RED has just confirmed that the first major film to use its new 8K camera is the highly anticipated Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 from Marvel Cinematics.
While the main camera, the 8K WEAPON Vista Vision/full 35mm format, is much more than most of us need now, big Hollywood movies can still find a way to take advantage of higher resolution and higher frame rates. This camera is slowly starting to hit RED users who have booked it, but as always with the latest technology, this high-level camera will be used primarily for a great show. Do the actions of the 8K DRAGON sensor have similar image characteristics?like pixel size, color and dynamic range, just like the 6K DRAGON sensor, but it’s much larger.
Here’s a little more of RED’s press release about this new camera
“We are all excited to create the next Guardians of the Galaxy in the new WEAPON 8K. This is the third collaboration with RED, having toured with EPIC® RED at Prometheus and EPIC DRAGON in Tarzan,” says Nik Korda, executive producer. “The large sensor size and the high resolution offered by the new WEAPON 8K, combined with its compact and lightweight size, open up a wide range of new creative possibilities.
WEAPON 8K captures 8K at 75 frames per second (fps), 6K at 100fps or 4K at 150fps with REDCODE® RAW; and its wide dynamic range produces cinematic-quality images with a lot of natural colors. In addition, WEAPON 8K has interchangeable lens mounts, an intelligent OLPF system and 3D-LUT outputs in the camera.
RED’s ?8K WEAPON is the large small camera perfectly contrary to intuition. Is it perfect for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2?” says Henry Braham, BSC, Director of Photography.
As with the rest of the industry, if people have a good experience with a particular product they will usually come back, and we review it here with the choice of WEAPON 8K for Guardians 2, as DP Henry Braham, BSC already worked with NET. on Tarzan.
It will be interesting to see what kind of workflow and goals they choose for the movie. The Vista Vision sensor in WEAPON 8K means you’ll have to choose lenses that cover 35mm of full size, although I imagine it’s possible that only parts of the film are shot in 8K, as we’ve seen with other movies that record premium formats for specific scenes. However, it is not outside the realm of the possibility that most, or all, may be in full 8K format, such as The Revenant, which is now in theaters, filmed with the ARRI 6K ALEXA 65. This cinema camera has a much larger sensor than Vista Vision and sometimes much higher data rates due to RAW unpacking (while the RED is compressed).
People will inevitably wonder why someone wants to shoot at more than 4K when that’s all we can see in a movie theater, but with the way the sensors are designed, you don’t get a pixel ratio of 1: 1 for each color channel. A standard Bayer sensor, used by all of these cameras, emphasizes the color green and must interpolate the color information:
The higher the resolution of the sensor at the beginning, the more information and color we will have and therefore the greater the “resolved detail”. 8K can provide a crisp and clear 4K resolution, just as 4K can provide a sharper and clearer 2K / 1080p image. This is one of the reasons why the Sony F35 and F65 have much higher resolutions than their final production. sensor for 1080p output and the F65 had an 8K x 2K sensor for 4K output.
In addition, for VFX, trimming and stabilization, having more resolution than its output can still be useful.