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Digital Bolex Gives You a Classic Film Look in a Digital Package (Video)
Once upon a time, people shot a kind of video called "film." And one of the most popular film camera makers was Bolex. Their 16 mm and Super 16 mm cameras were the favored tools for indie film makers, low budget TV news operations, and film schools. Sure, there were 8mm and Super 8, but they didn't give you the stunning clarity you could get with 16 mm. Besides that, carrying a Bolex was kind of like telling everyone, "Look at me! I'm a professional moviemaker!" And with the cost of processing 16 mm film back in the late 1960s and early 1970s you pretty much had to be a pro -- or at least have access to a TV station or college film lab if you wanted to do any serious movie experimentation. Obviously, times have changed. You can now buy a fairly serious camcorder at a consumer-level price. Or a DSLR that can do video -- and do depth of field tricks hardly any camcorder can match. Even so, if you are a film junkie, you just might want a Digital Bolex. Thanks to a highly successful Kickstarter campaign, it looks like you might be able to buy one before long. Too bad you can't still get Kodachrome film, which was the perfect film for your Bolex. Ah, well. RAW format digital is more or less the 21st Century equivalent of Kodachrome, so it will have to do.
Does it come standard or optional?
Why can't they just call it a RAW format camcorder?
Hipster cache thats why.
Should call it the Instagramcorder.
There's a reason every professional video camera uses a shoulder mount instead these days. The weight may not be as much of an issue now as it was in the U-matic days, but you're still going to get less camera shake when you don't have to balance the camera in one hand.
Well, it does physically resemble one particular Bolex design.
Also, I feel an overwhelming urge to point out that brand name recognition and hence resurrection is not exclusive to hipsters. There have been five "Atari" companies, for example.
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You can buy better than their Digital Bolex from sony on the used market. The VG10 with a lens adapter will do more than that thing ever will for less. and that is the out of date discarded model. the VG30 has a better sensor and does even better, or you can upgrade to the full frame version that gives you only a slight advantage over the VG30.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I just got myself a Bolex diver's model when I was in New York. Guy told me they sell for $3000+ in stores, but he let me have one for just $250. Talk about a bargain!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
To be fair, vinyl only sounds better than CD if you use the recommended Monster cables.
The color saturation, gradation and tonality are far beyond anything digital can do.
This is no longer true. Download some sample source footage from the RED or BlackMagic cameras and have a look. Both their software tools are downloadable last I checked. Amazing stuff.
Unless you're looking at a 1G file size, digital will never be equivalent to Kodachrome.
Yes, the data files coming out of the new cameras shooting in RAW formats are huge.
No, it's just a high-quality uncompressed video camera. It doesn't attempt to reproduce any visual artefacts of its namesakes. The point is that all cheap camcorders output in compressed formats, so an alternative is necessary for small-time film makers who want to do elaborate post-processing.
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It's nothing new. Music producers spend a ton on faux "analog" sounds and guitarists use digital modeling to try to recreate the sound of a distorting tube amplifier.
Right here on my desk is something called a "bullet mic" which allows blues harmonica players to recreate the sound of an old crystal mic like the ones Little Walter used to record at Chess Records. It's actually a recreation, but I can do just about the same thing with a USB condenser mic and a Mac Pro running modeling software. I can even recreate the thick nasty sound of a spring reverb using convolution 'verbs.
Artists have long tried to recreate the look of old oil paint.
There's nothing wrong with it. If art is primarily about memory, then devices like this camera help provide something of a backward-looking palette. That is, if this new Bolex actually recreates the look of the saturated colors of 16mm Kodachrome and isn't just a vanilla digital video camera in an old-looking case.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Technically that's true—but only in the sense that they're emulating a certain kind of film known for its high quality, and are themselves providing something that is high quality. So, um... yeah.
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The new digital DSLR sensors are very, *very* good. They were already awfully good for a while; now they're head and shoulders above film in so many areas.
