In the one week or so since I posted about DSLRs, there has actually been several press releases about functional improvements to a few of the problems I listed. These improvements only scratch the surface of the mountain of issues that prevent DSLRs from being professional motion picture tools (the central reason is actually the attitude of the manufacturers that HD video on DSLRs is an added bell-and-whistle for still photo 'shooters', and not a primary function), but regardless, this week simprovements are worth listing:
1. The Foundry Demos Technology to Nuke CMOS Artifacts
This is actually month old news, but The Foundry is developing software that will remove the rolling shutter artifacts from footage, which is currently the #1 problem with the Nikon cameras. Even though this is helpful, I would assume that even on a high end computer, actually executing the motion estimation algorithm would take several seconds per frame, and add an extra step in the post-production process, not to mention extra storage for the export of the corrected files. It's clearly a fix, but an extremely inefficient one. If these cameras are ever going to be viable, the rolling shutter needs to simply not exist in the first place.
2. Firmware update for Canon 5D Mark II
Canon announced that in early June, they will have a firmware update that will allow for manual aperture, shutter, and ISO. This is a significant step that puts them leaps ahead of the current Nikon HD lineup (D90 and D5000), which in addition to automatic controls, also have the rolling shutter issue mentioned above. Canon seems to be taking professional filmmakers at least a little bit more seriously than Nikon.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment