Digital Bolex Sample Raw Frames

Canon 50mm Corrected

Elle and Joe have posted the first raw sample frames from the Digital Bolex.

On Wednesday we eagerly waited in the conference room as Mike had the guys put some final firmware updates on the camera. They brought it in, the sides were taken off, but the display was on. This was the first time we could hold the camera and see the display live. It was an amazing experience. This thing we had been dreaming about was finally working in our hands.

Read more here and download the samples for yourself. If I read the post correctly, these were not captured at 24fps, but they are raw frames from the production sensor.

Congrats guys. Like you say, these images aren’t perfect (there’s a bit of a grid pattern in the Elitar frame, for example), but holy crap, you made a camera.

Here are the three sample DNG frames at both the Lightroom 5 default settings (remember, there’s no such thing as “straight out of the camera” with raw) and color graded by me using Lightroom 5. Click to see the full-res images.

Canon 50mm Lightroom 5 DefaultsElitar Lightroom 5 DefaultsElitar CorrectedPizar Lightroom 5 DefaultsPizar Corrected

Apparently You Bought Some Bolexes

Joe Rubinstein has posted a lengthy and detailed update on the Digital Bolex, including some historical perspective.

I was particularly gratified to read this (something Elle Schneider had also mentioned in an interview):

At the end of the day, We reached our personal goal of $250k on our kickstarter campaign and sold out of cameras within 36 hours of our launch and, according to Kickstarter reports, we sold more cameras due to Stu’s blogs than any other single external site.

Now Joe and Elle know what I’ve known all along—I may have a smaller audience than some of the other filmmaking blogs out there, but my audience is the real deal. They think for themselves, they actually shoot, and they put their money where their mouths are.

The Passion of the Bolex

My last post focussed on some concerns and questions I had about the Digital Bolex Kickstarter campaign. Despite stating numerous times that “I really want these guys to win,” I didn’t spend much time talking about what I liked about their project—and have thus unwittingly been cast as a vicarious mouthpiece for some far more negative appraisers than myself.

I could have mentioned that I appreciate any camera concept that sets out to capture the highest-quality image and bring it home unadulterated. I could have pointed out the planned on-board XLR inputs and metal construction. I could have talked up the compact size, or the affordable price. I could have cast these positives against the embarrassing backdrop of expensive, brick-shaped cameras made of cheap plastic that hammer your footage into an over-compressed pulp before committing it to a CF card, offered by camera companies with high-end markets to protect.

But all that stuff now pales against my new favorite thing about the Digital Bolex: how its creators reacted to my blog post.

Three days after launching their campaign, which funded successfully in less than 24 hours and has now well exceeded its outside target of $250,000, who do the Digital Bolex creators want to talk to? The grumpy guy who posted a bunch of concerns and tough questions.

Elle was a good sport about my post right away on Twitter, but Joe also sought me out via the Prolost contact form. We had a delightful chat this morning via phone. Joe specifically wants to connect with filmmakers who have reasonable concerns. He sees thoughtful critique as an opportunity, not an attack.

You know, like all our favorite camera makers.

Joe is so mellow in the Kickstarter video that I was immediately taken aback by how enthusiastic and passionate he was on the phone. He and his partners have an idea that seems so simple to them that he’s shocked they’re (nearly) the only ones doing it. Here’s some of what we talked about:

• The reason Joe feels they can make this camera at the price they’ve set is that it is the simplest possible digital camera—just a sensor and a card slot, with the bare minimum of electronics in between. He points out rightly that the D16 needs to do far less than any of the many far less expensive video cameras out there. A $200 flip camera requires more processing power than what they’ve envisioned, because it needs to debayer, color-space-convert, and compress the footage in real time.

• Joe harkened back to the days of the original Bolex and other 16mm film cameras, when the camera “didn’t affect the image quality at all, it just carried the film.” “[The Digital Bolex] is just the carrier between the sensor and the card.”

• Joe’s other passion is about on-set monitoring and the ubiquitous flip-out LCD panel on digital video cameras. He hates them—or rather, hates that they’ve taken the trust away from the director/cinematographer relationship. The director sees the ugly little image and thinks that’s what their movie is going to look like, instead of listening to the DP. “That little LCD has robbed the independent film industry of cinematography.”

• If there’s one criticism Joe’s sick of hearing, it’s “If Red couldn’t do it, how can these guys?”—a chorus of which I must confess to being a part. Of course, the situation is more nuanced than that. Red was aiming for an integrated, electronic zoom lens at that price point, as well as all the powerful internal computing horsepower required to compress Redcode footage.

