Cinematography ?

For an assessment of my research, please see the blog entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings. Another set of ideas I've been working on, in terms of how colour is represented can be found at: The Concept of Colour Space from the practitioners Standpoint. You can find other papers of mine at: academia.edu

Since the beginning of my fellowship in September 2007, in the development of HD technologies we've travelled from proprietary format wars (Sony, Panasonic et al) with high compression, an inability to store what we needed to store were we to improve the situation and all kinds of nonsense passing off as High Definition, through to Wavelet Compressed Raw file formats with the ability to store endless amounts of data through pipelines big enough and fast enough for the data to travel.

So now we reside in a place where we can attain a goal: uncompromised, uncompressed data streams with a deep enough bit depth to be in sight of the data flows that function between eye and brain.

When I began this work in September 2007 (though I've long been looking at the issues) 4k was an impossibility, streaming 'HD' on the net also an impossibility.

The point is as of my 3rd year in the fellowship, everything's possible: Every student is a cinematographer (thank you Red) everyone has the information to hand (thank you internet). On a democratic level, when everyone can - everyone will. Then 'experience' doesn't matter so much because 'we have the technology' and the issue becomes - again quoting the Italians: 'Few are called but many answer'.

Red are shortly giving us (a kind of) 9k capture. In fact 4, 8, 16k - who cares in a way. There are still issues around latitude in electronic cinematography - mind you, if you checked out the latitude of film in 1910, Electronic Cinematography is way in advance of that material's development. I always think here of the mirror of the development of film from 1890 to 1910 to the development of Electronic Cinematography from 1990 to 2010.

We should have a better name for Electronic Cinematography, it's too long and clunky with too many syllables - 'Film' referred to the substance the emulsion was applied to - data sits on drives (flash or hard drive) - should we call it: Stream? Carriage? Magnetic? Particles? Current? Or just Cinematography, a title agnostic to the material that the images reside within?