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I actually bought a Lytro Illum back in 2018 out of curiosity for the light field thing. I payed around 400 euros since the camera was already a fail and reseller were trying to sell the last stocks remained. I should say that the camera was very disappointing, at the point where the unboxing experience was the best thing about it. The image was quite bad, especially for a camera supposed to cost €1300, the dynamic range was very very limited at the point where even my mid-tear samsung phone was almost better. It used a special format of file to save the images and you needed a proprietary software on your computer in order to be able to change the focus and iris (more on that later) in post, then you could save the final result as a Jpeg or even as a 3d image. I should say that the software part worked quite well at least for me and there weren't bugs I noticed. The problem was that the changes you could made on the depht of field were quite limited and when you changed the focus the edges of the objects certain times were quite rough. All in all wasn't (at least for me) enough of a feature to justify the price and the quality drop of the image. I think that camera was a very big missed opportunity: you could see there was a lot of potential, the camera was well build, the firmware worked very well (as far first generations go) and the technology behind it was amazing. The problem, in my opinion, was that they focused too much on the light field feature and not on the actual quality of image itself. I think, and I believe is the same for every photographer, that the light field tech can be a nice added feature but nothing more than that and surely not a replacement for good image, and I this is the massive mistake Lytro company did. I'm an Italian speaker btw, so sorry in advance for grammatical errors.
Exactly, in the End the image quality is what makes or breaks a camera, just look at Arri or Blackmagic. They both focused on image quality, and both are quite successful with it, despite their competitor pumping out 12k sensors (for Arri) and generally having more features (for BM)
Yup and instead of turning to VR and the cinema industry, they could have improved their colour science and other stuff. Literally, I'm quite sad that they had to shut down 😢.
I never had a Lytro camera, but I remember their app that showcased user submitted photos and liking the novelty of being able to change the focus and angles after the pictures were already taken.
@@mnomadvfx Yea but each new sensor meant more complexity in the lense paths if they used 200 full frame sensors and they extracted more information from the beam path that would get absolutely insane. It makes sense google bought them. That was the only company that would dare to even see a possibility in handling that kind of complexity
I worked at Lytro for a bit, during the Illum until just before the immerge. It's really interesting to see a historical documentary style thing on stuff I actually lived through. And seeing people I know personally. Good stuff :-)
Appreciate it! Been cool to hear from people who have worked for these companies and get feedback 😂 try to do the best we can with the information available for us!
Was the big-ass camera with the half meter sensor made of smaller sensor tiles? I can't expect they designed and fabbed a wafer-sized sensor for only the price of a luxury car.
Otoy made a really cool demonstration of lightfields for VR by simply spinning a DSLR camera on a rig around and that created 1 frame lightfields (not animations). There's still nothing like that out there. People who were developing lightfield tech absolutely sucked at commercializing it. Such a shame. Neural radiance fields are sort of getting there without the need to have expensive rigs and cameras.
Yeahhhh... The marketing kinda felt like it was coming from a tech college or something. Which makes sense lol. Fascinating tech, gotta wonder if it will ever be viable or even in this century lol
@@FrameVoyager I would like to know how they managed to capture the direction information of the light rays. Perhaps the 300G per second was necessary to collect images on multiple sensors so they could form a 3D space
@@yuxuanhuang3523 If you know the angle of the sensor to other sensors you can decide the angle of the "ray". It's actually not that complicated - lots of papers on this topic.
They weren't trying to make a camera though, they were demonstrating their new data compression system called ORBX that can also be used for light fields.
Lyto failed in many ways. The worst of which is that they did not make a product that can be realisticly sold or used my the market. They made a giant beast when the entire industry was moving to more compact systems
I think they had the right idea honestly, this type of cinema camera and pricing model is the type to be directed at very large production companies, and if even just one of the biggest film production companies rented this camera, their story would've gone much differently...
