3D 2K CMOS

3D – 2K CMOS Digital Cinema Cameras

- What are they?
- How are they useful to large format film production?

In the past two years, amazing advancements in electronic image capture have allowed many new and useful 3D movie production techniques to surface and create high production value at relatively low cost. This trend is continuing at a rapid pace and shows much promise even for Large Format 3D cinema.

2K Digital Cinema cameras have a higher resolution than High Definition Digital Television cameras. They are formatted to fit exactly in the Digital Cinemas of mainstream motion picture production. The 2K Digital Cinema tools, both software and hardware, are implemented to work in a motion picture theater environment from capture to editing room and for delivery to the cinema. HD Television cameras are made primarily for broadcast to home entertainment screens and not large theater screens that are specific to Digital Cinema audiences.

The emerging D-cinema cameras are computer now record higher quality images and have become even smaller in size and weight. The cinema image presentation is rivaling the characteristics of film in normal size theater screens. The image storage capacity has increased enormously using no moving parts and making it easier to record more information un-interrupted by magazine reloading. Within the next year a new crop of even higher resolution 4K systems will surface and work at twice the resolving power in the same package size.

The biggest advantage of these small size higher quality camera systems is that they are very useful for 3D movie production. They have a small enough envelope to allow optimum stereoscopic effect more closely to the way use our own vision. These cameras are not however a replacement for Large format cinema cameras like IMAX 3D. Where digital cinema cameras really contribute is speed of access to life in motion, extreme mobility, and access to images unattainable by large format film cameras.

2K 3D Digital cameras can readily be applied to repurposing for the giant screen providing the user abides by certain rules when shooting 3D movie pictures for large format cinema. The main objective is to simply avoid making wide vistas that require extremely high image resolving power to bring out the details in the theater. But, send a D-cinema 3D camera into a lion’s den or onto a surfboard, or into an attack vehicle and very exciting things are going to happen on the screen! Why? Firstly because the subjects are accessible; and secondly the environment is smaller and therefore much easier to scale up to big screens.

A macro shot of a shrimp farming aphids in the hot vents of the deep ocean can be created with D-cinema equipment that completely fills the giant screen frame with only one small shrimp. When he is enlarged to Imax our mind still sees a ‘small shrimp’ but on the screen he is 30 feet long and we can see all the details by default. This is why small mobile 3D digital cameras can vastly benefit giant screen film production – Access to life unfolding in tight spaces. We can now ride with the tank driver in 3D and be just like him, and live his life for a few moments.

Bill Reeve csc.