Description
In this fxpodcast, we talk to Jordan Thistlewood, Chief Digital Officer at Cooke Optics, about the evolution of Cooke’s /i Technology and why lens metadata has become one of the most practical, and often underused, tools in modern production and VFX.
Cooke’s /i Technology has been around for more than two decades, and fxguide has followed its development closely over the years. At its core, /i records frame-accurate lens data: focus distance, iris, zoom position, T-stop, focal length, depth of field, hyperfocal distance, entrance pupil information, shading data and other lens characteristics. For VFX, this is enormously valuable because it gives post-production teams a much clearer understanding of what actually happened on set.
The original ambition was simple but powerful: make the lens communicate directly with the rest of the filmmaking pipeline. Cinematographers spend a huge amount of time choosing lenses, shaping focus, controlling exposure and crafting an image. But historically, once that material moved into post, a great deal of that nuanced optical information was either approximated, reverse-engineered, or simply lost.
That is the gap Cooke has been trying to close...hear about that in this podcast.
Enjoy!
0:00 Intro
1:14 Cooke Lens Data Tech
3:10 Lens Info as Metadata
5:20 Lens Data often was Lost Before Getting to VFX
7:03 Preserving the Metadata
10:27 Pitch to the Camera Department
14:33 In Focus Out of Focus
16:54 The Triangle
19:56 Mapping Zoom Lenses
23:06 Working with Other Devices
27:36 More Info about Cooke Lenses Data Tech
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