Waterloo, ON-based DALSA Corporation is venturing into the world of moviemaking on a grand scale with its new Origin digital cinematography camera.

Starting this month, the Origin, the world’s first 4K digital motion picture camera, promising resolution on par with film, will be rented out through the company’s new Hollywood-based facility.

DALSA spokesperson Patrick Myles says the company has high hopes that Origin will become the camera of choice for cinematographers in motion picture production.

Origin uses a digital-imaging chip that offers four times the resolution of high-definition video, allowing the camera to capture film-like image quality not seen before in digital, he explains.

Since Origin has an 8-megapixel, 4K x 2K film-sized image sensor, cinematographers can utilize the same lenses they would on film cameras. The Origin also has a reflex viewing system exactly the same as a film camera’s.

Myles says the camera’s resolution and exposure latitude set it apart from other popular high-end digital cameras such as the Thomson Viper and Sony HDW-F900.

Like film, only digital

‘You’ve got an industry that uses film cameras [96% of the time] because the exposure latitude is very good,’ he says. ‘With HD, you don’t have the same detail handling, resolution or exposure latitude as film, meaning shadows will become black or crushed, for example. Film has the ability to get shadow and highlight detail.’

In addition to its film-like qualities, the Origin benefits from some of the cost aspects of digital origination.

‘While most films are now being scanned at 4K, with Origin there is no film, but images still come in at the higher 4K resolution,’ says Myles. ‘There’s a fairly significant cost in film scanning of raw footage, but with digital you’re bypassing that entire step.’

DALSA, a publicly traded semiconductor and electronics company, has a long history in imaging, but not until recently had it targeted the motion picture industry.

That came about in the late 1990s, when DALSA was approached by Japanese broadcaster NHK to develop a custom chip for tests it was conducting for the next generation of HDTV.

‘NHK was looking at resolution that was four times that of HDTV, so the chip we developed for them was used as part of their research,’ explains Myles.

Following the NHK project, Hollywood came knocking.

‘The Hollywood community is searching for ways to replace film in motion pictures, and they liked the imaging capabilities of DALSA with respect to resolution, image quality and speed of capture,’ says Myles.

The company set up a research initiative called Digital Cinema in 2000, enlisting the expertise of members of the production community as it continued to develop a complete camera system and sensor. Among those who participated were Denny Clairmont of Clairmont Camera in North Hollywood and Ed DeGiulio of Cinema Products, who also helped develop the Steadicam with inventor Garrett Brown.

On April 7, 2003, DALSA debuted its Origin camera prototype at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas and walked away with four industry awards, including Digital Cinema Magazine’s Premiere Product Award and the 2003 Mario Award from TV Technology Magazine.

Montreal director of photography Daniel Vincelette (Le Marais, Leaving Metropolis) visited DALSA’s Waterloo facility after hearing about the Origin camera. ‘I was flabbergasted when I saw the images that originated on the camera,’ he says. ‘It was the first time I saw digital images that could compare to film.’

Since at that point DALSA only had images shot by students, Vincelette offered to arrange a shoot in Montreal whereby Origin would be put to the test on a short film. When DALSA agreed, Vincelette approached producer Francois Leclerc of Zicatela Films to help set up a test-shoot project.

In February 2004, over a period of five days, production took place on Le Gant /The Glove, a seven-and-a-half-minute film about a man who obsesses about a glove he picks up that belonged to a beautiful woman.

The movie was shot simultaneously using the Origin prototype and an Arriflex 435 35mm motion picture film camera.

‘We had the Origin prototype, which basically was a steel box with the electronic parts in it, with lenses and an optical viewfinder on it, and we used it as we would any other camera,’ Vincelette recalls. ‘It worked very well on set.’

Apart from Vincelette, four other Quebec cinematographers contributed to the project. The team also included René Villeneuve of Villeneuve Media Technologies, who supervised the post-production at Laboratoires Éclair in Paris (which happened to be posting Oliver Stone’s Alexander at the time.)

Villeneuve says the 35mm and digital images of Le Gant were finished in the exact same fashion. ‘Both 4K digital masters that resulted were then output to film, and this is what was compared,’ he explains. ‘We found that the sharpness and color reproduction of both versions were highly similar.’

Besides the advantages of digital projection over film projection, including evenness of screen illumination, absence of dirt and scratches, and rock-steady image stability, Villeneuve says the team also noticed the film-like appearance of the DALSA-shot material and the added sharpness it delivered on the screen.

Vincelette agrees the images were great, but adds that, in the short term, the camera is best suited to studio productions with big budgets.

‘Origin generates a huge amount of data, so you need to have a recording bank that can take that data and can store it,’ he notes. ‘There are not many places in the world where you can work with 4K data and post-produce it affordably.’

Villeneuve concedes that top-end digital imaging is still a work-in-progress. ‘To try to compare it to the mature and steady film technology is a waste of time,’ he says. ‘We have to view digital imaging for what it really is – an enabler and a creative tool that needs to be challenged and harnessed all the time.’

Le Gant’s digital and film footage was screened to members of the industry at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival as part of the Digital Vanguard panel.

DALSA’s Digital Cinema Center in Woodland Hills, CA (a suburb of Los Angeles), with exclusive distribution rights, is currently the only place cinematographers can get their hands on Origin. Myles says DOPs can come in and actually do some test shooting with Origin, post-produce on site and view the footage in a screening room. The camera costs US$3,000 per day to rent.

Meanwhile, DALSA says it will announce collaborations on a number of new productions this year, including feature films.

-www.dalsa.com