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Written by Terry Flaxton
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Friday, 07 September 2007 |
In April this year at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, HD changed forever - suddenly we leaped several generations and we gained the capacity, on everybody's desktop, to manipulate the highest level of HD. Jim Jannard, a sunglasses manufacturer from Canada managed to manufacture a new camera, called the Red, that one might previously have paid half a million dollars for. In fact the camera body sells for $17,500 - and if that wasn't all, he got together with Steve Jobs at Apple and made Final Cut Pro Studio take this data and work with it...
INTRODUCTION
This article is about the rapidly changing face of HD and its impact on us in an attempt to point up what is going on technically, aesthetically and societally:
This breaks down into three parts:
The first part is derived from the concept that accepts that to truly understand HD, you have to accept that it has a mathematical base - and that that understanding is as valuable as either an aesthetic or theoretical appreciation.
The second part will be a look at HD through my experience as an industry Director of Photography because theory and use are two different things use can unveil elements that theory cannot see.
The third part is through my experience as an artist working in the video medium for thirty years - and make no mistake - though called electronic cinematography, HD is a form of video.
Initially though I want to introduce an idea that may be useful when thinking of HD: As the light falls at dusk and you are driving along, you might notice that the tail lights of the car that you are following seem much brighter than usual. Also, there is a moment when the traffic lights seem too bright and too colourful. The simple explanation for this phenomenon is that you are witnessing your brain switching between two technologies in your eyes: one, the rods, inherited from our distant ancestors which were evolved for the insect eye to detect movement, are very numerous, there are around 120 million of them. Through them you see in black and white. The second technology are much more sensitive to colour. They are called Cones, are far less numerous and we have between 6 and 7 million. So, there are two technologies between which there is a border - and it is this boundary which is of interest.
Keeping this idea in mind, it is becoming apparent to those that work at the extreme horizon of High Definition that something similar happens when a certain level of resolution is reached. A fluttering occurs, a switching between two states. Suspension of disbelief comes into play and the mind switches between - we enter into states of belief about the truth or lack of it concerning the veracity of an image. What is really interesting to me as artist is the boundary between the two states. I have had discussions with technicians who do not think in terms of art, yet who have noticed something similar.
THE PRESENT YET FAR FUTURE
NHK - Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai - or the Japan Broadcasting corporation recently conducted an experiment where it linked up a prototype 8k Super Hi Vision Camera to 18 one hour data recorders. Usually each machine would record one hour's worth of data from a completely uncompressed 2k 4 4 4 camera like the half a million dollar Dalsa Origin - the highest level HD we have commercially available at present. The SR data recorders were running very fast - so fast that they went through one hour's worth of recording in 3 minutes - all 18 of them. The subject of their test was a simple car ride between two points lasting 3 minutes.
To display the image you have to imagine a normal computer display set at say 1280 x 1024 pixels - the kind you have to squint at if your sight is lessening. Now, imagine this display expanded to some 27 feet long. The resolution of the image, the car ride, was immense. This technological moment reminds me of the Lumiers brothers screening in January 1896 of a train arriving in a station - some of the audience ran from the cinema in the belief that the train was real. In the NHK screeing the Japanese audience are reported to have found the experience so overpowering that many of them experienced nausea. So in this technological moment, echoed in the past, the distant future and barely imagined future is now absolutely in reach.
Let's look at some figures:
Standard HD is known as having 2k resolution - because it has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels (1920 is close to 2000 - or 2K)
4k is 4096 x 2160 pixels
8k is 8192 x 4320 - this is NHK's Super Hi-Vision.
In each of the above, if you divide one by the other you will generate a figure of around 1.8 - and this is roughly a 16:9 relationship - the now common TV aspect ratio.
TECHNOLOGY AND COMPRESSION
Any serious understanding of High Definition technologies require a basic understanding of the idea within digital technologies called 'compression'. In Digital imaging the lens receives light and focuses it onto a charged coupled device or sensor which then turns this into electrical impulses. Very early on in video a question arose for designers when far too much data was originated in this process. Solutions were proposed and the idea of throwing 'unnecessary' data away grabbed hold of the mind of early designers. This method continues today, such that a contemporary HD camera like the Sony HD750 or HD900 simply doesn't record 500 of its 1920.
