The Video/Digital Cinema News Cycle is Eating Itself?

puredrifting

puredrifting

Major Contributor
The big headline today? "Sony a6400 2.0 Firmware Update adds Real-time Eye AF for Animals"

Has anyone noticed traffic seems way, way down here? Very few new thread topics, mostly pontificating about the few new products that were introduced at CineGear 2019 and the Apple WWDC. Check out Cinema 5D and Newsshooter, I'm seeing the same thing over there too. Sure, they have new articles every day which this site doesn't but a lot of the new articles seems to be scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as what they are covering. I hasten to say, the Reckoning of the digital cinema business is here. We may get to the point where there are only one or two new cameras per year introduced, if that and all of the ancillary gear like grip, lighting and audio will undoubtedly slow down too. I'm kind of digging it, it's nice to not have to waste tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on new gear, a lot of it built on artificial and not actual business needs instead of need to keep up with the latest flashy gear for the sake of gear (resolution wars, VR and 3D Mania, FF Mania).

Not good for manufacturers and retailers but definitely good for us users who are trying to make a living with this gear who are like rats on a treadmill trying to always have the newest expensive gear to keep up with the "latest thing."
 
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Yes, the mania is over. Everyone has what they need (well, there's always something we want). Moore's law has caught up to our desires in the camera department. That's good.

The poor buggers heading camera divisions are trying to figure out what's next. They need volume sales or heads will roll (oh, they already have at Canon). Young engineers are probably leaving for other divisions as things slow down. Then the camera division is left with the older guys that can't keep up with the young guys and have stayed too long in one place and are afraid to move on. Camera divisions combine and consolidate. One division's heads start pushing the other out in a power play. Some research is dropped. Product lines are simplified. The president tells them 8k is the end of the line. They pray that full-frame will save them.
 
Paul F said:
Yes, the mania is over. Everyone has what they need (well, there's always something we want). Moore's law has caught up to our desires in the camera department. That's good...
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It's not the Moore Law - computers are getting faster and faster, which is certainly useful in the video processing, data centers, etc. - but the ... what was the term I used a while back? ... an Irrelevancy Valley (TM). The photo-video industry simply has gotten to the point where images taken even with the entry level cameras have reached levels beyond which no human eye can discern them. Resolution, dynamic range, slow motion, low light, etc. are pretty much where there is no next step. There's a sensor speed readout/global shutter, IBIS, auto focus, codecs, media and a few other areas where marginal improvements can still be still wrung out. But it's getting pretty close to the "My Maserati does 185" territory.

PS. Here's some news on the lens front. The new Sony telephotos apparently have terrific auto focus (as tested with A9), which should mean that heavy cinema lenses can also handle the task.

NorBro said:
puredrifting, yes, you make a valid point.

Sent by a robot.
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Paul F said:
Yes, the mania is over. Everyone has what they need (well, there's always something we want). Moore's law has caught up to our desires in the camera department. That's good.
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Regarding Moore's Law, there is a growing realization in the semi-conductor industry that Moore's Law is coming to an end:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601441/moores-law-is-dead-now-what/
https://www.cnet.com/news/moores-law-is-dead-nvidias-ceo-jensen-huang-says-at-ces-2019/

The technical version of the law, which is that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every 24 months, seems to have already slowed. There have been increasing challenges in switching to smaller production processes, and everyone kind of expected that the laws of physics would bring about the end of Moore's Law at some point. Even Gordon Moore himself said in 2015 that he didn't see Moore's Law surviving the next decade.

The more colloquial version of Moore's Law, that computing power will continue to grow at an exponential rate, may also be in trouble. You might imagine that even though the increases in transistor density have slowed down, the semi-conductor manufacturers would find new and creative ways to increase computing power. But so far this hasn't really happened. Intel and others have struggled to keep producing new processors that are significantly faster than their predecessors. Sure, they might add more processing cores, but the amount of compute power in each core has not been increasing very quickly.

So, from this perspective, it's not that Moore's law has caught up with our camera desires. Instead, the end of Moore's law has made it difficult for camera makers to give us the same kind of dramatic, year-over-year performance improvements that we've enjoyed since the start of digital imaging.

