Thomson Broadcast Solutions Secures Order From ARRI MEDIA for Viper FilmStream Cameras
A Thomson (Paris Euronext: 18453) (NYSE: TMS) business, Thomson Broadcast Solutions delivers open, integrated digital products that work together along the entire digital video chain to support a variety of workflows, from content capture and acquisition through production, post production, and transmission. It offers an award-winning, robust product portfolio that touches more high-quality content than any other; product and systems expertise that has yielded hundreds of patents and a number of industry standards; and worldwide software engineering expertise and customer support teams second to none.
"Viper represents a significant improvement in digital image capture and will increase our ability to supply the best tools for our clients," said Bill Lovell, video manager of ARRI MEDIA. "We will provide a higher level of support and back up for those choosing the Viper FilmStream Camera for their productions, no matter which format they choose."
The Viper FilmStream Camera can be configured to output traditional high-definition video, 24p digital video, and the unprocessed 10-bit log 4:4:4 RGB FilmStream signal. Available with the Viper cameras is innovative hard disk recording technology from Director's Friend and DigiPrime® lenses from ZEISS.
"This first order for the Viper FilmStream Camera brings unparalleled digital image capture to the UK and all of Europe," said Marc Valentin, vice president of the Thomson Broadcast Solutions. "By adding the Viper camera to its film, digital cinema, and video rental inventory, ARRI MEDIA now provides the most advanced choice in image capture to its clients."
Capturing Every Bit of Information
The Viper FilmStream Camera differs from other forms of electronic and digital image acquisition in that it captures every bit of information a scene has to offer in a non-destructive, transparent, and reproducible way—with no traditional video processing. The camera's optical block contains three unique HDDPM™ Frame Transfer 9.2 megapixel CCDs for a total of 27.6 million pixels. This design lets the camera work in several progressive scan formats: 1080 lines at 24/25/30 frames per second as well as 720 lines at 50/60 frames per second. In addition, when set in the 720 lines mode at 60 frames per second, it offers slow-motion effects at many different playback speeds during post-production.
"ARRI MEDIA has always believed in providing the appropriate tools and technologies as part of our rental inventory," said Graham Anderson, managing director of ARRI MEDIA. "Whether producing in film, 24p digital cinema, high definition, or now FilmStream, we continue to provide the choices that producers have come to expect from ARRI MEDIA."
Using the Viper in FilmStream mode, post-production tools are able to utilize all of the photons captured by the camera's 27.6 million CCD pixels across three images. Post-production operators can then change the visual and emotional impression in a picture in any way, since no information has been lost through video pre-processing and filtering.
To achieve its true film-like output, the CCD signals of the Viper FilmStream Camera, from pure black to CCD saturation, are captured with 12-bit A/D converters and then converted to RGB data values using 10-bit logarithmic calculations. These calculations enable the camera's output to look more like film than any other digital cinematography system available, while taking advantage of the full dynamic range every CCD (red, green, and blue) has to offer.
The Viper camera's FilmStream datastream is transferred for recording using a dual HD-SDI link as a carrier. It maintains full resolution during this process with true progressive 1920 x 1080 pixels for every color—no color sub-sampling, no color space conversions, no irreversible video manipulations, no further quantizations, and no compression. This process also gives Viper FilmStream camera users excellent performance for blue/green screen applications and video effects.
For robust post-production, the Viper FilmStream Camera can transfer its images to the Specter Virtual DataCine, whose toolset includes full-featured color-correction, transition effects, conformance editing, and real-time image manipulations such as zoom, pan scans, and image rotation. The Specter system processes the Viper FilmStream Camera content much the same way as it would process 2K film scans using a full 10-bit log signal. The Viper FilmStream Camera content can co-exist with film scans in the same Specter system. Users can format the output from the Specter system to any SD or DTV video format—and at any frame rate. The system also provides a 2K data derivative for recording back to film for theatrical release.
For traditional high-definition video production, the Viper FilmStream Camera also supports a full resolution RGB video mode and a YUV video mode via a single HD-SDI cable. In these video modes, the camera enables use of all the video-processing tools that modern video and digital cinema cameras have to offer, including several adaptive knee functions, matrices, gammas, black stretch, and coarse and fine detail circuitry. All the features that the Viper FilmStream Camera has to offer, such as a multi-format capability, are available in these video modes.
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