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Lytro cinema

Lytro has made no secret of its need to move from selling mass-market products to consumers to high-end tools to professionals. It started that transition with its annunciation of Immerge, a planned offer for immersive content creators. But before anyone has even seen an Immerge, Lytro has introduced Cinema — a product which will offer many of the same benefits as Immerge, but is aimed at traditional pic makers. Cinema is a super-high-resolution, super-high-performance, video capture and processing system that incorporates lite field capture to permit movie makers to get a 3D (or really, virtually 3D) version of the scene, allowing for changing camera settings similar focus, aperture, and shutter angle after the fact. It likewise turns just about any ready into a dark-green screen.

Lytro Movie theater past the numbers

Lytro puts the Cinema at 755 RAW Megapixels — whatever that ways. I interpret that as significant the full number of photo elements captured is 755 meg, but since angular information is beingness captured, the actual spatial resolution (eastward.1000. output megapixels) will be quite a flake less. Lytro hasn't said whether the Cinema uses an array of traditional imagers or uses custom versions with microlenses, the way its earlier products did. The Picture palace records at up to 300 fps, and at a nearly incredible 16-stops of dynamic range. It'll be corking to see how Lytro has accomplished all that in a unit about the same size every bit a TV studio camera, in one case the visitor reveals the details.

A frame from the demo video for Lytro Cinema illustrates how capturing a light field from a single camera position has its limits, as occluded objects can't all be capturedThe blueprint goal for Cinema is the consummate virtualization of the camera. With it, cinematographers can not only refocus a scene after shooting, only vary the depth of field (or even create synthetic combinations of in-focus objects) and the shutter bending (movie speak for shutter speed) and output frame charge per unit. Mayhap of most interest is the integrated depth data — generated both by the light field capture and an agile scanning system — which will permit easy light-green screening of backgrounds or specific objects. Depth information as well allows for much easier compositing of reckoner-generated objects into a video shot with Cinema. To help make this possible Lytro is integrating Cinema's post-processing software with several popular editing tools.

Lytro didn't really invent Light Field Picture palace

Lytro is not the first to apply calorie-free fields for cinema. German language tech powerhouse Fraunhofer has been showcasing a film shot with its array of cameras that allow for most of the same mail-processing magic that Lytro'south Cinema will — although not with near the same resolution and frame rate. Its short film, Coming Dwelling house, provides a glimpse of what is possible using light fields for live action movie creation. And even better, Fraunhofer has fabricated a video that shows the background on how it captured and processed the footage to make the picture.

2D capture of a 3D scene does have limits

Lytro, and many of the articles about Cinema, wax eloquent near how it "captures all the rays of light within a scene." That's a bit of hyperbole. Information technology captures all (or nearly all) the rays of calorie-free emitted from a scene that happen to pass through the photographic camera's lens. You can alter your point of view a trivial bit later on the fact, but y'all can't peer around corners, or look backside objects, for example. That's why multi-camera rigs like USC LightStages exist. Of course, if you are trying to mimic a green screen, often the background objects volition be discarded anyhow.

For now, Lytro Cinema seems like a nigh magical device, but we'll know a lot more when Lytro unveils it to attendees at the NAB bear witness in Las Vegas next calendar week — where Fraunhofer volition also exist talking near its work. It will besides be premiering Life, a curt motion-picture show shot with the Cinema and created in conjunction with the Virtual Reality Company. Lytro expects the Movie house to be available on a subscription ground to a limited set of partners for production applications starting in Q3. Pricing wasn't announced, merely if you accept to inquire…