III.

Digital Cinematography

Being entirely electronic, digital cameras have no moving parts. The various intensities of the image produced by the lens are focused onto a solid state chip called a charge-coupled device (CCD). The typical CCD has a much smaller area than a frame of film, being ’ of an inch (16.93 mm), but comprises over two million elements or pixels, laid out in a pattern 1,080 pixels high by 1,920 pixels wide. This ratio is called common image format (CIF). The intensity of light on each cell of the array is converted to 12-bit digital information for storage on high capacity memory. To record colour, the camera has a beam-splitting device that splits the picture into three identical images. The images are then passed through a primary colour separation filter (red, blue, and green respectively) to separate the relative intensities of each colour and the colours are recorded by three separate CCDs.

The data stream from a digital camera is recorded on a digital tape recorder. A lower resolution video version is later made for editing. (See Digital Editing, below.)