Lytro's first professional cinema camera could be a real game-changer

Shawn Knight

Posts: 15,254   +192
Staff member

Lytro, the imaging startup that introduced the world to the concept of post-focusing via its light field technology, said a few years back that it intended to bring its innovative concepts to other fields outside of consumer photography including virtual reality and professional filmmaking.

In November, Lytro unveiled its first light field-based virtual reality camera, the Immerge. Now, the company is turning its attention to cinema and broadcast with a new camera it’s calling the Lytro Cinema.

Lytro claims its new camera delivers benefits that even today’s top industry tools aren’t capable of. Brendan Bevensee, Lytro’s lead engineer for light field video, says it offers the ability to capture everything about a scene including different perspectives, focal planes and apertures. This, Bevensee adds, means that every pixel now has color and directional properties as well as exact placement in 3D space.

Or in other words, it’s a virtual reality camera that can be controlled in post-production. With it, you can adjust the focus point to any point you wish, shift the camera to the left or the right, move it in and out and control frame rate – all after the fact. There’s even a feature called Depth Screen that lets videographers impose artificial green screens in post-production, eliminating the need for true green screens to create CG content.

Lytro says the Cinema camera has the highest-resolution video sensor ever designed. Every frame has 775 RAW megapixels and 16 stops of dynamic range and it can record at up to 300 frames per second. The camera enables multiple render options including IMAX, RealD, Dolby Vision and ACES.

Lytro plans to debut its first short created using the Cinema camera as the National Association of Broadcasters trade show later this week.

Permalink to story.

 
I'll believe it when I see it. Lytro has a history of making bold claims like these and to grossly over-exaggerate what their cameras can do. They boasted the same way about their first two cameras and they turned out to be over-priced, under performing novelty items that nobody wanted.
 
I'll believe it when I see it. Lytro has a history of making bold claims like these and to grossly over-exaggerate what their cameras can do. They boasted the same way about their first two cameras and they turned out to be over-priced, under performing novelty items that nobody wanted.
The only reason to buy a lytro product is if you don't know how to take a picture. Considering that people don't know they don't know how to take a picture, they're perfectly happy with the camera on their phone
 
Back