Will LiveStream Movi and other future cameras ruin film creativity

[offbeatbryce]

I was looking at the Movi camera by LiveStream. It's a small camera that shoots multiple angles without needing multiple cameras. You can switch the camera angles using your computer I believe. Based on this camera and other future cameras and artificial intelligence. Will this ruin the whole creativity of filmmaking? Say in like 10 years there was a camera made that could automatically zoom, move pan etc without touching it. It always got the perfect shot by tracking the persons face or whatever you selected to follow it. To me that would officially ruin cinematography for good

 

[Stiffman]

I don't think it will, as this isn't a cinematographic camera, it is for live streaming.
Even if this technology progressed to larger, more pro level camera's, It's not what you want if you are making a film
In cinematography, you aren't trying just to film the faces of whatever is in the scene, you want to choose what is in front of the camera. the director should have a clear idea of the shot they want, and how it should look.
Then there is the issue of panning / zooming in post. It's not the same as doing it for real. Lens distortion etc, and generally get worse the closer to the edges of frame, it might be OK for web streams / low budget stuff, but high ends events, you'll want the best you can get.

This kind of thing would be useful live broadcasting events, which is exactly what the idea behind it is. And it's basically what people are doing already with capturing 4k video for HD distribution, or 1080 for 720 distribution.

 

[puredrifting]

Bryce:

To me, it sounds as if you are equating camera operating with cinematography. I shoot a lot of BTS and EPK on the sets of pretty big shows/features and you may not realize that at that level, the cinematographer often doesn't ever touch a camera. His or her job is to create lighting and camera movement that will best compliment the story, not to operate the often multiple cameras. These new technologies may make achieving certain camera moves easier, repeatable and more precise but they will never achieve the organic look you get from a handheld camera with a good operator or even on a Steadicam with a good operator. All of the movement requires real time human input to achieve the organic look that most prefer. Sometimes keyframing and reliance on high technology interfaces can be very involved and time consuming. Many shows I work on use high end drones, cablecams and other remote technology already and those technologies are only good for certain shots in certain setups. They are also far from "live, real-time, effortless". To get one drone shot the director wanted on a recent shoot in Africa required two of the best drone pilots and camera ops in the world about four hours to nail just one or two shots. And those were top notch guys but there was wind, there were dust clouds, there were actors hitting their marks, etc. Actors don't always precisely hit their marks and when they do, there are variances in timing and framing that are impossible to shoot as accurately as handheld or even on sticks with a human operator.

Also, there is no constant, "perfect shot". If there were, what we do could all be boiled down to a mathematical formula and shot with robots. Perfect to you may be smooth with an elevation change with a specific rack focus whereas perfect to me may be that the camera op is following talent and a bomb goes off and the camera as well as the actor is thrown five feet in the air and tumbles and lands face down in the dirt. I think you are missing the art of filmmaking in your supposition. One of the shows I shoot on is Homeland. Watch a few episodes of that show and tell me if you think that the look and feel that the human camera operators achieve could easily be achieved with any kind of automation.

 

[DLD]

The new Lytra pro camera promises multiple angles and multiple focus points but, as of now, it requires a super heavy data wrangling.

As to creativity, it's basically limitless. I recall reading Larry Gelbart's quote that he was rewriting MASH episodes in his head a decade after leaving the show. In terms of the narratives, the creativity will often run head first into the budgetary constraints anyway.

 

[puredrifting]

The new Lytra pro camera promises multiple angles and multiple focus points but, as of now, it requires a super heavy data wrangling.

As to creativity, it's basically limitless. I recall reading Larry Gelbart's quote that he was rewriting MASH episodes in his head a decade after leaving the show. In terms of the narratives, the creativity will often run head first into the budgetary constraints anyway.

I too saw that demo and it was mind-blowing. But we are several years off from this technology being small, light, practical and affordable (for instance shooting with two of them on episodic with the insane post deadlines they often work under). I took the demo as being a peak into the future and it looks incredible but we aren't near there yet for most projects. Almost struck me as a synthesis of if you were shooting live action in conjunction with Pixar on the back end.

 

[KMR]

Note carefully that this camera doesn't shoot multiple ANGLES simultaneously. That would be physically impossible for a single lens to do. What it does is cover a single wide angle of view, from which multiple different crops (via digital zoom) can be selected. These are, in effect, different angles in that they cover different parts of the overall image coming into the lens. But those "angles" all originate from the same single large image.