One of the greatest things that could happen to digital Cinema Camera Rentals is if color or wavelength of light could be recorded directly.

1. Bayer Sensor Technology
One of the greatest things that could happen to digital Cinema Camera Rentals is if color or
wavelength of light could be recorded directly. Sensors would gain two to three stops of
dynamic range, around 40% more detail, and much more accurate color rendition. Sadly,
photo-sites are colorblind; they only record amount of light, not type of light. Therefore,
camera systems have had to use some workarounds, each with their own complex
engineering and flaws, to record color. Film stocks used layers of dyes, and early digital
camera systems used prisms to separate wavelengths of light. Now, we are working in the
era of the CFA, or color filter array. This is a filter applied over the top of the sensor with a
specific pattern of red, green, and blue filters to separate light hitting each photosite.
The Bayer filter array is the most commonly used CFA. The pattern is shown in the image
below: each green photosite is surrounded by two red and two blue photosites in
alternating red-green and green-blue rows. The sensor is divided into 50% green, 25% red,
and 25% blue photosites. Each photo-site is sensitive to only one color, and in the majority
of camera systems, each photo-site corresponds to one pixel in the final image.
This confused me for a long time. How do we get the millions of colors we see in films? It
seems that to get one accurate color pixel in the final image, you would need one green, one
red, and one blue photosite on the sensor. It turns out that cameras are a lot smarter than
that. Complex algorithms work to determine a pixel’s color based on the amplitudes of the
pixels around it, and it does this millions of times for each frame. This process is called
demosaicing, through which the color of each pixel is interpolated by those around it. This
math accounts for a lot of the differences between different camera systems and the images
they produce.
Part of the reason Bayer sensors work is because our eyes are much more sensitive to
changes in brightness than to changes in color. Arri Alexa Mini Lf Rentals, even though
color detail is reduced by the CFA, it does not ruin the image’s apparent resolution. Look at
the image above: what immediately catches your eye is the contrast between the near-
white fire and the shadows in the forest and water: changes in exposure, not in color.
The reason there are twice as many green pixels as red and blue is because human eyes are
most sensitive to green light, and thus exposure is primarily dependent on our perception
of green wavelengths.
Another problem is the detail of the image is severely reduced by the filter array. Cinema
Lenses, Even if the demosaicing algorithm is extremely precise, there is still guessing
involved, which will blur the final image and cause artifacts. This can be solved by shooting
at a higher resolution than the deliverable format, and scaling down in post-production.
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