It's actually almost 21MP or almost 6k. There is a 6x6 grid of pixes under every microlens. So you take 755MP and divide it by 36. This equates to a resolution of 20.83MP or about 6k. It wasn't sold for Google. It was an error in reporting, the employees went to Google.
@@Neojhun I had already written why this is not true, but keeps getting deleted due to the links. Anyways, only early reports said that. Reports that came out after clarify that they were not. You can find one on CNet as well as others so long as they are datedlate March 2018 or later. The early March reports were the erroneous ones. You will also not find the purchase in alphabet inc 2018 quarterly earnings reports, or any SEC filings. Also for what it's worth in 2018 the year of the demise of Lytro the website for lytro redirects to Raytrix in Germany, and still does. Now, it is possible Google bought some items, but they certainly didn't buy the company there would be concrete company papers.
Couldn't agree more! I hope they really figure out how to use it one day. Imagine the cost cutting applications for filming movies or anything? You really can fix it in post lol
as a videographer and editor i think this was the most amazing and mind blowing revolution of all time for camera industry now a days this can be made much much smaller even phones can use time of light and lidar to achieve re focusing and relighting but compared to this its so muchmore than that its the actual hardware thats capturing all of those things if you combine this hardware technology and todays sensors i believe it would be flawless
Ah yes , i remember that LYTRO refocus camera, it was featured on Tested by Norman Chan! I can't believe it was already 11 years ago! 😅 Back then that technology was mind-blowing! 😃
Im torn, on the one had this is a totally incredible technological breakthrough, but in the other hand i shiver at the thought of taking even more "artistic" decisions in the editing room, and without the need for a focus puller, or even a DP to consult to, it makes it too easy for the artistic vision of the DP to be deviated from or ignored, i love that Arri went for the Baked in looks from the camera in the alexa 35, its bold, but it puts the control back in the hands of the filmmakers, at least in my opinion, not that planoptic cameras dont have a place in cinema, i just wouldnt like it to replace the current tech completely.
Totally get what you're saying! We are kind of at a weird crossroads at this point in the history of filmmaking. Will we keep more grounded like we always have or will everything start to become more automated? And which is better? Fascinating times
I don't foresee plenoptic cameras completely replacing conventional digital ones (heck, analog films are still around to some degree). However, there is a possibility of some aspiring directors or cinematographers experimenting with light field cameras.
Lytro would never have taken away today's traditional Digital cameras even if it was smaller and lighter because there is so much character in Lenses and even in the Dynamic Range of your sensor, Lytro tech is amazing but the results are extremely digital, I believe the DOF is SImulated and until they simulated good looking DOF with some character I think the results always looked really really nasty, Think Fast blur on Premiere or After effects.
I had the chance to see the camera and equipment at the company in Dec 2016. Not only the camera but the hard drives were as big as a large mini fridge with hundreds of petabytes of capacity! There were so many wires all around which could transfer terabytes of data to the hard drives. It looked like a sci-fi machine! My mind was blown...
I remember this thing, it was for sure an interesting idea and the PR was so bad. I still dreamed of getting to try it out and I still dream of owning the one they made someday. My own white whale
I remember when the Lytro was released to the public. It sounded fancy-schmancy. If they had only improved on the consumer product, expanding to a professional photographer level version, they could have been relatively successful. Imagine if development had progressed enough to fit it into an iPhone?
if it actually recorded at 400GBps there literally would not be any feasible way to record data from it. even now the fastest commercially available drives top out below 10GBps, and in 2016 things were a lot slower. you would need enormous drive arrays of dozens of drives in RAID 0, which would be very very unreliable, if they used anything commercial, and even if the solution was custom with custom interfaces, would still need thousands of NAND Flash storage chips to record at that data rate for more than a few minutes. No way in hell they had anything approaching a working prototype that would deliver those results
Yeahhh, I know they had some kind of "special storage" solution for it. But who knows, no one ever really got to use the camera for real so we'll never know 😭
@@FrameVoyager it would need 40 drives with write speed of 10GB/s or better strapped in raid 0 and a lot of multisocket server's to handle 400GB/s also if you would take 30TB ssd's then you could fit 75s of footage on it for hour of footage you would need 48 of these arrays aka 1920 drivers with is 7680 lanes of PCIE that equals to 60 AMD EPYC CPU's and that hour of footage would be in total of 57.6PB totaly reasonable right??
