Hey everyone! It’s been a busy few days in Bolex land. We got back from Vegas on Thursday night, and we’re already back in the office fielding phone calls and meetings. For those of you who weren’t able to get out to NAB this year, I thought it would be fun to do a quick recap of our experience.
One of the fun things we are showing at NAB is a set of prototype Kish Lenses. This post goes into some more details about the lenses, their look, and the quality testing.
We’re at NAB! And we’re so excited to show off everything we’re working on tomorrow. For those of you at the show, you can find us at the Pomfort booth, C8441, in the Central Hall. Come on by and check us out!
One of the reasons we decided to team up with Pomfort for NAB was, of course, to show off the new transcoding software they’re building for the D16. We have the first version of the software up and running, and it’s looking great.
If you remember from the first blog post about the software back in January, we’re separating the functions of transcoding into four “rooms” – Copy, Organize, Color, and Export (with Edit coming later). Here’s a quick look at how the software actually works: Continue reading “Pomfort Software Demo at NAB” »
Mike arrived a few hours ago with the cameras. I had gotten a report last week that we had finally conquered the frame buffer, and we were now piecing together the four quadrants of the sensor and tweaking the final image. The engineering team told me that image wasn’t quite perfect, but looked OK. I wasn’t sure what they meant, I guess I pictured something that was kinda flat or grey that could be pushed in post, after all we’re shooting raw!
What in fact was going on was a strange kind of vertical streaking and a quadrant problem. When the camera was still the problem wasn’t obvious, but when the camera was moving a lot you could see it.
Last week I was so excited, We were going to have working cameras for NAB, Illya had committed to getting a prototype of the PL mount, Lumatechnic had agreed to lend us some amazing S16mm PL lenses, our Kish lens prototypes are ready for display, Hive lent us a plasma light, and a cool new company called Model Box made us a unique D16 display.
I was up all night basically torturing myself with this question: Do we show the not so good images tomorrow? On one hand the images show how far we have come and how close we are to our goal, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that we can’t. There would simply be too many eyes on those images. We have come so far, even since SXSW, and I know that the people who have followed our progress would understand that the image will improve, but I don’t think everyone else would understand. I don’t want their first impression to be these imperfect images.
The reality is we have chosen the longer road, the path less traveled. The CCD sensor we are working with looks more natural to our eyes than most CMOS sensors, but its elements are much more complicated to design. Making the many changes to the camera that our backers requested made the D16 into a much better product, with amazing potential and capabilities as a long term investment camera. This is a long term project with a long term commitment, one tradeshow is not the measure of it.
It was really one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make, but in the end I decided to hold off showing images till they’re right. For some the goal is to make something that is good enough and get it out quick, but we don’t want to make a camera that is good enough, we want to make a camera that is great!
So we are going to wait to show footage till it is as good as we know it can be. I spoke with our Canadian team late tonight and they are more committed than ever to making this happen as soon as possible, and we already have some leads on ways to crunch the delivery time to a matter of weeks. I hope you all understand my position on this. And if you’re at the tradeshow please come by, we’ll be there, partially working cameras will be there, and a beta version of the software too!
And for all of you that can’t come I wanted to show you how awesome the Hotrod Cameras PL mount really is…
Thank you all for your patience and understanding, Joe and the entire Digital Bolex Team.
Hey gang. Now that we’re rapidly approaching the final camera, I wanted to share some pictures and information about the camera’s UI, so you can start to get familiar with it and ask us any questions you might have.
