Legendary filmmaker and visual effects pioneer Doug Trumbull is the first in North America to shoot with the new Phantom 65-Z3D system. The music video “Golden Eyes,” shot on location in New York and featuring Dana Fuchs, was co-directed by Doug and director & visual effects technologist Mark Anton Read.

The Phantom 65-Z3D is a single camera 3D production system that uses Zepar twin lenses inside a single housing to capture stereo images on a single 65mm sensor. Each of the two images is equivalent in size to a Super-35mm film frame, with associated characteristics like depth of field and field of view. The Phantom 65 is capable of high frame-rate recording, and Doug chose to shoot at 120fps as a ‘real time’ speed and 320fps for slow motion sequences. The complete system is small, lightweight and easy to set up.

“The lens pairs are perfectly matched and aligned, and weigh only a couple of pounds, making the entire package so small, it easily fits on the Steadicam,” said Trumbull. “This first experiment involved extremely dynamic movement of camera and subject, often going 360-degrees multiple times. We shot all day without any problems.”

Phantom 65-Z3D is a joint collaboration of Vision Research, MKBK of Moscow, Dedo Weigert Film of Germany and AbelCine. By utilizing a single sensor, the P65-Z3D is like a pair of parallel cameras, in that there is no toeing-in for convergence. By adding the capability to adjust the lenses horizontally in front of the sensor, thus changing the distance between the lenses, it is possible to affect the zero parallax distance and therefore determine the point where objects appear in front of the screen and behind the screen. The resulting images produced by the system’s parallel capture are clean and free of optical distortion from beamsplitters or image keystoning.

“I feel that the Phantom 65-Z3D offers opportunities for 3D that cannot be achieved with heavier dual camera beamsplitter systems” Trumbull added. “I am extremely impressed with the results, and intend to use this system next as part of my development of a system for shooting virtual sets and locations in 3D with real-time compositing.”

Watch the video for a behind-the-scenes look at “Golden Eyes” narrated by Doug Trumbull. Dailies from the 3D music video will be available for viewing at AbelCine’s NAB booth #C8932.

The Phantom Flex has been surpassing expectations since its release in September. To explain some of the features that make the Flex the most versatile digital high-speed camera available today, we put together a short video featuring our Phantom specialists.

Besides its technical capabilities, such as frame rates, sensitivity and ease of use, Flex is distinguished by the stunning imagery it produces. No Phantom video would be complete without high-speed photography, and we’ve included teaser shots from an upcoming short by award-winning filmmaker Brendan Bellomo and cinematographer Greg Wilson, as well as footage of galloping horses from Phantom pioneer and DP Steve Romano.

Check out our Introduction to the Phantom Flex on abelcine.com and on Vimeo and YouTube in HD.

[View with PicLens]

The New York Times Magazine is the first to publish footage shot with the new Phantom Flex. The NYT used the camera to document the world’s top women tennis players in super slow motion for an article called “Women Who Hit Very Hard”. Watch the video here.

A video feature called “The Beauty of the Power Game” accompanies the article and was shot with the Flex – the fastest frame rate, highest quality and most light sensitive high-definition camera on the market. Players like Serena Williams, Kim Clijsters and Jelena Jankovic are shown in their finest form at over 1,000 frames per second. Watch the video here.

“The goal was to balance the grace and femininity of these athletes with their sheer power, and the Flex allowed us to do just that,” said Producer Sandrine Lima of Reel Sessions. “The amazing slow mo ability of the Flex allowed us to accomplish the vision Dewey Nicks [the Director] and the Times had.”

Read more about the New York Times tennis shoot on the NY Times Well blog, and on the SPD blog. A gallery of still images is also available on the NYT website.

Vision Research, the manufacturer of the Flex, will begin shipping cameras to customers next week. The camera has had some key improvements made to its form factor since being introduced at NAB this past April. Above are our first images of the Phantom Flex as it will be released to customers.

The overall length has been shortened, the controls have been moved to the front side of the camera and the weight has been reduced. These improvements, combined with the numerous technical breakthroughs in the Flex’s image-making capabilities, put this Phantom on a new plateau.

Those of us who have been around awhile are marveling at the rate of development our industry is experiencing at the Digital Cinema level right now. It may be that future bloggers (can we call them “Floggers”?) will look back at this time in the history of Digital Cinema and declare it a unique era of technical fertility and creative vision. Of all the innovation, of all the hype, of all the tipping points, no camera represents this phase of development better than the one announced today by Vision Research – Phantom Flex. Read the press release here.

