Remember: A lens is not guaranteed to perform in a 5-Mpixel camera simply because it is specified as a 5-Mpixel lens.

Edmund Optics and Schneider Optics explain aspects of matching one technology’s advances with another’s.

Pictures and arrows at the following link:

Matching Lenses and Sensors

With pixel sizes of CCD and CMOS image sensors becoming smaller, system integrators must pay careful attention to their choice of optics

Greg Hollows and Stuart Singer—Mar 1, 2009

Each year, sensor manufacturers fabricate sensors with smaller pixel sizes. About 15 years ago, it was common to find sensors with pixels as small as 13 µm. It is now common to find sensors with standard 5-µm pixel sizes. Recently, sensor manufacturers have produced pixel sizes of 1.4 µm without considering lens performance limits. It is also common to find sensors that contain 5 Mpixels and individual pixel sizes of 3.45 µm. In the next generation of image sensors, some manufacturers expect to produce devices with pixel sizes as small as 1.75 µm.

David Zanit writes a nice piece in StudentFilmmakers Magazine which brings out points that one doesn’t think of until they need to be handled.

“…I wanted the shot to start calm, and then, with no warning turn chaotic. The point was to illustrate how our characters had to live in a constant state of unease never knowing when the next attack would be. I suggested we try to cover the scene in one moving take. The shot started handheld high up on a crane looking down into the camp. After a moment, the explosions started. As the explosions moved through the camp, the crane lowered, and the camera stepped off the crane and moved quickly forward through the camp.

To achieve this, the grip department had to get a special “walk around” platform for our crane. I stood on the platform wearing a safety harness that was attached to the crane. Another grip went up in the crane with me to help safety me and help with the camera before we started rolling. When the crane lowered to the ground, several grips had to step onto the crane to make up for the lost counterweight when I stepped off (to make sure the crane arm did not shoot back up into the air). They also had to unfasten me from the crane. All of this had to happen very fast; it was absolutely crucial that I did not step off early.

Standing on the crane with a mask to protect me from the dust.

Once off the crane, I still had to run forward into the camp with our very skilled pyro technicians making sure I was always safe from the explosions. My team did a great job pulling off this very difficult shot.

Read the entire piece at:
Lighting Period War Film, Shades of Hope | 
Separating Worlds through Color

Times of transition bring out the iconoclasts and entrenched white papers and no end of forum discussions. In his latest Digital Content Producer article, D.W. Leitner cuts through the arguments with a paraphrase from James Carville: It’s the audience, stupid. He’s going to Park City with the partner he brought to production, long GOP MPEG2, and he’s sticking to his decision.

He makes an end-around to discussions that started years ago and are still going on in the forums; compression, long gop, is/is not ‘good enough’. And why not? As he points out, A) He did the tests at the time, with the technology available, and B) the technology has gotten him the product he needed at the budget he had in a manner he considered painless compared to a previous headache project. In the process he mentions that the technology performed without dropouts during the recording phase, a comment that is mirrored in technical papers (albeit a Sony Broadcast document), as well as many forum comments – the post production phase also is easier and has fewer dropouts while handling more data than H.264 variations.

So, who is to knock it? Use what works.

Except – that we are in a transition that has moved startling fast – 1080i was defensible until 1080p showed up in every home for less than a 1,000 moneyunits, as well as multi-processor computers and the NLE software to support them. The testing has to keep repeating as each technology ripens. For example, Phillip Bloom makes an astounding presentation which doesn’t once attempt defense, instead showing all the same ideals of cost and quality for camera technology that wouldn’t have been discussed by movie pros 3 years ago (and then, only to disqualify.)

The good news is that the horrors of the unresolvable video delivery and presentation format wars didn’t allow a merely ‘good enough’ standard to inhibit innovation the way that 16-bit audio became.

[Editor: It seems a pity to cut any part of this brilliant lesson in art and technology by D.W. (David) Leitner (IMDB link). The except here is from the middle, but it is understatement to say that you should read the whole piece, beginning to end.
Proof in the Pudding where Red One is Concerned | Leitner’s Cinematography Corner | Millimeter

…

Or, as a counter example, view a 35mm print of Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant, also shot with a Red One.

Reviewing The Informant in the Washington Post on Sept. 18, staff writer Ann Hornaday writes that: 

As with his last two projects, the “Che” films and “The Girlfriend Experience,” Soderbergh filmed “The Informant!” on the Red Camera, a digital system that is lightweight, nimble and particularly well-suited to filming without added lights. The result with “The Informant!” is a desaturated palette and spontaneous style that recall movies made in the 1970s. (In many of the scenes, the protagonists are backlit by blurry, unruly flares of light — shots that most directors would reject as unusable. But Soderbergh embraces what might be considered a technical flaw and makes it a design element.)

I mean no personal disrespect, but what a load of hooey. Not the part about the style of movies made in the ’70s (also questionable), but the part about being “particularly well-suited to filming without added lights.” On what does she base this remarkable insight? That Red One is more light-sensitive than either film or other digital cameras (wrong, wrong), or handles highlights or shadows in a superior manner (wrong)?

The roots of motion picture lighting can be traced back 100 years to the single-digit ASAs of early orthochromatic Kodak …

… Soderbergh told me he intends never to shoot film again…

… a total of three shots involved the use of additional lighting.

Soderbergh has made an artistic choice here, one having nothing to do with the particular creative possibilities inherent to a Red One. …

… you forget about technical choices.

But I knew by its grain-free, low-light look it was shot digitally. By comparison—and this came as total shock to my system—I didn’t realize Antichrist was shot digitally until the credits rolled.