Lytro Cinema - Camera from the future?

[kaylee]

5 hours ago, AaronChicago said:

Holy shit. This is a dream come true for VFX movies.

holy shit is right ?

for me personally this is one of the coolest things ive ever seen 

i dont even kno where to start...... of wait yes i do!!

chromakey green seriously makes me physically ill when im surrounded by it all day long, and as an artist i find it aesthetically embarrassing on my set... AND that whole process is just painstakingly awful in a way that feels wrong... its not the right way. the right way is the easy way. a camera that sees a 3d environment. that is some 21st century stuff r there

and of course im talking about vfx heavy productions – quentin tarantino is not reading this announcement lol

[Michael Ma]

I'm gonna guess all that money saved from having to shoot something very quickly and minimizing re-shoots is going to be spent on having to work with all that more data on special equipment.

[jax_rox]

56 minutes ago, Geoff CB said:

While it won't replace traditional cinema cameras, this could easily replace green screen. Perfect keys without having to worry about a large green backdrop? A compositors dream. Look for this to be used heavily in VFX.

Yes - very useful. Just depends on how it captures. Can I use different lenses on it? Or am I stuck with one? What size is the 755MP raw sensor? The weight and size could prove problematic for rigging..

And then - do you have to select your aperture, focus point and focal length for each shot? Because if so, you're not really saving any time anyway. Instead of spending time getting a perfect key, you're spending that time selecting focus points, apertures, etc.

Quite apart from the fact that Lytro has traditionally over-hyped, and then under-delivered (though I'm happy to be proved wrong).

If you could incorporate the 3d-space technology into a more traditional cinema camera... That is what I'd be interested in.

Funny though, I was saying just last week to a mate of mine that the future of cameras would just be a box that captures the entire scene in 3D space, and in post you select your focus points, focal length, aperture, colour etc. etc.

I didn't think we'd be a week away from a product announcement  

[hmcindie]

Wouldn't it be way easier to just rig an xbox kinect into a regular cinema cam to get the depth information? You couldn't refocus with that but depth maps you could do.

[Don Kotlos]

19 hours ago, sanveer said:

Interesting features. 

Yeah I agree. Many people were begging Lytro to allow these things in video. 

Swapping the background or even selectively color grading it looks very easy. 

I would imagine that after few Hollywood movies and enough buzz, they could come back with a consumer video camera that doesn't weigh a ton. 

[jcs]

A light field camera doesn't have a traditional lens, however since it's computational photography, different lenses can be simulated.

Xbox Kinect uses a TOF IR sensor for 3D depth. It's very low resolution and noisy. Also very sensitive to sunlight IR (not an issue indoors with no windows). Lytro is visible light, where the 2D image is computationally assembled and 3D comes from parallax.

[jax_rox]

3 hours ago, That Guy said:

This might be the most depressing thing I've read in a long time.

Right?! It's reminiscent of when the Blackmagic Cinema Camera came out and the rep gleefully stated to a room full of Cinematographers that you 'no longer have to light'.

I don't know how you could possibly light the most effectively for this Lytro. Even if you get it 'round-about' right, what happens when you cut in for a CU and realise that in the CU the light looks much harsher? In traditional coverage, it's immediately apparent, and you can quite easily stick a frame on it. Or what if the contrast sucks?

As I say, the 3D stuff is really interesting, and would be interesting to incorporate into a more traditional camera (if that's even possible?). The rest...

[Syme]

Their definition of "megapixels" seems a little bit fishy to me. I assume that means something like the number of samples used to measure the light field, but I'd rather know the size of the actual image it's going to create after turning the light-field into a 2D or 3D image. Seems like there must be a lot of "pixels" per actual pixel.