  Ultimately, it seems clear to me that Red chose not to pursue the 3K Scarlet rather than “failed” to deliver it. “We recently came to the conclusion that, indeed, we cater to the professional market,” wrote Jim Jannard. “We want to build the best tools possible for those that want to ‘man up.’ Life is short and the clock is ticking.”

• Amazingly, Joe expressed the same sentiment, but carried it in a much different direction: “You only have so much time in this life,” he said to me. “I want to spend mine having fun.” I can think of no better expression of the difference between Digital Bolex’s lofty camera promises and Red’s.

• They’re not kids building these cameras in a garage. They have manufacturing partners who know how to bring camera stuff to market.

• I asked Joe about the 4:4:4 descriptor on their site. He said it was pulled directly from Kodak’s documentation of the CCD sensor, and that he realizes it’s misleading in the context of a raw workflow.

• Joe has a background in image software and is very interested in debayering techniques. He’s researching how to provide the best quality 1:1 2K RGB renderings of the D16’s raw DNG files. Now that they’ve hit the $250K mark, raw processing software is a part of what they plan on delivering to their backers.

• But the Digital Bolex also lists JPEG and TIFF output, so real-time debayering is in the plans. Joe estimates that a high-quality JPEG frame could be about 1/3 the size of a DNG frame.

Unlike some seem to, I get no joy from fearing the worst about a project like this. I wasn’t very happy about writing Tuesday’s post, and while most of you got it, the easily-inferred negativity that I tried to dampen with honest optimism was enough to bring the internet to my door, resulting in my first opportunity in months to delete a couple of nasty comments.

Now I’m glad I wrote what I did though, because, as a result, I have a new friend who makes cameras. Thanks for taking the time Joe, and a hearty congratulation and best of luck to you and the Digital Bolex team. Maybe some of my readers will ask themselves the same question I posed to myself: In your short time on this Earth, would you rather be a pessimist and be proven right? Or an optimist who’s occasionally wrong?

Digital Bolex

My inbox this morning was crammed with mentions of a new Kickstarter campaign for a 2K digital cinema camera called, with the blessing of the nominal company, the Digital Bolex. Philip Bloom has done a terrific job of summing up the camera’s specs and raison d’être in a blog post provocatively titled The Digital Bolex D16. Raw 2K for less than a cost of a 5Dmk3?. He’s even got an audio interview with the creators, Joe Rubinstein and Elle Schneider.

In the time it’s taken me to retrieve coffee and fight my way through the rain to my desk, the campaign has funded—but there are still open pledge spots at the $2,500 mark, which earns you a first-run D16 for $800 less than the planned retail price. Less than 24 hours after launching their campaign, the Digital Bolex is a success. Hooray! Right?

I hope so. But color me… skeptimistic.

Like Philip, I also have fond memories of shooting 16mm film with a Bolex. And I can see where Elle and Joe are coming from with their design philosophy:

There is no camera on the market that offers affordable RAW quality to consumers and independent filmmakers. The Digital Bolex will mean filmmakers who prefer an uncompressed and “film like” look won’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve that. Isn’t it time for the digital generation to have image quality as good as our parents had?

Aren’t these two just adorkable? I desperately want them to succeed.

But after watching the well-financed and well-intentioned Red Digital Cinema company struggle to deliver on their promises, and abandon the “3K for $3K” design/price-point of their Scarlet camera, one has to wonder if these flmmakers-turned-cameramakers have any idea of the challenges they’re about to face.

I wish no ill on anyone. I really want these guys to win. But there are a few things that give me pause as I consider whether to send these kids my heard-earned money.