Ah I was following Lytro from launch but had no idea they went into broadcast/cinema. I really hoped Panasonic, Sony or other camera manufacturer would buy them and optimise the technology. Panasonic in particular, because they have always been at the leading edge of capturing frames from video in their GH series micro 4/3rds cameras. And light field tech seemed the next logical step.
I know this isn't strictly 'camera' related but it kind of is! And since this camera was going to allow you to change the DOF in post; I need to talk about this. So in videogames, you are essentially always looking through a camera. But even though there is so much you can do with a manual DOF; it is hardly utilized ever. The only time you may see it is when you are playing a FPS and you look down the barrel of a gun. One game that bucked this trend blew my mind when it used it and even now; no game has tried to do what this game did. That game was Alien Isolation. Alien Isolation allowed you to shift your focus between your radar and the environment. Something you don't even think about is that when you do something as simple as look at your phone; that is DOF. The background is blurry but you don't even notice. However in games DOF is rarely used in these instances. But in Alien Isolation they used it to tremendous effect. It was so immersive. So why do I bring this up? Well if this camera ever became a reality; imagine what we could do with movies? VR movies could be the thing of the future. Imagine it. They film an entire scene with this camera and with eye tracking; the movie knows where you are looking and focuses on that object. You could watch a movie and focus on what the person was reading whilst your friend watched the same movie and looked at the characters expression instead. I don't think we will get this for another 20 years or so but goddamn it could be amazing.
if they had made a 1080p consumer video camera for $5000 that would have been cool. especially if aimed at VFX (same size as the big original black magic ursa, but with ability to create easy chroma screens would have been interesting for smaller VF workflows).
Like many things we use today, when they first invented, they were way ahead of its time. Most basic network and internet concepts were conceived in the 1960's and it took 40 years for the other technologies to make it practical to the population. I still think lightfield idea is revolutionary, we just haven't found the right application and current electronics is not powerful enough make it good enough.
What's really happening, is they divide up the sensor into many tiny chunks, each with a micro lens in front with a different focal length. Basically they're taking one small photo for each focus distance, and that's all there is to it, there's no 5D uber math going on, all you're doing is pick out the small slice of the photo that's the focal distance you want. Their cameras, because of this fact, still require focusing, they just don't have to be as precise because each shot is taking a matrix of smaller photos at different distance of focus. Sure they could do some 5D uber math with these information but there's no need to do that for the results they produce in practice. All they have to do really, is compose the images together for a smooth DOF effect. Kind of like the fake bokeh we have in phones today.
Exactly, all of the talk of light fields, math transformations, photon direction, etc... Was all nonsense when talking about the camera. Sure, those things are real when talking about actual light fields... But no Lytro camera was actually capturing light fields.
@@hbp_ yes, there are some similarities. Canon basically splits every pixel in two and there's a normal number of pixels. Where as Lytro splits every pixel into a million, and there's like 16 pixels.
I doubt they had the technology to build such microlens array with different focal lengths, my guess is they are just spherical "dots" like embossed plastic sheets for decorations. I'm guessing the 5D uber math is both real and not, like they might be just overlaying all the images but with different blur strengths to turn up locally unblurred images, but for the lack of words in geniuses' heads the way they explained was "preserving incident angles of photon beams" and all that
Honestly, this would be the savior for 3d video. I always thought it was stupid because IRL, things you aren't focused on are blurry. With current 3d video tech, whatever was in focus in the shot is the only thing that can ever be in focus when viewed. It's quite distracting if one wants to look at something else in the scene. It breaks it down into a gimmick.