I have a camera with a sensor that's a quarter-frame compared to film, called the Four Thirds format. Modern sensors of this size are quite good, but I have one of the old "crappy" ones (back before Panasonic figured out how to make decent ones), and even so I can make 16x20" prints off of it at ISO 800 that look great. I don't even think they *make* ISO 800 Kodachrome, do they? Yes, low-light sensitivity isn't the final story in imaging, but for people who shoot wildlife (which tends to move around a lot and requires telephoto lenses with apertures like f/5.6 at the best) it's important. This, remember, is with an old, bad-for-its-time quarter-frame sensor.
As for resolution, a Nikon D800 will give you about 100 line pairs per mm of resolution, but it crucially retains almost full MTF close to that frequency for black and white detail, by the nature of the digital sampling involved. (Color detail is less than that, because of Bayer filtration, but it is in any event not worse than half of Nyquist, and often much better.) Kodachrome, on the other hand, doesn't: the measured contrast decreases smoothly with frequency, and is quite low (Kodak cites MTF at 100 lp/mm=0.001) by 100 lp/mm.
As for dynamic range, at base ISO that D800 sensor will give you something stupid like 14 stops of dynamic range, measured in some sane way (difference between clip point and level where SNR at some fairly high frequency falls to 0 dB, or somesuch). Even the new Four Thirds sensors (the little quarter-frame ones) give something like 12 stops. Can Kodachrome do this, and do it with no color shift?
There is a look you get from film that cannot be duplicated any other way.
No there isn't. There are hundreds of pieces of software dedicated to exactly that. If you really wanted to you could simulate film at a near-molecular level to get it just right. The thing is - and I'm sorry if you feel it's a bad thing - not many people are that interested in approximating film any more. They want to capture their images and have them look good - you could do that with film and now you can do it with digital. And even if there was something about film that just couldn't be emulated in the digital realm, what makes that objectively better? One could just easily claim the inverse.
If you're happy shooting film with all the attendant extra time and effort it takes, great. But why come here sneering at everyone else because they're happier with their high-tech gizmos? Are you the sort of person who gets annoyed because now anyone and his dog can get into what used to be a nice exclusive field?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What is the nature of "working in partnership," I don't know. Hopefully it's a close partnership, because otherwise it seems like you'd be crazy to buy such a complex product from somebody who never made one before, when there are already entrenched, world-class competitors.
RAW format just means the raw, unprocessed data, straight off the image sensor. It's a greyscale image with a stored filter pattern. You can have uncompressed bitmaps that are not RAW. You can have compressed RAWs that are unprocessed. Uncompressed and RAW are two completely independent and non-exclusive properties.
For what it's worth, it would be stupid to operate a video camera in uncompressed mode when hardware stream compressors are so readily available, and are typically good for at least 2:1 compression ratio.
the HR-16 always seemed a little top-heavy to me, but then Canon came along with the Scoopic-16 and Sound-Scoopic to make the Bolex seem balanced.
crank? on a digicam? man, it better telescope and fold back.
and I notice they're pushing Switar lenses. some things never change ;)
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
it's a raw cinema camera, doesn't actually shoot video. emulates film process in that it records 24+ still frames per second in uncompressed raw. to recreate the look of saturated colors is up to you in post, using the highest quality images. there isn't an faux anything being generated or added or recreated, only the idea that you can actually have a quality image come out of a cheap machine.
I spent a few years as a contributing editor and translator for Berlin-based smallformat (the English version of schmalfilm). It was extremely sad to see how the European movie camera manufacturers had been completely unable to competitively shift manufacturing to Asia when the electronic revolution started to take hold in the early 1980s - we basically lost AGFA (Germany) Eumig (Austria), Beaulieu (France) and even the once-might Bolex SA ended up as little more than a repair shop occupying a small part of their old office tower. Here's an article about a melancholy visit to Bolex in early 2005 (originally in German): http://schmalfilm-shop.schiele-schoen.de/115/8170/smf2050748/WHERE_THE_BOSS_OPENS_THE_DOOR.html