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

Abstract

This paper describes 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 ultrahigh-definition television (UHDTV) and benefits from NHK's pioneering research in the area of very high-resolution imaging, what is described 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 moviemaking. The single complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor in the new Panavision camera has the same four times HDTV horizontal resolution of 7680 photosites as that proposed by NHK for UHDTV. Our sensor's vertical resolution is only three times the HDTV vertical for a resolution of 3240 photosites, and it has 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, red-green-blue (RGB) image from the available 25 million photosites. The recorded frame size is 3840 × 1620 × 3 (RGB) or 18,662,400 pixels.