Lytro's light field camera was pretty nifty; you could shoot now and focus later, but it couldn't hold its own in front of smartphone cameras. Now, Lytro has decided to shift focus to professional video solutions and its latest offering, the Lytro Cinema, has "the highest resolution video sensor ever designed" at 755 MP.
The camera records video at 40K resolution and can go up to 300 fps and shoots in 3D too! The result is 400 GB of data every second and, as a result, Lytro will also sell you an entire server array to process and store the data.
Lytro, with its camera, also intends to revolutionise the way movies are made.
"Lytro Cinema defies traditional physics of on-set capture allowing filmmakers to capture shots that have been impossible up until now," said Jon Karafin, head of Light Field Video at Lytro, in a statement. "Because of the rich data set and depth information, we're able to virtualise creative camera controls, meaning that decisions that have traditionally been made on set, like focus position and depth of field, can now be made computationally. We're on the cutting edge of what's possible in film production [sic]."
Taking the ability to manipulate the scene captured, the Lytro Cinema could potentially revolutionise visual effects, starting with the way green screens are used. Essentially, with green screens, the background colour is selected and digitally removed. Green is chosen because the human body tends not to have much green in it and because digital sensors are more sensitive to green. With the data, the Lytro Cinema captures, post producers have the flexibility to recreate green-screen-like effects without the use of one.
The entire Lytro Cinema set up includes the camera, the servers we mentioned before and Lytro's proprietary software to edit the light field data, which Lytro claims can be set up to fit into the kind of work flows that big studios currently use.
