Development of a 70mm, 25 Megapixel Electronic Cinematography Camera with Integrated Flash Recorder

Abstract

This paper will describe the system design of the world's first 70mm, 25 megapixel, electronic-cinematography camera with an integrated flash memory recorder. — Although this camera shares many of the attributes of NHK's Ultra High Definition Television and benefits from NHK's pioneering research in the area of very high-resolution imaging, what we are about to describe is an electronic cinematography camera and recorder - not a television camera. While the unique requirements of the cinematographic process allow us to take advantage of certain processes that would not be practical in a television environment, we must also make provision for requirements that are unique to movie making. — The single CMOS sensor in the new Panavision camera has the same four times HDTV horizontal resolution of 7680 photo-sites as that proposed by NHK for UHDTV. Our sensor's vertical resolution is only three times the HDTV vertical for a resolution of 3240 photo-sites and an aspect ratio of 2.37:1 rather than UHDTV's 16 × 9, 1.78:1 aspect ratio. — Bucking the recent trend to take a lower resolution imager and interpolate to a higher resolution, the Panavision camera utilizes an oversampling technique to output a full bandwidth 19 megapixel RGB image from the available 25 million photo-sites. — The recorded frame size is 3840 × 1620 × 3 (RGB) or 18,662,400 pixels.