I don't think we've fully felt the effects of the end of Moore's Law yet, but it's going to have a pretty broad impact across a lot of different fields.
 
Even though we have a lot and truly almost everything now, there is still so much improvement that's necessary.

All of these cameras are either missing one critical feature or something is extremely inferior the way it works or is implemented. It's like they do it on purpose. :engel017:

High framerates at high resolutions are also desperately needed and it seems like no one but RED has even scratched the surface. (Excluding specialty systems.)
 
Its funny, I was talking to a client on a shoot the other day exactly about this because she's noticed the same thing. For the first time in my multi-decade career, I literally have everything I want or need in the produciton space, all of the stuff that I couldn't afford before is now affordable

A camera
B camera
Lenses - I'm mystified to say I have 15 lenses! Who needs 15 lenses??!? Nikons, Canons, Fujinons, how the hell did I acquire 15 lenses? And this is after selling off half a dozen Nikons and a few Canons.
motion control slider
gimbal
drone
C camera (iPhone 8 Plus)
gimbal for C camera
Go Pros
All of the grip and lighting I need for my work
Shotgun
Hypercardioid
Four wired lavs
Wireless lav set
Three Tascam DR-10L recorder
Three more wired lavs for the Tascams
Handheld setup for B camera
Shoulder Mount for A camera
Eight tripods, two Millers, two Sachtlers, some Manfrottos and Benros too!?!
2019 iMac
2011 MBP that still works and is fine for downloading media
Plenty of Cfast 2.0, SD cards for cameras
Two 12TB Raids, One 16TB RAID

I literally don't need ANYTHING. And it's an amazing feeling, very similar to the feeling I had when I paid off the last of my consumer debt, it's freeing.

The Production industry had better do their homework and start INNOVATING again because there are a LOT of buyers out there like me in the same position, we have everything we want or need to do pro level work. They are going to have to come up with something truly innovative and groundbreaking to get me to spend any money on any new gear for years, I think for at least 3-5 years, possibly longer? As Paul F alluded to, they have boxed themselves into a corner with the Digital Video Revolution. Everything is too good, too cheap and too accessible. How do you continue to sell new products to a market that is saturated and actually shrinking in monetary supply because budgets continue to shrink incessantly? HDR, FF and idiotic resolution wars aren't doing it. They'd better get it together or we will see the giants topple. Wouldn't that be funny if in a few years, Canon, Sony and Panasonic are out of the pro video business and all that are left are a bunch of no name Chinese makers duking it out to nail those HUGE $2,000.00 top of the line pro camera sales? Sounds far fetched right? But that's where the market still seems to be heading, the march to the bottom.
 
Another sign that our field is maturing is that I can just reply to new threads with links to my old comments, http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?346893-future-proof&p=1986635042&viewfull=1#post1986635042.

There are a few things that I still await and still some room for manufacturers to distinguish themselves:

1. Uncompressed RAW recording. The new CFexpress standard makes this possible in camera, even at 4K and high frame rates. The advantage is peace of mind, knowing that: (a) I could not have chosen a better codec. I don't agonize over the bitrate or fiddle with menus choosing it. I just always record uncompressed RAW. (2) I don't have to worry about my footage being unreadable in a few decades. The technology is here, we're just waiting for prices to fall. 1 hour of 4K RAW is a terabyte. When a 1TB CFexpress card is $50, we can stop using camera codecs.

2. Global shutter. Fast read-outs have improved things, but when it is finally purely global then we won't have to ponder special circumstances.

3. Ergonomics, simpler controls, longer battery life. Whenever a thread turns toward the future of cameras, people joke about some mind-reading flying camera with lasers. But my ideal is always a return to the straightforward simplicity of the original Leica. My ideal is not more but less, and the controls that are left are so well-designed that the connection from my brain, through my hands, to the camera is transparent.
 
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There's a lot of room to go for industrial design, usability, and software innovation for cameras. First camera that opens up development so cameras work like phones with custom apps (and cameras have modems in them so they become effectively IoT devices) will start a new revolution. Who will be first? (Sony is almost there but the apps need 100% total hardware control; current system isn't there yet).
 
