It's thermally cooled, and comes with its own traveling server to deal with the 300GB/s data rates. The sensor is housed in the black box behind the orange strut, which appears to be at least a foot wide. However, as we understand it, the theoretical lowest resolution of 21MP with the Cinema sensor means that output resolution shouldn't be a concern for 4K, or even higher-res, video. Final output resolution was a concern with previous Lytro cameras: the Illum yielded roughly 5MP equivalent (sometimes worse) stills from a 40MP sensor. That should mean that at worst, you'd get 755/36, or roughly 21MP final video output. Which is exactly what Lytro did - the sensor housing appeared to our eyes to be over a foot in width, sporting a whopping 755 million total pixels. A 6圆 pixel array underneath each microlens means there are 36 pixels for every 1 pixel on a traditional camera so to maintain spatial resolution, you need to grow your sensor, and your total number of pixels.
That huge light field sensor gets you unreal f-stops down to F0.3 or fasterīut all this doesn't come without a cost: the Lytro Cinema appears massive, and rightfully so. The sensor housing appears to be over a foot wide. A Lytro representative claimed even faster apertures can be simulated. You could open that aperture up to F1.0 in post, and at the demo of Cinema at NAB, Lytro impressed its audience with - we kid you not - F0.3 depth-of-field footage. F2.0 constant aperture lens in relatively small and lightweight body. That's what allowed the Illum camera to house a 30-250mm equiv. Speaking of F0.3 (yes, you read that right), light field allows you to simulate faster (and smaller) apertures previous thought impossible in post, which in turn places fewer demands on lens design. You can even isolate shallow or extended depth-of-field to different objects in the scene using focus spread: say F5.6 for a face to get it all in focus, but F0.3 for the rest of the scene. * Selective depth-of-field is also available in post: you can choose whether you want shallow, or extended, depth-of-field, or even transition from selective to extensive depth-of-field in your timeline. You can focus your image after the fact, which saves critical focus and focus approach (its cadence) for post. The multiple perspectives captured mean you can generate 3D images or video from every shot at any desired parallax disparity (3D filmmakers often have to choose their disparity on-set, only able to optimize for one set of viewing conditions). We've focused on depth screening and perspective shift, but let's not forget all the other benefits light field brings.
With light field, though, those decisions are reversible. There are two optical paths, one for the actual light field capture, and the other for previewing the live view and dialing in creative decisions like exposure, focus and depth-of-field at the time of capture. Think Animoto on steroids.įront of the Lytro Cinema, on display at NAB 2016. Even from a consumer perspective, consider what auto-curation of user-generated content could do with tools like these. It's not clear yet what that range of freedom is with the Cinema, but what we saw in the short film was impressive, something cinematographers will undoubtedly welcome in place of setting up motion rigs for small camera movements. The 36 different perspectives affords you some freedom of movement in moving a virtual camera in post, but it is of course limited, affected by considerations like lens, focal length, and subject distance. There will be 36 of these 'sub-aperture' images though, each providing one of 36 different perspectives, which then allows for computational reconstruction of the image with all the benefits of light field. The difference, though, is that there is a 6圆 pixel array underneath each microlens, meaning that the image made up of only pixels on the sensor at any position (X,Y) underneath a microlens represents the scene as seen through one portion, or 'sub-aperture' of the lens. Head of Light Field Video Jon Karafin explains that in front of the sensor sits a microlens array consisting of millions of small lenses similar to what traditional cameras have. The Lytro Cinema is capable of capturing these multiple perspectives because of 'sub-aperture imaging'.