cheap optics. Especially of this nature.
I can see this technology being utilized to correct for the issues we still have even in top notch glass. Such as minor distortion, CA, edge sharpness, etc. I don't see why we need to fall back on bad optics.
And expensive? I know this technology is still in its infancy, but the results shown are hardly as good as some of the better photography lenses in the $200-$300 range. Yes, that is not cheap, but it's also not that expensive. Maybe I've lost touch with what is expensive considering an Arri screw for a MB is like $60 and the dumb side knob of an FF-4 follow focus is $700+.... but there are decent photography lenses that are decently priced. I am not sure I even see the use for this technology for professional photographer, no less professional cinematographers.
Again, I think I've beaten a dead horse considering this was never proposed to replace lenses on motion picture sets. I'm just thinking if there was any use for this technology on our side of the fence.
-ryan
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