The Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineer's (IEEE) Spectrum Magazine
reports on the use of digital cameras aboard the International
Space Station (ISS) to shoot the IMAX documentary, "
A Beautiful Planet".
Senior Editor, Stephen Cass writes -
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Stephen Cass, IEEE Spectrum
However, the moviemaking secret of A Beautiful Planet is that the astronaut filmmakers actually took very little video of the Earth. It was realized that the digital video cameras currently available don’t have the resolution needed for the enormous IMAX screen. Instead, says James Neihouse, the film’s director of photography, still digital cameras such as the Canon EOS C500 EF were used. These captured 4K images at four frames per second in daylight, and two frames per second in the Earth’s shadow. About 250,000 still frames—totaling about 11 terabytes of raw data—were captured in this way. Back on Earth, software was used to interpolate additional in-between frames to create video files with smooth motion. The result was roughly 18 terabytes of footage that had to be edited down for the finished movie.
Opting for digital cameras over film also allowed images to be captured with very high dynamic ranges, so that dimmer features like stars or the aurorae were not washed out by bright objects in the foreground. The result is spectacular scenes of the sort that would have been previously impossible to see on a screen without resorting to post-production editing wizardry like compositing separately shot footage together or using computer generated graphics.
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Article here -
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/g...tch-to-digital
Movie official web site and trailer here -
http://abeautifulplanet.imax.com/
IMAX documentary shot from ISS uses digital cameras - A Beautiful Planet