Simply put, data is a representation of the artifact, whether generated in or imported into the digital realm, and all representations have levels of veracity. A full representation is all the data of the original, and anything else is something that resembles the original but has less data in that representation. A tsunami of 'under-the-bonnet' software innovation has flooded the world in recent years and most of today’s HD cameras have worked with a prior software technology - Fourier's Discrete Cosine Transforms. (Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier 1768 - 1830). The discrete cosine transform involves breaking up the image data into tiles, so that each can be treated independently.
Wavelets, a new technology (the theories were in place in 1807) has helped prize open Pandora’s box:
"Wavelets are mathematical functions that cut up data into different frequency components, and then study each component with a resolution matched to its scale. They have advantages over traditional Fourier methods in analyzing physical situations where the signal contains discontinuities and sharp spikes. Wavelets were developed independently in the fields of mathematics, quantum physics, electrical engineering, and seismic geology. Interchanges between these fields during the last ten years have led to many new wavelet applications such as image compression, turbulence, human vision, radar, and earthquake prediction".
Amara Graps, http://www.amara.com/index.html
The critical difference (between DCT's and wavelets) is the use of sinusoidal waves because the function used in wavelets eventually returns smoothly to zero, whereas a sine wave has no beginning or end - it just keeps oscillating. This makes it very computationally intensive to do a DCT over a full frame. As one DP put it on the Cinematographers Mailing List: "ummm, wavelets good, DCT bad."
Contemporary cameras and post production systems have been designed with a view to the previous (less efficient) technology of DCT's and the manufacture of the relevant devices, cameras, proprietary editing and storage systems has been positioned to recoup the massive amounts of prior research that has been expended by big corporations. Like all video technology before it High Definition has grown out of defense technology. So withholding technological advances has been a marketing strategy by corporate development of the digital realm. And the very language used with words like 'High' and 'Definition' are also elements of that strategy in that 'high' evokes notions of flight, or suggests secrets, or access to something above the normal - it is in effect a term that renders the technology desirable.
THE CONTEMPORARY ARGUMENT ABOUT HD IMAGE CONTROL
High end HD work is far beyond the use of tape to capture the data necessary to render the image accurately. Sony won the format war against Philips who'd developed a superior HD 1250 line system in the 1990's by developing a more manageable image of 1920 x 1080 pixels and then making cameras which threw away one fifth of the pixels and only recorded 1440.
They did this because it wasn't possible at the time to record all 1920 pixels - the data pipelines were not wide enough. Even then, the 1440 pixels were only recorded in a way that lost much detail.
A pixel is effectively a packet of data that is represented on screen by a changing luminosity and a changing colour identity - Sony's pixels in HD Cam are in 3.1.1 colour space - that's a description of what each pixel packet contains in terms of data that renders the luminosity and colour in tact - or not as the case may be. The ideal colour space in terms of recording data at the moment is 4.4.4. - the previous Olympian peak of Standard Definition PAL was 4.2.2. What these numbers mean is hidden unless one become very technical, but one can guess that the more samplings (copied bits) of the original there are - the more data can be displayed. As usual, bigger equals better.
So we want to record as much data as possible but with limitations and compression or 'lossy' recording soon became a solution to massive amounts of data (60 gigabytes per minute of decent HD) so that something of some value could be recorded on tape. Currently, the highest form of HD image capture requires one has to record on hard disc - and not just any hard disc, but a RAID. The only exception on tape is through Sony's data deck, the SR, which records a form of high end HD.
Contemporary drives run at 7200 revolutions per minute and read and write between 30 and 50 megabytes per second. A byte has 8 times as much data as a bit but actually, it doesn't really matter what that means in detail, unless like me you're capable of becoming a train spotter, it simply matters that if you want to record Sony's system which loses 500 pixels at the outset, you need 220 Megabytes per second of information captured and played back and for that you need a Redundant Array of Independent Discs. So what's a RAID?
If I throw you a ball you might be able to catch it. If I manage to throw you 20 balls at the same time you have no chance, If I throw 20 balls at you and another 19 friends - you have a chance of catching them. A RAID Array uses a group of discs to catch large amounts of data.
