Reflecmedia's Chromatte System
For filmmakers who want to get into greenscreen and bluescreen videography as easily as possible, there is no technology that is simpler than Reflecmedia's Chromatte system. Essentially a space age fabric that reflects high bandwidth light, the Chromatte system consists of a length of Chromatte fabric and a circular light called a LiteRing, that affixes to the front of your digital video camera.
When the circular light is affixed, the fabric reflects the color of the light into the lens of the camera without effecting the rest of the image. As such, you get a perfectly illuminated green or bluescreen without having to light the screen at all. While still pricier than most microfilmmakers would like, the price has dropped somewhat on this setup. Currently you can get a Chromatte LiteRing in either blue or green and a 7 foot by 7 foot square of the special fabric for about $2,000. If you want to build a greenscreen studio using this technology, you’ll be spending about $32 per square foot for the fabric. For a 30’ by 20’ foot cyclorama setup, that would come out to about $19,200. (Each LiteRing runs $600.)
Maxon & Paul Babb
Midway through my tour of NAB I got a chance to chat with Maxon’s president, Paul Babb, at his company’s booth. Maxon is responsible for Cinema 4D, a tremendously popular 3D program that is substantially easier to use that Autodesk’s 3D Studio Max and Maya offerings and has been utilized for a lot of network television shows. (We used it to create the background models for our 3D shootout last year.)
While we were chatting about the state of the industry and low-budget filmmaking, I commented that, although Cinema 4D is much easier to use than many other 3D programs, its fairly expensive photoreal rendering options made it less attractive than the more robust (but more confusing) Lightwave to the huge number of low-budget filmmakers that come to our site. (Cinema 4D has a main module that sells for about the price of Lightwave, but, unlike Lightwave, C4D doesn’t support photoreal rendering until you get into the $2200-$3500 packages.) I explained that many of our readers want to make photoreal rendered backgrounds for low-budget greenscreen films and he said that they were seriously considering making the photoreal options available in their sub-$1000 version of Cinema 4D. He went on to explain that they had recently created some extremely versatile 3D set creation tools for high end Hollywood studios who had used them for creating the environments in such high profile films as Spiderman 3. Why he felt this might be interesting for our readership is because they are planning to create a lower-budget version that they actually want to package into their sub-$1000 version of Cinema 4D. When this will be available remains to be seen but if it’s half as easy to use as Paul seemed to think it would be, it would be a huge step forward in 3D effects for low-budget filmmakers.
Iconix & Stereography
With the popularity of stereographic films these days, I had to go check out the rising star in the field: Iconix. Iconix makes super high-rez cameras that are so tiny that they can be placed in virtually any location you can imagine, which has made them very popular in many Hollywood films and TV shows that need a unique perspective. (Of course, because of their tiny size, they don’t actually have a recording drive in the camera, relying instead on an HDMI video out to a standalone high definition recorder or computer, much like a spycam or a very high-rez webcam.) While this is useful in normal videography, it’s absolutely essential in stereoscopy (the recording of stereo 3D images), where cameras must be placed 2 and a half inches apart from one another to replicate the perspective of a right and left human eye. To showcase this use, they had set up a recording rig in a stereoscopic configuration and were showing pre-recorded streographic footage on a high end monitor system at their booth.
While Iconix cameras are quite a bit more expensive than most of us have in our camera budgets (approximately $16,000 per HD-RH1 camera), the potential they offer for 3D filmmaking in the future makes them something to keep an eye on.