• “Raw” is just a word, it’s not an acronym. So you don’t put it in all caps. Don’t you want to buy a camera made by someone who knows that? No? Just me?
• The spec sheet lists the color depth of the files as “12 bit — 4:4:4”. But the accepted understanding of a bayer-pattern sensor is that it does not deliver 4:4:4 color at its native resolution.
• That’s important. Take a nice, sharp, raw photo with your DSLR, and process it with your favorite software, such as the awesome new Lightroom 4. Now crop a 1:1 1920x1080 window out of the middle of it. Does the image quality thrill you? There’s more to Red’s 4K and 5K specs than simple pixel-count boasting and dreams of 4K presentation. Oversampling is a good thing. The 3K scarlet was as low as Red was willing to go, I imagine in part because 3K bayer downsamples to a nice, clean 1920x1080. The Canon C300 uses a 4K sensor to provide full 4:4:4 color sampling at HD resolution, even if it offers no way to get that color sampling fidelity out of the casing.
• Raw is big. The D16 is said to shoot uncompressed Cinema DNG frames of 2–3 MB each (which seems small to me) to dual CF cards. If each of those is 32 GB, that’s about 18 minutes of recording time per reload, on $130 worth of media at today’s prices.
• Raw requires transcoding. When you get home with your CF cards full of footage, you’ll be processing it with some as-yet-unknown software for a good long time before you can work with it, or even review it. I suppose you could think of this as reminiscent of sending your 16mm rolls to the lab. Except you’re the lab.
• All this adds up to a huge data footprint for images that might not be as mythologically “film like” as one would hope. For me, personally—and you are welcome to disagree, as this is a subjective as it gets—uncompressed 2K bayer is precisely the “sour spot” of digital cinema; a data-heavy, workflow-intensive image that won’t survive much pixel-peeping.
• Monitoring and focus could be an issue. The cute little viewfinder is planned to be only 320x240. Video out is also SD. HD-SDI is said to be offered “in [a] separate unit.”
• We’ve had a fun ride together over the past few years working out for ourselves what a “film like” look means to us and to an audience. Is it uncompressed 2K frames? Or is it soft, rolled-off highlights? Maybe it’s 35mm depth of field characteristics. Or maybe it’s just where you put the camera.
• Or maybe part of the new “film look” is “Look, I’m editing my film on my MacBook Air on the ride home from the shoot, because I shot to a mildly-compressed codec that’s compatible with my editing software.”
• But don’t discount 16mm sensor size. Two years ago, a film shot on Super 16 won the Best Picture Oscar—and was nominated for Cinematography, where it lost to a movie shot on 2/3” digital cameras.
• This camera almost already exists in the form of the A-Cam dll from Ikonoskop, a Swedish 16mm camera manufacturer. You can order one now for €7,700 ($10,000 US). It’s interesting that the Digital Bolex team, in celebrating the legacy of one European 16mm camera maker, is effectively claiming the ability to beat another at the digital game.

I Worry Because I Care

I’ve funded a few Kickstarter campaigns, and it’s never lost on me that It’s an odd (but kind of exciting) thing to send a stranger your money in the hopes that they’ll send you a thing sometime in the future. Joe and Elle remind me of another breakout Kickstarter project, the PID-Controlled Espresso Machine. Two adorable, scruffy guys promise something that seems too good to be true—a commercial-quality, temperature- and pressure-regulated espresso machine for a $200 pledge.

For comparison, my dual-boiler, temperature-controlled espresso machine costs $2,000 today. I recently had the PID unit replaced, and the part cost alone was over $300.

These guys were hoping for $20,000. They funded successfully—at $369,569.

They win! Right?

Well another way of looking at that is they have $370,000 of other people’s money, and less than a year to deliver 1,300 commercial-quality espresso machines to eager backers, at a price-point that no one in the coffee industry has ever touched. Have they promised the impossible?

What do they do when they hit a snag? When something costs more than they thought? When life gets in the way? When they realize they just volunteered to work their asses off for a year for a combined salary of whatever profit they can scrape from that investment that thousands of people have made?

If responsible Italians (or in my case, Spaniards) need to charge upwards of $1,500 for an burly espresso machine, and trusty Swedes need to charge $10,000 for a digital 16mm camera, one has to ask: Do scruffy hipsters know something that responsible Italians and trusty Swedes do not?

What a Grumpy Gus I am (did I mention it’s raining?). Why can’t I just be happy for these guys? Look at their adorable glasses! Every industry needs a shake-up now and then, someone to come in with a fresh perspective and no entrenched interests. Remember “Here’s to the crazy ones?”

I worry because I care. I want it to work out, I really do. Count me in for a dollar.

Check out the Digital Bolex Kickstarter page. Follow @digitalbolex on Twitter. And don’t miss the follow-up.

Update on Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at 2:52PM by Stu

A few updates:

• Folks have gently pointed out that Joe has a professional background in sensors and software.
• The Digital Bolex FAQ lists the frame size as 3.5 MB, which is more in keeping with sample frames from the 1920x1080, 12-bit Ikonoskop camera. So that’s 13 minutes on two 32 GB cards.
• Elle is a sport.
• Swedes.