If you want to record 1920 x 1080 pixels with their full complement of data then you need read and write speeds of 440 Megabytes and up. So, given that the HD world has spent its time thinking in terms of being true to the information it gathers it really doesn't want to distress an image that is already distressed by being captured badly.
If you do work on the image in camera, in the colour matrices, then you limit how much data is recorded. If you crush the blacks to get a 'look' you automatically reduce the data that is output into the image display - therefore the cinematographer ever mindful of his or her employ wants every bit of data carried back into post production and when all is gathered in their swag bag and taken home - then the work on the image can begin. But of course if you've ever really watched an image that is produced like this you see that there is a thin patina over the image and the 'look' itself is not inherent within the image. I'm a romantic so I want the look within the image. I spent 30 years shooting video as well as film and I know it's possible.
WHERE REALITY ITSELF IS EXTREME RESOLUTION
So I now wish to detour through my practical experience as a maker of images within the industry to describe how a Director of Photography thinks. Within this a and from what I've already described a question arises: Where does compression end and aesthetics begin and if reality itself is extreme resolution what is the DP trying to render within the image ?
It's been my practice as a DP on receiving a new script, for which I have to confer “a look” as well as quality-control the production from inception through to release print, to make a plan.
Within the available contemporary aesthetics there are a series of tactics to 'say something' with light. These if listed become mundane: a warm look for comfort, blue for alienation, and a whole variety of strategies which, if the DP is masterly enough can be transcended and trip the production out of the commercial realm into the artistic.
So I would sit down with my script and make my notes whilst keeping a mind to innovation. Then the night before the shoot, in a growing state of anxiety I would finally gain the courage to throw away my plan in the belief, that deep down, if I approached the production on my wit and my unarticulated aesthetic then I will reach further into my creativity and find something that goes beyond technique and hopefully approaches art.
In the past, when I've made works of art then I would function solely intuitively responding at each moment, whether in the shooting stage or in the editing stage, to whatever the material and the software programme 'said' to me to do. Therefore I was open to the practical acts of assembling the final work so that those final acts were also part of the creative process. So the cross fertilization that was occurring was that I would import art strategies into the commercial realm.
People like Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, The Spiders Stratagem etc) whose famous colour theories render incomprehension and a throwing up of hands from the more prosaic and practical amongst the brotherhood of cinematographers - has a grip on cinema and also High Definition that is second to none.
Where Storaro works with colour and light in one way, Conrad Hall (American Beauty, Day of the Locust) worked in another. His inventiveness and commitment was to the photographic within the cinematic arts where cinematography is defined as the art or technique of movie photography.
As his career progressed, and as Hall traversed the boundaries of contemporary wisdom about what constitutes good exposure, Hall influenced a whole generation of DP's on this issue.
He came to understand that the act of generating the still image and something within the act of photography gets at something that cinematography rarely gets at and he was therefore concerned with finding the photographic moment amidst the flow of images. In describing Hall as searching for the photographic, I don't mean the prosaic happenings of the quotidian, I mean rather, their opposite, his finding of the extraordinary within the ordinary. This cult of the DP comes into High Definition in an undesirable way. Historically in the clash between film and video, the film users were seen as the craftsmen and the video users were seen as being artless.
I remember being on a Ridley Scott set in 1983 as he shot the famous 1984 commercial. I was shooting for Apple and my footage was used by Apple to heighten awareness that the commercial that was to introduce the Apple Mac was only going to be shown once in the middle of that years Super bowl - this was a fantastic ploy that earned that commercial a massive audience that is still viewing this particular commercial - albeit with Hilary Clinton's face as opposed to Big Brother's. As we were viewing back our rushes checking focus and exposure I became aware that about 20 people were standing behind us looking at our monitor.
This was a film crew that had never before seen what it had been shooting at the same time as shooting it. Usually the film would come back the next day to be viewed by the more select in the hierarchy - but rushes could not be viewed in the 'present'. We all stared at each other - two alien tribes, previously at war with each other - the video people after all were going to destroy their medium in the long run and take their work). Then one of them grinned in pleasure at seeing this and suddenly, like the German and British troops in the first world war downing their rifles on Christmas day and playing football together, suddenly we were friends. From then on they stopped being horrible to us, even sometimes offering to move lights to let us have more illumination. In the end the artist in me took this footage and I made a piece called Prisoners in 1983.
