360Photography

NAB 2016

Last week Las Vegas once again hosted the annual National Association of Broadcasters Show. Although many of the products and technologies seen at NAB won’t be of direct interest our audience (think satellite trucks and news studios), the explosion of high quality, affordable tools aimed at filmmakers and videographers make it a good place to watch industry trends and new product categories. Perhaps more importantly, NAB can provide insight into what technologies we might expect to filter down to prosumer and consumer products in a few years time.

Take a look at a few trends and products from NAB 2016 that caught our eye and got us excited.

Virtual Reality (VR)

VR was everywhere at NAB, with multiple sessions focused on VR technology, storytelling and distribution that were packed to standing room only. A top destination was the VR Showcase sponsored by Kaleidoscope VR, a VR studio, and Jaunt, a maker of VR cinema cameras. With dozens of stations featuring headsets from Samsung, Oculus and HTC, visitors could experience cinematic VR experiences in person.

These weren’t just your standard ‘park-a-camera-in-an-iconic-spot-and-look-around’ videos, but actual films created with a VR audience in mind. Imagine watching a film about the 7/7 London Tube bombings, except you’re sitting on the train while the story plays out. It creates an immersive, visceral experience that simply wouldn’t work with conventional filmmaking.

We’re very excited about the creative possibilities that VR can provide to photographers and filmmakers, so we’re planning a follow-up report to tell you more about VR and our experiences at NAB.

Nokia OZO: Impressive VR for a price

The Nokia OZO includes eight cameras and eight microphones to create immersive VR footage. You can pick one up for a cool $ 60,000.

If you still equate the name Nokia with mobile phones, it’s time to change your thinking. The company has made a big push into VR, making a big splash at NAB with its $ 60,000 OZO 360-degree spherical VR camera. The OZO features 8 cameras, each with 195-degree field of view and global shutter, as well as the ability to capture stereo video for 3D effect. To add additional realism, the OZO also features 8 microphones in order to provide 360 sound, something that’s important for creating immersive VR experiences.

Although the quality of the footage from the OZO still isn’t up to the resolution and dynamic range standards we’re accustomed to seeing in digital still cameras, the VR experiences created by the OZO were impressive and compelling. The directional sound had a huge impact on the realism of footage shot with the camera, and it captured some of the best VR footage we’ve seen. Count us in for a test unit!

GoPro Omni

Not to be left out the the VR extravaganza, GoPro showed off its new Omni camera, a cube-shaped cage that holds six GoPro Hero 4 cameras. Although rigs holding multiple GoPro cameras aren’t new in the VR world, GoPro has embedded useful features to improve the experience of a multi-GoPro setup. Primarily, all cameras in the rig are synchronized and act as a single camera. 

This may not seem like a big deal, but if you’ve ever tried to set up, sync, and use multiple cameras at one time you’ll appreciate the convenience. Making a mistake on just one camera ruins your entire shoot. The Omni solves this problem and syncs everything, right down to the rolling shutter, between all the cameras at once. 

GoPro is selling the Omni for $ 1,499 (rig only) or $ 4,999 for the full kit.

4K? No thanks, I think I’ll take 8K instead.

Although many consumers are still learning about 4K video technology, the broadcast industry is already beginning to think about 8K video, with companies such as NHK, Canon, Panasonic, Ikegami and Planar showing off 8K cameras and displays.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way right up front: 8K IS AMAZING! (Yes, we meant to scream that.)

OK, let’s put 8K this into some context. None of these companies really expect 8K technology to come to your living room any time soon, though that’s likely to occur in some form by the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, which seems to be a common target in the industry.

The real interest in 8K technology right now is for content acquisition, and it’s the same reason producers of HD content like to shoot in 4K: additional post-processing options and better quality footage when downsized. Display manufacturers are also excited about 8K for applications where size really does matter, such as cinema screens, displays at amusement parks, and giant stadium screens.

Trust us, though. Once you’ve seen 8K displays you’ll never look at a 4K screen the same again…

8K Displays

It’s almost impossible to see the pixels on Canon’s prototype 8K reference display – even with a magnifying glass.

Speaking of 8K displays, one of the most impressive examples was Canon’s prototype 8K reference display. To fully appreciate just how sharp this display is, consider that each frame of 8K video is just over 35MP of resolution – the rough equivalent of a full resolution Nikon D810 image. Pack that into a relatively small screen and for all practical purposes it looks like a backlit fine art print.

Quite simply, this redefines what a video screen is. Once you remove any noticeable pixelation, it’s essentially indistinguishable from a nicely backlit, printed image. We could easily imagine these being used for museum exhibits, but we suspect content creators will come up with interesting ways to use them that we haven’t even envisioned yet.