Dateline-June 17th, 2019, Wall Street, New York City - The Tokyo, Shanghai, Frankfurt, London, and New York stock exchanges all closed trading as indexes tumbled sharply to record lows. In a chain reaction around the world, stocks tumbled when information leaked out that Puredrifting had everything he needed. Puredrifting has been a key economic indicator that has been followed closely by all the global exchanges for decades. This day will forever be known in financial circles as The Big Black Monday.

In other news, Katz Deli has been overrun with people in the media business who are seeking solace to the news that camera manufacturer's are going to make 16k cameras in medium format and discontinue all support and sales of other formats. When asked, one person in line said, "Their pastrami, pickles, and cream soda are the only thing that will get me through this day".
 
Paul F said:
Yes, the mania is over. Everyone has what they need (well, there's always something we want). Moore's law has caught up to our desires in the camera department. That's good.
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jcs said:
There's a lot of room to go for industrial design, usability, and software innovation for cameras.
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Cameras are exremely awful. Who here has one they actually like?

ND (or 6 ISO) ? missing from all small camera

Simple handling and ergonomics? MOstly terrible
Menues? Always horrific

Solid mount points? Mostly Missing.

App/Controls? Always awful

Build in lav recievers, Vision transmitters? No

Controls? Either give me four knobs ISO WB Shutter and FrameRate.. or let me really delve and write my own configurations.

For example Id like to write a custom configuration that you define the focus distance limits. I spent loads of time messing with water housings.. an unltil I went to manual focus the focus would dance between infinity, the subject and drips on the housing front. If I could have locked AF from 2-3m I would have been golden.

Oh and Id like 4:3 monitors where the info was under the actual image.

Industrial design, and deep testing has gone out of the window.
 
There`s no time to do it right when all the stock holders just want a quick return of investment. And there are no idealists left.
 
jcs said:
Moore’s pedestrian law soon to be blown into the weeds: https://www.sciencealert.com/google-s-quantum-computer-is-100-million-times-faster-than-your-laptop (not the cannabis weeds the other kind).
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Quantum computing research has been ongoing since the 1990s, and while some progress has been made, we still are not very close to any practical applications for quantum computers. It's still at the research rather than the commercialization stage.

The National Academy of Sciences recently put together a fairly in-depth report of the current state and future prospects for quantum computing:
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25196/quantum-computing-progress-and-prospects

If you don't want to read the whole thing, the one sentence summary of the report from Wikipedia pretty well captures the state of things:
"As of April 2019, no large scalable quantum hardware has been demonstrated, nor have commercially useful algorithms been published for today's small, noisy quantum computers."

The report suggests that real world usage of quantum computers are probably at least a decade away. But Moore's law is ending now, so I wouldn't bank on quantum computing to save us.
 
davedv- does what we read in the news reflect what has actually been discovered or solved, or is it possible technologies exist which are far more advanced (and developed on Earth): https://www.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_586d37bce4b014e7c72ee56b

Maybe quantum computers are 10 years away, maybe they’ve been here for a while, just not public.

Regardless of Moore’s law, putting the computing power of a recent mobile phone into a higher end camera would provide improved usability, processing options, lower power usage etc. Current cameras are using relatively ancient tech with Sony having the best of the lot. Phones get all the latest tech love due to market scale vs. cameras.
 
Paul F said:
Dateline-June 17th, 2019, Wall Street, New York City - The Tokyo, Shanghai, Frankfurt, London, and New York stock exchanges all closed trading as indexes tumbled sharply to record lows. In a chain reaction around the world, stocks tumbled when information leaked out that Puredrifting had everything he needed. Puredrifting has been a key economic indicator that has been followed closely by all the global exchanges for decades. This day will forever be known in financial circles as The Big Black Monday.

In other news, Katz Deli has been overrun with people in the media business who are seeking solace to the news that camera manufacturer's are going to make 16k cameras in medium format and discontinue all support and sales of other formats. When asked, one person in line said, "Their pastrami, pickles, and cream soda are the only thing that will get me through this day".
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I love it. Destroying the economy and boosting Katz' in one fell swoop, I feel like Lex Luthor with a soft spot for Pastrami.
 
Isn’t it ironic that good, inexpensive, widely available gear is a large part of what’s killing the industry?
 
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