But - historically film people are brought in to light video because they are seen as the artists. But they don't know the technology and video people are brought in to hold their hands and that has meant that mainly unaltered footage gets taken back into post to do the colour grading work - and therefore the 'look' is applied as an overlay to the image.
ACHIEVING THE FILMIC LOOK
The suspension of disbelief that has become a part of watching film - or put another way, the automatic generation of atmosphere - is not yet part of the way of watching the form of video that is called HD. Therefore we have to rely on other strategies to get at the suspension of disbelief and atmosphere and it is my contention simply to light well and to leave everything to post will not achieve the goal.
Some of the available cameras are mighty complicated. Some film people may just call in a DT technician, some video people will believe that everything should be left to post - but the real answer is that the DP has to take on their time honored role of being (besides the artist) the chief quality control technician.
...And that means they just have to know what they are doing. It is smoke and mirrors. it is art, it is experience, it is knowledge.
It's obvious really.
So - in film, Cinematographers constantly distort the colour standards and definitions the film manufacturers seek to implement for their stock, to impose atmosphere. 'Atmosphere', like popcorn, shares a quality that allows the easy suspension of disbelief. If film manufactures say that development should occur at such and such a temperature, then heating up or cooling down the developer is a means by which the colour or grain or exposure may be changed in a pleasing way.
All cinematographers seek to distinguish themselves from the others primarily to have a signature for themselves that delivers a unique selling point, therefore a higher income - however, in High Definition image manipulation, with the form being less available to material manipulation, that function has become truncated.
And here we have to turn our gaze to others without such fixed propositions in mind in terms of image manipulation. Though cinema requires the creation of atmosphere normally achieved through the distressing of the image, the idea of 'atmosphere' is a form of impurity disavowed by some artists who tend to seek the truth of their art through an ascetic attitude because their thinking involves delivering truth through purity.
MY WORK AT BRISTOL
Artists have long pushed the boundaries of a form in pursuit of artistic truth and sometimes this has allied them with commercial forces. The downtime agreements in New York in the '70's were an example where commercial facilities allowed artists to use the extremely expensive equipment during the night for low money as long as they told the editors in the morning of anything they discovered during their art practice. And - early video art was fascinated by the plasticity of the form.
In my own practice I was often enraptured by the simple act of making the work with such wonderful technology. This technology, like an internal combustion engine, functioned faster than the eye or mind. If you think that a car uses a series of miniature controlled explosions many thousands of times a minute - you can't help but wonder. And video, even analogue video, took one 64 millionth of a second to 'write' a line. Here I remember Bill Violas Zen-like observation:
Duration is to consciousness as light is to the eye.
This seems to mean that the presence of light is why the eye evolved and consciousness evolved to deal with things that were more than momentary.
Art is a dealing with that which is more than momentary.
Viola's roots seem to be in both the Buddhist proposition of Dependant Origination - that everything arises in relation to everything else and penchant for the symbolism of renaissance painting and renaissance ideals - to be knowledgeable of many different concerns and practices in relation to our place in the world.
My roots really grow out of the moment that I realised that all things record an image - From a lowly rock which if left in shadow long enough records an image, to paper that has a leaf left on it in bright sunlight, to metal with a chemical coating, to celluloid that holds a coating, to tubes, chips and sensors that react to light.
But it's not just the image, it's also the act of making that concerns me: After Georgia O'Keeffe had lost her sight and could no longer paint, she took to ceramics to continue creating... As she neared death (she died on 6th March 1986 at the age of 98) she spoke of the creative act, of how the need to make something was like looking out over a precipice, of how one must leap into the abyss and of how fear itself would turn into wings...
So in approaching the creation of a three year programme of work, I inevitably drew on what I have been practicing for thirty years, both as a Director of Photography but also as an artist. I felt that I had to explore the aesthetics of High Definition Video and how this new and developing aesthetic might affect the work of the practitioners and the viewing experience of the audience.
