New Cooke S7 T2 Lens
There are many new lenses at NAB but the ones that caught our eye were from Cooke. New S7 lenses for the Cooke look on the new big format sensors.
The new Cooke S7/i lenses cover an image circle up to 46.31 mm diameter. “That’s every format from RED 8K VV 21.60×40.96 mm (46.31 diagonal) to Full Frame 24×36 mm (43.3 mm diagonal) and anything on down” commented Film and Digital Times reporting on the news.
Full Frame and Large Format is gathering momentum. It is future-proof because these lenses work equally well on Super35, current Full Frame, VV and the inevitable arrival of new cameras to come. The new Cooke S7/i lenses are extremely fast and go incredibly close. Maximum aperture is T2. Minimum object distance is around 4 to 6 inches in front of the wider ones. Front diameters are nicely compact at 110 mm. Cooke /i Technology connections are in the expected places. Focus is the same familiar Cooke cam-drive mechanism that feels as smooth and silky as the image looks. The main difference is large format coverage. Available beginning June 2017 in focal lengths: 18, 25, 32, 40, 50, 75, 100 and 135 mm. Price will be between S4/i and S5 (!!!).
The demo footage below was shot on Cooke Optics S7/i Prime Lens Full Frame. The footage was shot on RVZ’s RED W8K VV (courtesy of Samuel Renollet) by Michael Lindsay and Brendan McGinty.
MaterialX: An Open Standard for Network-Based CG Object Looks
Material X is an open standard for transfer of rich material and Look-dev content between application and renderers. It originated at Lucasfilm in 2012. MaterialX has been used by ILM in feature films such as Star Wars The Force Awakens and real-time experiences such as Trials on Tatooine. The original Specification was made public in July of 2016.
MaterialX is supported by both Autodesk and the Foundry, and we are hoping either at NAB or Siggraph in July that we will hear more from one of these two key companies about the adoption of MaterialX.
The official position for the Foundry as of today, just prior to NAB, is that their products are targeting it for future releases. We expect to see movement in both Mari and Katana workflows, but Material X is still at an early stage, and it is understood the Foundry would still like to see a tad more work done to the standard. As such there is no official release dates yet from them.”There’s long been support here for the project. The earliest reference I’ve got to the idea comes from conversation with Jack Greasley almost five years ago, which maybe shows how long it takes for these things to cook” commented Simon Robinson, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at the Foundry “But it’s great that Doug Smythe has given the project such momentum”.
(Keep an eye out : We have heaps more about the Foundry coming out around NAB)
The project specifications are being lead by Doug Smythe and Jonathan Stone at ILM.
You can download the spec here
They wrote that:
Many Computer Graphics production studios use workflows involving multiple software tools for different parts of the production pipeline. There is also a significant amount of sharing and outsourcing of work across multiple facilities, requiring companies to hand off fully look-developed models to other divisions or studios which may use different software packages and rendering systems. In addition, studio rendering pipelines that previously used monolithic shaders built by expert programmers or technical directors with fixed, predetermined texture-to-shader connections and hard-coded texture color-correction options are moving toward more flexible node graph-based shader networks built up by connecting input texture images and procedural texture generators to various inputs of shaders through a tree of image processing and blending operators.
- Define the associations between geometries in a model and materials to create number of looks for the model.
At the moment, there is no common, open standard for transferring all of the above data relationships. Various applications have their own file formats to store this information, but these are either closed, proprietary, inadequately documented or implemented in such a way that using them involves opening or replicating a full application. Thus, there is a need for an open, platform-independent, well-defined standard for specifying the “look” of computer graphics objects built using shader networks so that these looks or sub-components of a look can be passed from one software package to another or between different facilities.
The purpose of their proposal is to define a schema for Computer Graphics material looks with exact operator and connection behavior for all data components, and a standalone file format for reading and writing material content using this schema. Their proposal will not attempt to impose any particular shading models or any interpretation of images or data.
Source: fxguide.com
