Through The Looking Glass

April 24, 2022 2:39 AM

Why are TV Cameras still HUGE and expensive ? (SLYT)
posted by Gyan (21 comments total)

Follow up: Phone vs $250,000 Monster TV Camera
posted by Gyan at 2:45 AM on April 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

It's all about not trying to do the job of a 20 ton excavator with a $5 shovel.

Or vice versa, come to that.
posted by flabdablet at 3:47 AM on April 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

Last time I ran a real studio video camera was the mid/late 80's but the lens is apparently $212,000 of the $250,000, which makes sense to me. Really good optics aren't cheap.
posted by mikelieman at 4:07 AM on April 24, 2022 [16 favorites]

Wow, it must take years to just learn how to operate that setup, let alone develop the artistry to use it well.

(and, yes, the lens is still the most expensive part)
posted by Bee'sWing at 4:21 AM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

A peek at the Fujinon UA107X8.4 Lens Specs show it's a 8.4-900 mm f/1.7-4.5 zoom. It's still f/1.7 at 340 mm zoom, which means it has a 200 mm diameter aperture. You could comfortably fit a whole iPhone 13 Pro Max through the lens aperture. That's why they still spend that kind of money.

(If we're gonna play Top Trumps to avoid a tantrum from the iPhone squad, the UA107 has a closest focus distance of over 3 m. $200k doesn't buy you out of the laws of physics.)
posted by scruss at 5:19 AM on April 24, 2022 [11 favorites]

Wow, it must take years to just learn how to operate that setup, let alone develop the artistry to use it well.

It's a union gig. IATSE broadcast department or cinema guild.
posted by mikelieman at 6:08 AM on April 24, 2022 [11 favorites]

LOL flabdablet, I once spend a day or two digging a 20' ditch and bashing through a road with a mattok, a shovel and a sledgehammer. Would have taken an hour with even a small backhoe. Might even have cost less.

Yeah, there are optics and time and quality and eventual problems that boil into the equation. The only 4k projector in the US at the time had bulbs that cost $10k each, the actual camera (on loan) was the first 4k streaming camera, don't even want to know what the price tag on that would be. This is sorta the reason we paid for Sun/IBM hardware back in the day versus throwing a bunch of PCs at something. Mission critical usage tends to take expensive equipment. Once you are paying that much equipment failure is big money lost quickly from downtime and there are techs with parts on a plane fixing things as soon as possible. Every minute/hour of having issues is more money lost than actual equipment costs.
posted by zengargoyle at 6:30 AM on April 24, 2022

That's a poor comparison, zengargoyle. The lens is a single point of failure where a cluster of information processing devices pays the cost of dividing work across nodes (Amdahl's law has an overhead cost of co-ordinating work) but redundancy allows you to restart work and repurpose capacity when failure comes.
posted by k3ninho at 7:05 AM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's a union gig. IATSE broadcast department or cinema guild.

Let’s not forget SMPTE

Which stands for “Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers”
(Maybe I think, that is what keeps them in sync…)
posted by TedW at 7:08 AM on April 24, 2022 [11 favorites]

IATSE: I Am Always Taking Something Extra (seriously though—there's nothing better than a union crew)
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 8:44 AM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

That's a poor comparison, zengargoyle. The lens is a single point of failure

especially when used to bash through a roadway.

Glass bottle or old shoe? We report, you decide.
posted by flabdablet at 8:44 AM on April 24, 2022

I've worked in TV for a little over 25 years now, and I've watched the cameras get smaller to the point of being positively tiny, but those lenses have stayed exactly the same. They are no joke...pricey and awesome, and they will probably never get smaller.
posted by nevercalm at 9:38 AM on April 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

Let’s not forget SMPTE

Which stands for “Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers”
(Maybe I think, that is what keeps them in sync…)
posted by TedW

Igotthatreference.jpg
posted by Splunge at 11:24 AM on April 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

Igotthatreference.jpg

Yeah, I bet that just clicked for you.
posted by loquacious at 11:37 AM on April 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

Wow, it must take years to just learn how to operate that setup, let alone develop the artistry to use it well.

Keep in mind that generally there is a whole team involved in the scenarios that these kinds of lenses make sense. The actual mechanics of what the camera operator is responsible for (adjusting focus, zooming and framing a shot), are all pretty intuitive and it takes literally a minute or two to get a handle on the controls (no pun intended).

The camera operator can safely ignore all the buttons and dials on the camera, except maybe for things like monitor brightness/contrast and headset volume. They don't have to worry about video codecs or getting clean audio or hitting the record button; even exposure levels are taken care of by someone else back on the truck or in a control room.

It definitely does take plenty of experience and skill to anticipate/find shots and make smooth movements though, especially in fast paced environments like sports.

I've used similar lenses, including less powerful versions of the Fujinon featured in the OP video, at live events with IMAG. I can personally attest that 100x zoom range is really fun and kind of mind blowing. I can only imagine shooting with 200x like the lens in the OP is capable of.
posted by soy bean at 12:51 PM on April 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

A few years ago I was watching some BBC nature documentary which ended with an impossible zoom shot. It started off with a single hatchling in a nest on some seaside cliff, and zoomed out, and out, and out, and out, until you could see a mile of cliff on either side of the now-invisible nest and a mile of ocean between the cliff and the camera.

