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Video: A 1000fps look at how a 16mm motion picture camera works

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Video: A 1000fps look at how a 16mm motion picture camera works

Gav with The Slow Mo Guys wanted to check out how a 16mm motion picture camera works in crisp slow motion. Using a Phantom Flex4K, he recorded at a blazing-fast 1,000 frames per second.

The Phantom Flex4K is an incredible feat of engineering and modern technology, but today the focus is on an older Russian 16mm motion picture camera. For viewers who haven’t seen how a 16mm motion camera operates, it’s neat to see the camera’s internals and how the film is loaded. With the film loaded, it’s time to set the frame rate, which is controlled via a dial on the outside of the camera. In this case, Gav will record at the standard 24 fps frame rate, although you can also record using this camera at 8, 12, 16, 32 and 48 fps.

A close-up of the back of the 16mm motion picture camera. Here you can see the rotary disc shutter with its two cut-out sections.

Taking a step back, a digital SLR camera includes a mirror at a 45° angle to project what the lens sees into the optical viewfinder. When you press the shutter release, the mirror flips up out of the way, exposing the shutter, which then remains open for a set amount of time to expose an image. As soon as the shutter closes, the mirror flips back down, allowing you to see through the viewfinder.

This split-view shows how the film is exposed as the disc spins on the left and what is being exposed on the right. When the mirrored disc covers the film opening, a small metal claw is inserted into the holes in the film to move it to the next frame. You can see this in incredible slow motion in the video below.

A 16mm camera operates similarly. The image coming through the lens is bounced by beam-splitting mirrors and then off a mirrored disc set at 45°. Unlike a DSLR, the 45° mirror in the motion picture camera doesn’t move out of the way to reveal a shutter but is itself the shutter. It is a rotary disc shutter. There are two openings on the disc, on either side, so for every 1/2 rotation, a single frame is exposed, which can be seen in glorious slow motion below.

When shooting still frames of Gav pouring water out using the same 1/60s exposure as the motion picture camera, Gav would exhibit some motion blur. Why doesn’t this happen with the motion picture camera? As we can see clearly at 1,000 fps, the film is being driven through the camera but is perfectly stationary when each frame is exposed, moving only when the rotary disc shutter is blocking the film. As Gav shows using a macro lens, there’s a metal claw that goes perfectly into the film’s sprocket hole to move it in perfect time with the selected frame rate. The entire mechanism is exact.

If you want to see the camera operate at 48 fps, which has a shutter speed of 1/120s, be sure to watch the full video above. You could project the film recorded at 48fps at half speed for some analog slow-motion footage.
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Adobe's working on a way to make AI do the Photoshopping for you

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Adobe's working on a way to make AI do the Photoshopping for you


Image: Adobe

Last week, Adobe announced that a handful of AI-based features would be moving out of Premiere Pro beta. Now, the company is teasing even more AI tools for Premiere Pro and Photoshop ahead of Adobe Max London on April 24. In a blog post, the company provides a basic overview of what’s coming, promising even faster edits and helpful tools for learning.

All of the new features rely on agentic AI, or tech “capable of conversing, acting and solving complex problems.” It’s essentially a highly capable chatbot that combines elements of generative AI with decision-making and execution capabilities. Adobe says its approach to agentic AI is similar to its approach to generative AI, aiming “to give people more control and free them to spend more time on the work they love – whether that’s creativity, analysis or collaboration.”

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Image: Adobe

To that end, Adobe teased that at Adobe Max London, it will showcase its first creative agent in Photoshop, found in an all-new Actions panel. “Our vision is for Photoshop to be able to analyze your image and recommend smart, context-aware edits,” Adobe explained. It says the editing platform could find ways to improve your image and actually make those improvements with a single click. It also says it wants users to be able to use natural language to access “more than 1,000 one-click actions in Photoshop” for faster and simplified edits.

In the video examples provided in the blog post, prompts are typed into the AI agent, which then handles the edits for the user. The creative agent adds all of the edits as layers, just like if the person were to be making the changes themselves. That means you can still go in and tweak things by hand as needed.

Adobe says this isn’t exclusively about speeding up the editing process. Instead, it also envisions the creative agent as a way to learn Photoshop. Given how complex and overwhelming the software can be for new users, such a resource could be helpful. Plus, Adobe says it could also handle repetitive tasks like preparing files for export.

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Image: Adobe

Adobe also envisions agentic AI coming to Premiere Pro. One example it provides is using the creative agent to create a rough cut. Getting started on projects is often the hardest step, after all. “While AI can’t replace human creative inspiration, with your input it can make some educated guesses to help you get your project off the ground.”