My current and growing understanding of the aesthetics of the HD form are of course derived from my earlier involvement with the media of origination and reproduction - but HD is making me begin to think in a new way. For instance, I am beginning to realise that the term High Definition is incorrect - perhaps the term High Resolution Imaging is more appropriate.
LESSONS FROM STANDARD DEFINITION
What made me think like this is that the involvement with HD was a watermark because of the discoveries that seem to be hidden within it - the seeking after resolution in both real and metaphorical senses. This made me realise that I am coming to the end of a stage of work which began with my involvement in video in 1976.
My first encounter with video tape was with 2 inch analogue quadruplex, where one took a razor blade and cut it in two just like film then spliced it together to make an edit. Then the idea of re-recording came along and we set up the machines to lay in the next bit of video that was effectively re-recorded after the last shot.
Around 1982 I was managing a video facility in Soho called Videomakers. The person that owned the studio was musing on the technical problems we were having with the simple act of trying to dissolve one image to another for an art piece and as with all things artistic that solve problems, this had an immediate feedback into the commercial domain as we used the same technique to generate stereo soundtracks for a client who because of this development eventually became and still is the Creative Director of Universal International. So art then as art now was the research and development arm for the commercial sector.
As we solved our problem, the owner of Videomakers was saying that his father had successfully harnessed a computer to revolve a still image. With a little bit of development the image could be refreshed near the speed of 12 times per second - so if they could do that, then by interlacing and splitting the image into odd and even lines they could then generate the other 12 and a half frames and manufacture a whole second of video and henceforth a moving TV image could therefore be revolved.
So with the advent of the possibilities of manipulation, we groped our way through the late paleo-analogue age into the early neo-digital age and the main concern was adjusting the thinking processes to cope with the new paradigm being offered: The fact that with a digital image one had something that could be manipulated or, the operations as Lev Manovich has termed them.
Working on a recent piece, The Unfurling I began to understand a resolution or definition threshold that I now have to go through. Noticing my daughter sleeping on a granite ledge in the sun, I turned the camera on to her. I videoed her as she woke up, unfurling from a tight embryonic shape, She got up and un-self-consciously walked away. When I got to the editing suite I found this moment and slow-moed the 10 seconds down to 30 minutes. As usual the accidents of the medium came into play and though there was value in the distortions that the technical act imbued the image with, I realised that given the same brief, if shot in high definition at high speed, that this might unveil something more than the original standard definition version of the 'photographic moment'.
So, though I have enjoyed the accidents that have come about through stressing the parameters that low definition equipment was manufactured to handle to the point where the image breaks down, new digital high definition equipment offers a different kind of unveiling of form. The horizon of technical 'excellence' is currently very distant so image capture can be achieved without stressing the media.
This then prompts the question about the aesthetics of HD: Given that one of the main ingredients of the artists palette is the corruption of the medium they are working in to find the surprise within the form, what new strategies can the artist or practitioner engage in to unveil a deeper insight into the content. Here, there is an issue around transparency and simply the delivering of an idea unaffected by the medium - but McLuhan of course tells us that that is an impossibility. So what is not transparent about HD is a central question as we look at it like people who have never seen the representation of an image in this way before ?
To go back to the Buddhist concept of co-dependent origination: How do things arise in the world, seemingly separate when they are dependent on one another ?
On this note, let me return to Viola's statement:
"Duration is to consciousness as light is to the eye".
Through talking about the way we experience the world directly using the terms of the experience, then Viola's intuition has lead him to work in a certain kind of way which has captured the public imagination (and infuriated many artists!). This is an element that any artist might grasp and manipulate, and I believe something that High Definition can deliver - not just duration, but articulation - so to take his thought and re-apply it to HD:
"Definition is to consciousness as luminosity is to the eye".
It's a qualifying statement.
In calling my latest piece the Unfurling, apart from the obvious unfurling movement that occurred, I am also touching on an unfurling of my own consciousness about the way a series of images function when demonstrating movement. I was aware in my previous use of photography that the standard definition of picture quality was holding 'something' back from my grasp.
