Skyward - Day 6 - 2008 May 1

I spoke with Ed yesterday about some technical aspects of Skyward, and apparently one of the problems with the Red One is that when shooting high-speed action, the image comes out blurry. I started doing some research to see what I could dig up.

I found a website that hosts Red footage: http://www.redrelay.net/. It takes forever to download this stuff, but JESUS CHRIST it looks good.

I also read up on "rolling shutter" problems. This is the blur we're talking about. The Sony EX1 (the camera I originally planned on buying) has a CMOS chip that reads pixels the same way a television does. It goes line by line and writes the pixels to memory until you have a full image. When you whip pan, there's the risk of having the "rolling shutter" read the top lines before the bottom lines, creating a skewed image. I stole some photos from this topic: http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=112362

No skew, camera is staticAt 1/60 shutter speed, the skew looks like this.The following photos are at 1/250 and 1/2000 shutter, and the skew is the same.When a camera uses a CCD chip, there is no scanning. The image is taken in all at once. Red One and the EX1 use a CMOS chip, which scans like a TV. I've seen action shot on the EX1 (our music video with "Say No More") and it looked phenominal. I noticed no skew except for maybe during whip pans, and I'm not keen on extremely fast camera angles. You can view the Red One skew tests here: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showpost.php?p=134798&postcount=1

On the flip side, I found this bit of info:

This is called "smear".With a CCD chip-based camera, you're likely to encounter smear in uncontrolled lighting situations. It's the result of having a CCD chip that takes in light all at once and inadvertently 'smears' the light across the CCD. I used to think smear was a result of a faulty lens, but the lens has nothing to do with it. Seems the only way to avoid smear is to avoid certain lighting.

A CMOS chip has no such problem.Taking into consideration what kind of movie Skyward is, I don't plan on the DP doing any camerawork under any extreme lighting conditions (naturally, a CMOS would freak out under a fast strobe light). The 'action' that we're shooting is nothing like in war films or zombie movies. It's a western, and the camerawork will be more on the conservative end. So far, I'm more sold on the CMOS, despite the slight skew when doing very fast camera movements. It's not like we can fight fast enough to skew our bodies.