As its name explicitly states, Phantom Flex is the most flexible digital cinema camera in existence. Its specs read like a comic book super-hero. Its frame rate can capture a speeding bullet, its black balance is more stable than a locomotive, and its resolution is capable of supporting more formats in a single bound than anything that has come before it.

…continue reading Introducing Phantom Flex from Vision Research

Photo by Rebecca Sandulak

Mother’s Day, a dramatic thriller shot in 2perf, has recently finished production using the Aaton Penelope.  Filmed in Winnepeg, from the Director of Saw II, III and IV, Mother’s Day is a heartwarming, bloodcurdling story of a sadistic family who return to their childhood home to terrorize the new home owners and their guests.

In an interesting twist on the industry’s trend toward digital, Cinematographer Joseph White explained how he and Director Darren Lynn Bousman chose to shoot film.

“We shot Repo! The Genetic Opera on Genesis with great results, but we felt that this film lent itself to a more traditional approach. We wanted a more dramatic, dark, stark look, and 35mm just made the most sense. Darren had done three of the Saw films on 35mm, and although we loved using the Genesis system (for a really stylized movie), we were both really happy to get back to 35mm.”

According to Joe, once they settled on 35mm film the decision to shoot 2perf was driven by two complimentary factors.

“The obvious budgetary reasons for sure,” he said “but being able to shoot around 22 minutes on a 1,000′ mag and 9 minutes on a 400′ mag is pretty amazing. With the finer grained film stocks today, it’s really hard to tell the difference between 2perf and 3perf, so in my mind it was a win-win for me and the producers.”

As for camera choice, Joe used both Panavision in 2perf, as well as Aaton Penelope, and found the Penelope perfect for portability.

“We used Panaflex cameras for our studio cameras, but the Penelope was just incredible when shooting handheld, steadicam, or even just putting it on a sandbag with a long lens to get another angle fast – it was an incredibly versatile camera and gave us so many shooting options. It is really the only compact camera that can shoot 2perf.”

“It really is an impressive camera” Joe enthused. “Gorgeous video tap, very quiet, a dream on steadicam and shooting in cars – many car shots would not have been possible without the Penelope. It’s just such a sexy little camera with every bell and whistle you could want, while still getting the fundamentals right. A camera with a real design sensibility – it has so many uses.”

We asked Joe how he’d feel about using Penelope again on his next film project.

“Absolutely, in a heartbeat” he said. “Penelope is my new favorite camera.”

Mother’s Day is Joseph White’s twelfth feature film. Other credits include Shelter, Repo! The Genetic Opera, Equality U, Open House and Café, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. Joe graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and received an MFA in Film Production from USC.

Mother’s Day stars Rebecca DeMornay and Jaime King. Joe’s crew on this project included operators Paul Suderman and Ari Robbins, along with AC’s Marcus James and Danny Quesnel.

Sony’s legacy of creating industry leading content creation tools took the next step today with the announcement of an HDCAM SR camcorder platform and upgrade roadmap that raises the price / performance standard for broadcast and Digital Cinema production. The new platform will exist in both 2/3” and 35mm formats and will work in seamless concert with both tape and memory based media for “full cycle” workflow and archival capability.

The first iteration of the new platform is the recently introduced SRW-9000, which is now available. This 2/3” triple CCD camera writes to a built-in HDCAM SR recorder for a combination of high performance and operational portability. Some key features of the SRW-9000 are 1080/60P “overcrank” recording in 4:4:4; and 14-bit A/D conversion, which translates to a dynamic range of over 12 stops.

…continue reading Sony Details SRW-9000 Future Proof Roadmap

If Indiana Jones were a cameraman his name would be Scott Duncan. An eight time Emmy award winner, Scott is known for his artistry as well as his sense of adventure. Scott has filmed inside war zones, on top of mountains and under raging rivers. Last month he used the new Aaton Penelope camera to shoot one of Manhattan’s most menacing marauders – Donald Trump.

The project was the opening of a brand new season of Celebrity Apprentice with The Donald and a gaggle of…celebrities (who we can’t name right now – you’ll know them when you see them). It proved an excellent opportunity for Scott to become acquainted with Penelope.

…continue reading Scott Duncan: First Impressions of Penelope