I had explored most other elements within the moving image and have always thought narrative should not be excised from the artists palette, regardless of its heavy usage by the entertainments industry - artists of course need necessarily go in the opposite direction from commercial definitions and usages of elements with the available palette as a form of distancing from entertainment and therefore creating chiaroscuro for their art.
ART AND COMPRESSION
Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay comes to mind, on the question of mechanical representations of the original (prints, photography etc): can the representation carry any of the authenticity of the original? This question revolves around the relationship between form and content. Why should the image I bring to mind of the Mona Lisa have less authenticity than the original from which my imagination has manufactured its own copy? After all I remember the feelings the original evoked in me - I come as close as I am going to get to the artist’s intent (be it voiced or held beneath his consciousness). If that which is communicated by the artwork, be it articulated or otherwise, resonates in me, is that not what is authentic about the original?
In 1987 John Wyver carried Benjamin's argument along with the help of Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virillio in his opening programme for the satellite station, La Sept - L'objet d'art a l'age electronique. At that time the world was concerned with analogue representations which decay in their passage from copy to copy, from medium to medium.
So twenty years later the spirit of the question still stands as we are now in the maelstrom of the following digital issue: Where is meaning, significance and value in the digital domain, given that the medium of reproduction and the medium of origination reside together in the same realm?
Further questions arise from this: Are not origination and copying one and the same thing? Has the idea that things can be 'derivative' had its day - is not everything both derivative and original at the same time?
If one proceeded with previous digital compression using Fourier's earlier maths then Benjamin's question might unveil a buried insight:
To copy is to decrease
And this might ring true, not only because things are changed in the act of copying (a kind of Chinese Whispers that renders exquisite corpses) but also that the representation itself is simply a Borg, a lessening, a copy without feeling. In other words the copy is without the 'true' sense of the original.
This brings to mind the notion of the Golem:
"In Jewish folklore, a golem from the Hebrew word meaning material is an animated being created entirely from inanimate matter. In modern Hebrew the word golem literally means 'cocoon', but can also mean "fool", "silly", or even "stupid". The name appears to derive from the word gelem, which means "raw material".
An abridged definition of the Golem from Wikipedia
Is the idea of 'raw material' anachronistic? Perhaps there is no such thing as an 'actuality' before the representation, before the data accrues? Are not our senses simply analogue-to-sensorium devices? Transmitters of empirical data to an organising centre - the mind?
TECHNOLOGIES AND ART CONVERGING
As there is a blurring of the lines between form and content, so there is between software, hardware and that nether region of firmware (this is a technology that tells hardware to be something - rather than do something)
These days, through use of the net and the operations, Hesses Glass Bead Game is available. This is a game where one might take a bar of Mozart and place it next to a brushstroke by Matisse and a line of poetry by Omar Khayyam and so create a new work of art. In The Glass Bead Game (pub. 1943) Hesse predicted post modernism and its bastard digital child "convergence'. Here, derivation is all - in fact it's been canonised. Hesse proposes the notion that authenticity is not only present in the copy, but it lends its weight and accumulates with the weight of other copies and their imbued authenticity and combines into new, authentic works of art.
So with a mind to Hesse and his pre- yet post-modern idea, cross metaphors and the weight of symbolism can be usefully applied, with a view to authenticity in the act of copying and how some copies might be truer than other copies through a greater appeal to the truth of their rendering of the original, I return again to Amara Graps’ description of the underlying principles of wavelets:
"The wavelet analysis procedure is to adopt a wavelet prototype function, called an analyzing wavelet or mother wavelet. Temporal analysis is performed with a contracted, high-frequency version of the prototype wavelet, while frequency analysis is performed with a dilated, low-frequency version of the same wavelet. Because the original signal or function can be represented in terms of a wavelet expansion (using coefficients in a linear combination of the wavelet functions), data operations can be performed using just the corresponding wavelet coefficients. And if you further choose the best wavelets adapted to your data, or truncate the coefficients below a threshold, your data is sparsely represented. This sparse coding makes wavelets an excellent tool in the field of data compression".