Almost as a tease, Canon tethered a magnifying glass to the display so you could look at the pixels up close. While it’s possible to see them you have to look really hard – certainly much closer than you ever would in real world conditions – and even then you have to convince yourself that you’re really seeing them.

8K Prints

Prints in Canon’s 8K print gallery were stunning and looked as good as what we would expect from even the best still cameras.

This is why still photographers should care about 8K video.

Each frame of 8K video is a 35MP image, meaning that as long as you use settings to avoid motion blur it’s possible to make some spectacular prints.

Canon illustrated this potential with an 8K print gallery, exhibiting prints made from individual frames of 8K video. The results were spectacular, with vivid colors and sharp edges. Really, if they had told us the photos were shot by a Canon 5DS or a Nikon D810 we would have believed them. If this is the future, bring it on.

Atomos Shogun Flame and Ninja Flame

The new Atomos Shogun Flame (top) and the original Shogun (bottom). The new Flame includes an HDR screen and AtomHDR technology, which allows videographers to see a live approximation of what graded footage will look like when shooting in Log.

Atomos has become a favorite of video shooters thanks to its excellent off-camera displays and recorders. At NAB the company showcased its newest line of ‘Flame’ products, which add significant new features to its Shogun and Ninja recorders.

The biggest improvement most users will notice are the displays: the screens are now 10-bit HDR displays that are up to four times brighter than previous models, meaning they can even be used outdoors without a hood.

Atomos also introduced a technology called AtomHDR to help videographers who shoot in Log format. Log video typically looks very flat until it’s color graded; AtomHDR allows you to record in Log while displaying accurate contrast and colors on-screen, giving a good approximation of what graded footage will look like. We use the original Shogun here in our studio and we were really impressed the AtomHDR technology. In the photo above you can see a comparison of the new Shogun Flame using AtomHDR (top) and the old Shogun without AtomHDR, but to be honest the photo doesn’t fully capture how much better the Shogun Flame looks.

The Shogun Flame lists for $ 1,695, and the Ninja Flame (which lacks some features such as SDI and XLR inputs) lists for $ 1,295.

Blackmagic Video Assist 4K

Videographers also flocked to the Blackmagicdesign booth to try out the Blackmagic Video Assist 4K, an updated version of its Video Assist monitor and recorder. The Video Assist 4K is built around a 7-inch display and includes HDMI and SDI plugs, dual SD card slots for continuous UHD recording, LANC connection for remote control, and XLR microphone inputs. Footage can be recorded in 10-bit 4:2:2 video in either ProRes or DNxHD for easy downstream editing. The Video Assist 4K looks to be a great option for people who need off-camera recording, especially those shooting events that may require long, continuous recording.

The Video Assist 4K lists for $ 895.

Sennheiser Microphones

The Sennheiser MKE 440.

Cameras tend to get a lot of attention, but videographers know that sound can be just as important as a good picture when capturing video.

Last year Sennheiser introduced the ClipMic digital and MKE 2 digital, lavalier microphones that plug directly into the Lighting port of an iOS device to record high quality sound, turning iPhones into great off-camera recorders. This year, the company followed up with additional Lightning-compatible microphones: The HandMic digital, a handheld microphone designed for mobile journalism, and the MK 4 digital, a studio microphone. We’ve actually been using one of the MKE 2 digital mics with an iPhone to record a lot of interviews over the past year and it works great, so we’re really excited to see Sennheiser expanding this line of products.

Sennheiser also introduced the MKE 440 stereo microphone for DSLRs (see photo). Designed to mount on a camera’s hot shoe, the MKE 400 provides high quality stereo recording as opposed to the mono recording provided by most DSLR microphones, and should prove useful when recording an immersive soundscape with an on-camera mic is important.

Lytro Cinema Camera

The Lytro Cinema camera promises to change the way films are made, though at the moment it’s about the length of a VW minibus.

Lytro was the clear winner of the ‘Well, that was bigger than we expected…’ award at NAB. 

The company, which recently announced its exit from the consumer photography business, literally pulled the cover off its new prototype Cinema camera to a standing room only crowd. Featuring a 755MP imaging sensor that appears to be about a foot wide, the Cinema camera has the potential to change the way some films are shot. 

Lytro’s Jon Karafin gave a live demo illustrating the camera’s unique ability to alter creative choices in post-processing, such as plane of focus, depth of field and depth-based keying. And because all of the computational work is done by thousands of CPUs in Google’s cloud, he was able to run the entire demo off a laptop computer.

The prototype camera is huge (about the same length as a VW minibus, to our eye), but company representatives told us that smaller versions will follow. We think this technology has a lot of potential and look forward to seeing how it evolves. You can read our analysis of the Lytro announcement here.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)