Adobe’s Media Intelligence can already help you search for clips by automatically recognizing objects and visual compositions. The platform also understands spoken dialogue and can generate captions and transcripts. So extending those features to a tool that can help quickly cut together clips to help you get started doesn’t seem that far-fetched. “We envision a world where you can direct a creative agent to help you refine shot choices, craft rough cuts, assist with color, help mix audio, and more.” Like Photoshop, Adobe also wants to use agentic AI in Premiere Pro to help users learn the software, including understanding keyboard shortcuts for complex actions.

Adobe says that the Adobe Research team is currently working on the foundational pieces of the company’s agentic AI framework. It will likely be showing off the tools and providing more details during Adobe Max London, which you can catch online for free on April 24.



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Atomos has reportedly stopped working on its 8K global sensor

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Atomos has reportedly stopped working on its 8K global sensor


Image: Atomos

In late 2022, Atomos told investors that it had “completed development of a world class 8K video sensor” and that it was “actively exploring opportunities for commercialisation” and holding talks with camera makers that it said were “showing great interest.” In an interview with PetaPixel later that year, the company said it was a full-frame, global shutter sensor capable of capturing 8K at 60fps with up to 15 stops of dynamic range, all while drawing just 2W of power.

We’ve heard very little about the project since then, but PetaPixel has just reported that it’s been abandoned, citing a conversation with the company’s COO. Currently, there are no further details about when the call was made to sideline the sensor or why that decision was made. We’ve reached out to Atomos and will update this story if we hear back.

While there’s been very little news about the sensor – dubbed the ‘Sapphire F8’ – since 2022, it seemed like an interesting proposition. Global shutters are especially useful for video applications, where rolling shutters can cause distortion on fast-moving subjects or during quick camera movements.

In 2022, the Sapphire would’ve been ahead of the curve

While several cinema-focused cameras have used the tech over the years, it’s only recently become available in cameras with larger (full-frame or above) sensors. When Red announced the V-Raptor X in early 2024, it said it was the “first available large format global shutter” cinema camera. Around the same time, Sony’s a9 III became the first full-frame mirrorless camera to feature a global shutter. In 2022, Atomos’ Sapphire project, developed after it acquired rights and technical staff from broadcast equipment company Grass Valley in 2017, would’ve been ahead of the curve.

Whatever caused the company to drop the project, it’s unfortunate that there won’t be more competition in the high-end sensor market. Making a sensor is no small feat, and neither is actually getting it into a finished product – something Atomos already knew since work on the Sapphire began during a project to create a cinema camera, which also wound up being canceled.



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Are embedded Instagram posts a case of copyright infringement? Supreme Court asked to decide

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Are embedded Instagram posts a case of copyright infringement? Supreme Court asked to decide


Photo: Abby Ferguson

Embedding social media posts has become a widespread practice and a critical tool for all sorts of websites. It allows sites to share content without hosting it themselves, opening the doors to showcase more dynamic content and user-generated or brand materials. Now, though, a photographer is asking the US Supreme Court to consider if embedding social media content is a violation of copyright.

As initially reported by Digital Camera World, photographer Elliot McGucken filed a petition for certiorari (a request to review) on March 28. This petition is part of his lawsuit against media company Valnet, Inc., which runs thetravel.com. The lawsuit results from The Travel embedding 36 photographs in McGucken’s Instagram posts across multiple articles without his permission. The case argues that embedding a copyrighted work without the artist’s permission is copyright infringement.

This debate, which centers around the “server test,” is far from new. The server test was a guideline initially established in a 2007 Ninth Circuit Court decision. It essentially says that if a website hosts a copyrighted image on its own systems, it is a copyright violation. But if the website uses third-party hosting, such as by embedding a social media post or an image from an artist’s website, it does not violate copyright.

There have been multiple challenges since the initial guideline was established. However, the most recent (outside of this new case) was in 2023, when photographers Alexis Hunley and Matthew Brauer filed a class action lawsuit against Instagram. They claimed that Instagram violated their copyright by allowing Time and Buzzfeed to embed photos they shared on their Instagram profiles. A three-judge panel at the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Instagram was not liable for copyright infringement, though, explaining that when a photo or video is embedded, no copy is made.

The district courts and Ninth Circuit court have already dismissed the complaints, but the photographer has now asked the Supreme Court to weigh in. The petition gives multiple reasons for why it should be granted, one of which is that it “presents a clear legal question that has divided the federal courts.” However, as VitalLaw reports, district courts in the Second, Fifth and Tenth Circuits, including a federal court in Manhattan, have all rejected it.

Instagram, like many other social media platforms, allows users to turn off embedding, which prevents websites from sharing content in this way. Instagram rolled this out in 2021, and users can change the setting under the “How others can interact with you” option inside the Settings menu.

The Supreme Court has until May 1 to issue a response.



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