Amara Graps, http://www.amara.com/index.html
What Amara is talking about here is the intelligent writing and therefore a more authentic writing of a piece of maths. A wavelet transform is so designed so that it use its internal structure to produce the most complimentary and accurate handling of the material. (whereas Discrete Cosine Transforms are more like shredding machines - you get the data but it's just a poor representation).
SUMMING UP
As with all form and content, there is an interrelationship between the technicalities of the form and its concomitant aesthetic and how it has developed historically. Recently the way that technology has been innovated has also changed.
Previous digital advances have been based upon a set of algorithms originated by Fourier in the late 18th and early 19th century - but recent developments also based upon Fourier's work but only recently realised, have created a tsunami of innovation in the handling of data which has transformed the digital realm - a prime example being HD.
Friday, August 31st 2007 and Jim Jannard and Red have delivered their first compliment of 25 Red cameras to a selected few. But though they have set the world alight with their offer of cheap and high level wavelet technology and made it available faster than any previous technological advance of this order, this development comes out of an individualist trend that has developed in late liberal capitalism and this development has been obfuscated by a fast corporate adoption of this trend which has its parallels in the notion of User Generated Content - and this is what I would term User Generated Technology.
About five years ago Jeff Krienes, a Director of Photography in California, was experimenting with a friend from Thomson Grass Valley on a prototype HD Camera. They'd become fed up with the slowing of technical innovation generated and allowed to be made public by the corporations need to get a cash return for their development. So they created a camera that fulfilled not only their needs, but their aspirations which of course was way above what was on the market or said to be coming. They made an aluminum case which contained some electronics and a few chips, had a fitting on the front to take a 35mm lens and the stripped down carcasses of 20 iPods to record the high data output. This camera had near the same specifications of the Red Camera. Though looking like the trailblazers, Red are in fact the inheritors of a User Generated, YouTube-like attitude to the production of technology.
What this means is, from early sole inventors in Fourier's time, we have just been through a long period where corporations, from the late analogue to the neo-digital age have controlled the means of innovation - but on entry to the meso-digital age, access to high level technical innovation is now becoming possible for the individual - and this apparent individual engagement with technology, besides being the apogee of the celebration of the geek within, is a hallmark of the period we are in, and this hallmark is centering on the production of High Definition Technology. The commonality of information available through the web is also allowing a commonality of aspiration so that the User and now the Doer is also the Maker and the Knower of their own world. Through changes in what is known in the meso-digital age, the definition of the self is expanding - the idea of what an individual is, is being re-defined and new resolutions of definition are being employed in that definition.
I have long cherished the ability of video to create surprises for the maker, but with the development of the video form through its analogue past into its digital future I can now find surprises in the higher rendering of detail. This is one element of my exploration into HD and my intuition and experience tell me that we have only just scratched the surface.
ADDENDUM
As I complete this draft my son has just come in to me and demanded a camera which records more than 25 frames per second. I explain that there are very few cameras that do this but shortly I will use a camera that records several thousand frames per second that costs about £900 per day - he scowls and says - that's the trouble with you old folks - your technology is too expensive and stuck in the past....
THREE SMALL APPENDICES
HIGH DEFINITION VIRTUAL REALITY
Last Year in Marienbad was based upon Adolfo Bioy-Casares 1940 novel, The Invention of Morel. On one hand a fairly turgid read, but on the other completely inspirational in its inventiveness. Our hero, an escaped prisoner, comes to an island and discovers that he is not alone. He witnesses a group of people going about their business - the idle rich amusing themselves for a summer. He maintains his distance from them for most of the novel because he fears capture and return to his prison. However, he falls in love with one of the people and eventually discovers that none of the people on the island can react to him. This is the bit where you should turn away if you do not want to spoil the read. Bioy-Casares has invented the first virtual reality novel. Morel's invention is actually a projection machine of such extremely high resolution that our hero does not realise that in fact the island and its inhabitants that are all a projection of last summer’s events. The authenticity of our unnamed hero's feelings remain - even after knowing that everything he has seen has been manifested within that limnal borderland where definition and suspension of disbelief function.
META LANGUAGES
The meta-language of HD is replete with either numbers in some configuration 444, 311 for instance or made up words like Wavelet's, DPX, LUT's, Cineform, Codecs and so on. It's a kind of poetry if you employ aesthetics to it's construction.