My optical-engineering experience is in astronomy, where sure, you can focus on a bird’s nest from ten miles away, but you can’t use the same telescope for a wide shot. Perhaps they mounted their camera on some drone and flew away? But then how was the zoom-out so stable, etc.

I saw the meter-long, $200k lens in the preview still for this video and thought, “oh, okay, mystery solved, that’s how they did it.”
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 1:18 PM on April 24, 2022 [8 favorites]

those lenses have stayed exactly the same. They are no joke...pricey and awesome, and they will probably never get smaller

Well, no, the high-end super telephoto lenses probably won't get much smaller, because they're bumping up against hard physical limits.

Without going too far into the optical weeds, the diameter of the front element puts a hard physical limit on how much angular resolution you can coerce from the lens, and high-end lenses are almost all within 20% or so of that limit now.

As we move to 8K recording, those lenses are probably going to get bigger, and also sacrifice some of their deepest zoom. For example, if I've done my math right, that Fujinon UA107X8.4 lens can't resolve the pixels — even theoretically — on an 8K 2/3" sensor when zoomed at its far (900mm) end. It's limited to about 4K (or 2K if you use its built-in extender). It's physically impossible to do better without a larger virtual entrance pupil, which means a larger front element, which means a bigger lens. The UA107X8.4 is likely not useless for 8K — it can probably do 8K up to about 450mm zoom — but the combination of ultra-deep zoom + 8K needs a bigger lens.

(There is another hard physical limit for low light video — photon counts — but the last I checked commercially-available cameras have room for about 10x-100x improvement before they hit that limit. Certain incredibly specialized astrophotography sensors can do better, at the cost of needing LN2 cooling and complex control systems.)
posted by reventlov at 1:36 PM on April 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

It definitely does take plenty of experience and skill to anticipate/find shots and make smooth movements though, especially in fast paced environments like sports.

Yeah, most camera operators don't routinely touch or use most of the controls on these cameras unless they're an independent field unit.

For multicam operations like live sports most of these pro broadcast class cameras have network control options like this one from Sony: https://pro.sony/en_FI/products/camera-control-panels/msu-1000.

A unit like that can do neat tricks like remotely control white balance or black balance not just for a single camera but every single camera in the network all at the same time. Every setting or almost every setting can be controlled, including aspects like swapping internal ND filters or other optics, or infrastructure settings even like the brightness of a viewfinder or LED illuminated buttons.

IE if you were doing a live concert telecast and you were the director or producer in the broadcast suite or control room and you wanted to turn off every blinky light or button or dim every viewfinder or screen for a low light setting on every camera in the building on the network for a low light segment of the performance or show you could do that.

These cameras are not even remotely in the same class as prosumer DSLRs, and broadcast cameras in particular have a lot of features not found even on pro cine/film cameras.

They're designed to work together in a heavily networked multicam environment and you often buy, rent or lease them in calibrated packages and groups of cameras, especially for things like live sports so that every single camera in use matches the other one within certain specifications and limits so that there are no jarring or obvious changes in the color and brightness values of shots from different cameras.

The camera operators mainly work on shot composition, tracking shots, zoom values and maybe some non-autofocus focus pulling - if they're not doing parfocus focal lock.
posted by loquacious at 2:37 PM on April 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

@k3ninho
... a cluster of information processing devices pays the cost of dividing work across nodes (Amdahl's law mumble mumble)...

I bet you have not looked under the hood at an operating system, or tried to actually implement a reliable cluster with Wintel machines.

Back at the time we are talking about, when you would buy Sun/IBM for reliability over racks and racks of PClones, there was no/limited operating system support for making the latter into clusters. Beowulf does not count. Some people just want to buy the tool that works and get on with using it.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:10 AM on April 25, 2022

It’s been some time since advances in optical astronomy relied on making one huge lens even larger. Any reason tv cameras won’t follow the same path?

Asking from a state of almost complete ignorance.
posted by skyscraper at 7:37 PM on April 25, 2022

Terrestrial astronomy generally hits other limits before diffraction, especially atmospheric distortions, light pollution, and lack of photons. For example, the Dragonfly Telescope Array uses a large array of Canon 400mm f/2.8 lenses to achieve "the equivalent of a 1.0 m diameter refractor with a focal ratio of f/0.4, the largest and by far the most sensitive lens telescope in existence" - in photography terms, that's a 400mm f/0.4 lens.

However, if you read their papers, the f/0.4 is only for the magnitude of light collected; the diffraction limit of that telescope is no better than a 400mm f/2.8 lens:

While the diffraction-limited angular resolution of the array remains that of a single 143 mm aperture lens, this is small enough (∼0:65′′ at 450 nm) to be seeing-limited most of the time at most dark sites in the continental United States.

That diffraction limit is worse than the UA107X8.4, which has a roughly 200mm aperture. You can actually hit that extreme diffraction limit with cinematography or photography because you have (relatively speaking) plenty of light, and you're generally not looking through the entire atmosphere — though if you regularly use a lens like the UA107X8.4 or a 400mm f/2.8 stills lens, you'll quickly discover that a few hundred meters of air heated by the ground during the day will ruin your shot. (On a hot day, even 10m of air can turn your image to mush! If you really want to see far, you need to shoot early in the morning on a cold, clear, calm day after a rainstorm.)
posted by reventlov at 10:12 AM on April 26, 2022