It’s been a while since we have been in touch with an update. Things have been crazy busy! I hate to dump all this on you at once but I want to share some of the exciting projects we have had the opportunity to work on for the last few months and introduce you to an exciting new technology that has to be the most important innovation in digital video to date and we are thrilled to be able to offer it to our clients.
We worked on two videos to be shown at the Paris Air Show for
Barnes Aerospace and
Hamilton Sundstrand during the summer. Our friends at
Proficient Audio have been keeping us busy, working on a group of videos to introduce their new products at the 2007 CEDIA show. You can view the videos
here on the new Video Dashboard that we just completed.
Mark and Joe had a chance to shoot video for long-time collaborator Brad McLain, on a “zero-gravity" aircraft flight that creates temporary weightlessness. NASA has used this method to train its astronauts for the last 45 years and it's the same way Tom Hanks floated in Apollo 13.
The Northrop Grumman Foundation has teamed with the
Zero Gravity Corporation to develop the
Weightless Flights of Discovery program. The program is designed to inspire students to pursue science and technical careers by inspiring their teachers first. DVP's footage will be included in a documentary McLain Science Education is creating about the program.
Nino was an in-studio guest on The Howard Stern Show for the Riley Martin site we launched in June. Riley Martin is a well-known author and radio host. Martin is the author of The Coming of Tan, a book that describes his life and his alleged abduction by aliens. He currently hosts The Riley Martin Show on the Sirius Satellite Radio channel Howard 101 and Artisfirst Radio Network.
We just started a three year project for the Space Science Institute. STEPS (Science Theater Education Programming System) is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. When completed, STEPS will allow museums across the country to create multimedia presentations that will be shown in their museum theatres with an estimated target audience of over one million viewers in the first 5 years.
Now for the exciting new revolutionary technology that I mentioned.
It's called
The Red One Camera. And ours is on the way. To say this camera is groundbreaking would be an understatement. Here's some background.
When James Jannard, the billionaire founder of the eyewear and apparel company Oakley, set out to create a new video camera with a 4K sensor that rivals the definition of 35mm film and image quality that exceeds anything else available today, everyone said it couldn’t be done. After all if the big boys like Sony and Panasonic only produce cameras with maximum resolution of 1920X 1080 pixels how would a sunglass maker create a camera with a 4520 X 2540 resolution? Compare that to the super high end 2K Genesis and Viper cameras that many feature films are being shot on. The difference is four times the resolution (see chart below).
Well after 5 years and a lot of public bashing that this is and always will be “Vaporware” the cameras are finally shipping. Well kind off at least. They have been taking reservations for the camera for years and only 100 have been shipped so far. We should get our hands on ours in June.
The Red One Camera is the future of Cinematography.
Typical high-end HD camcorders have 2.1M pixel sensors and record with 3:1:1 color subsampled video at up to 30fps. Red delivers 12M pixels at up to 60fps and records RAW, or 2x over-sampled HD in 4:4:4 or 4:2:2. That’s more than 5 times the amount of information available every second and a vastly superior recording quality. With the Mysterium™ Super 35mm cine sized (24.4 x 13.7mm) sensor, RED gives you the same breathtaking Depth of Field and selective focus as found in film cameras. Mysterium™ boasts a greater than 66db Signal to Noise Ratio thanks to its large 29 sq. micron pixels. And 12,065,000 pixels deliver resolution that can only be called Ultra High Definition.
One of the first real field tests came from recruiting veteran filmmaker, Peter Jackson to test two RED camera prototypes named “Boris” and “Natasha.” The result was a film called Crossing the Line.
Here’s a clip.Steven Soderbergh, director and cinematographer of Ocean's Eleven, Traffic, and Solaris, said "This is the camera I've been waiting for my whole career: jaw-dropping imagery recorded onboard a camera light enough to hold with one hand...I know this: RED is going to change everything."
Soderbergh’s making two new movies (Guerrilla and The Argentine) with it; the upcoming Angelina Jolie assassin-fest “Wanted” was shot with it and, from the trailer, looks visually amazing…
What this means to you is that your corporate video or television commercial will look more like a major motion picture or a national TV spot .