This language also requires a grasp as, if you hear someone saying they are shooting HD you need to know what they are telling you - even if they do not.
For instance, if someone is saying they are shooting HD with an HDV camera, which has an original sensor resolution of 960 pixels as opposed to the full 1920 of 2k HD, then you need to know there's a misunderstanding going on in their mind but be clear yourself. More importantly, you need to know what the issues are to make a proper judgment - as with any other are of concern.
Equally, you have to know that with an HD form like HD Cam (Sony's lower end HD system), which might have a sensor that produces 1920 x 1080 pixels, that very, very quickly in the processing chain in the camera, that 480 of those pixels are dispensed with so that the magic number of 1440 are recorded. (the HDV's 960 pixels up up-rezzed to 1440 to produce what might look like to some eyes, HD). Then having dispensed with some 'unnecessary data', does compression begin.
HDV for instance records an Mpeg signal which uses a long GOP of 15 frames which is a highly compressed codec A 'gop' a Group of Pictures refers to basic compression derived from Fourier Transforms leading to Discrete Cosine Transforms or DCT's - GOP's can be any length.
In a Gop, the group of pictures only changes the data where the picture itself changes, so for instance a person against a backdrop moves their eyes and mouth and sometimes their head, sometimes their hands, but the backdrop and the suit stay the same - so why renew these elements if they're the same all the way through the 15 frames. So they don't and the impact of this in recording images as can be seen with any HDV camera which records images using this system is that it handles motion badly. It is this kind of artefact that exercises the Director's of Photography, imaging technicians and post production technicians so much: Their eyes are attuned to pick up this stuff and yell like hell when they see them. If you allow these through then even the digital realm will disintegrate from copy to copy, or from tape to streaming or DVD or broadcast. This to my mind is one use of Discrete Cosine Transform which describes just how much damage can be done to the data/signal in its passage through the film making process.
One last description of Wavelet's as they have the power to metaphorise the Digital Moment - This from Amara Graps:
"The fundamental idea behind wavelets is to analyze according to scale. Indeed, some researchers in the wavelet field feel that, by using wavelets, one is adopting a whole new mindset or perspective in processing data.
Wavelets are functions that satisfy certain mathematical requirements and are used in representing data or other functions. This idea is not new. Approximation using superposition of functions has existed since the early 1800's, when Joseph Fourier discovered that he could superpose sines and cosines to represent other functions. However, in wavelet analysis, the scale that we use to look at data plays a special role. Wavelet algorithms process data at different scales or resolutions. If we look at a signal with a large "window," we would notice gross features. Similarly, if we look at a signal with a small "window," we would notice small features. The result in wavelet analysis is to see both the forest and the trees, so to speak.
This makes wavelets interesting and useful. For many decades, scientists have wanted more appropriate functions than the sines and cosines which comprise the bases of Fourier analysis, to approximate choppy signals (1). By their definition, these functions are non-local (and stretch out to infinity). They therefore do a very poor job in approximating sharp spikes. But with wavelet analysis, we can use approximating functions that are contained neatly in finite domains. Wavelets are well-suited for approximating data with sharp discontinuities.
The wavelet analysis procedure is to adopt a wavelet prototype function, called an analyzing wavelet or mother wavelet. Temporal analysis is performed with a contracted, high-frequency version of the prototype wavelet, while frequency analysis is performed with a dilated, low-frequency version of the same wavelet. Because the original signal or function can be represented in terms of a wavelet expansion (using coefficients in a linear combination of the wavelet functions), data operations can be performed using just the corresponding wavelet coefficients. And if you further choose the best wavelets adapted to your data, or truncate the coefficients below a threshold, your data is sparsely represented. This sparse coding makes wavelets an excellent tool in the field of data compression.
Other applied fields that are making use of wavelets include astronomy, acoustics, nuclear engineering, sub-band coding, signal and image processing, neurophysiology, music, magnetic resonance imaging, speech discrimination, optics, fractals, turbulence, earthquake-prediction, radar, human vision, and pure mathematics applications such as solving partial differential equations."
For much more information on wavelets go to: http://www.amara.com/current/wavelet.html
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