Was looking forward to this one. Such a fascinating camera conceptually. Definitely the VFX & VR uses were the most interesting conceptually. Probably way too ahead of the industry. And, 40K is ridiculous resolution. The cinema camera was literally the size of a tank turret. Although that would be a funny sight to see a tank rolling up and telling others "Oh, that's just the camera."
@@FrameVoyager Cinema cameras are already impractical. An IMAX camera is hard to lunk around and requires huge film rolls. I don't see like it's that much of a difference beyond the storage issues.
A guy I worked with got the consumer tube (is there a word for a 3D rectangle?) and the fact you can change focus points afterwards was neat. But was bummed out by the obvious need of their software making distribution of said files challenging. I had zero idea the cinema thing even happened! I do hope to see it again someday and not buried in some warehouse to whom eventually owns the IP
Thanks for sharing this fascinating technology. This is the field in which I'm doing my PhD. Just a quick correction on how a light field camera works: they don't have multiple sensors inside them, just a regular camera sensor. The difference is in the array of tiny lenses in front of the sensor and the processing you can do with that additional information. Light field cameras are in regular use in industry but have yet to find their niche in the consumer market.
It doesn't use multiple sensor, just one normal sensor with a lot of small lenses. Essentially capturing several low resolution pictures focused on different layers. But data alone beats physics using various level of computational imaging. Think between stacking for denoise/super resolution, to depth estimation, to nerfs Light stages are used. Which simply shoot from different angles to get frames of 3D models.
I feel when the new CEO took it over , the company started to die, as original CEO was more correct in making consumer products, which they should had improved over time. But the cinema camera specs sounded too much like a scam.
I can't see any other comments mention this , but the technology lives on in Google, in stuff like project starline , which basically uses the lightfield tech for video calls
We're already seeing that Technology is action, especially for Google and their Pixel series devices. I'm literally positive they bought Lytro explicitly for all the Computational Photography they could harness from the company. And now they shoehorn all of that into the Pixel series phones.
They tried to solve problems no one was having. It's an interesting technology but if your image was out of focus, you simply just took another photo. Maybe the VR application would be useful but it's still way too early.
That moment I realise it's also Lytro that made the lytro illum allegedly camera of the future a buggy laggy terrible quality camera which had terrible battery life and was oversized with a tiny sensor..
i wonder where the actual cinema camera went to. I kinda hope its in a F-117 like state of retirement where its technically retired and not public facing but is still being used and studied
I have a feeling that google would take advantage of the technology to suddenly compete in the camera market by making it compact and stuff. but regardless I hope this concept got to be developed and be open for public,. vfx cgi and editing stuffs would go ballistics with this.
The only thing I could properly rationalise for the scale of that camera was "400GB/s" That's both something I can imagine and also unthinkable. I think something like 24TB a minute of footage. While you can make storage that will support that, its an entire server rack on wheels in traditional storage terms of just SSDs, thousands of them.
This story is much deeper and it is really strange. Lytro invented a new camera that had no lenses, but just a ball radar like and could see. Then Google bought the company and created a tech which is just multiple common cameras together, and they used the same name, as if they wanted to make that new tech Lytro invented disappear, and confuse the public, no ask yourself, what could that new tech camera see? and why they rushed to cancel it?
I bought 18 Illum cameras (when they were heavily discounted) for an array. Worked great ....but the computing power necessary was way too much for live action!
That giant Lytro cinema rig reminded me of the "Blimp" -- the old Technicolor camera with three film strips for each primary color. Big, expensive, noisy and a chore to work with the material. Lytro simply used brute force to achieve fundamental post-process gimmicks already possible with the advancement of machine learning algorithms for image processing, at much lower price and keeping your existing tool-chain setup.
If 3D makes a big comeback like it did between 2009 and 2012, this camera would get a metric shizton of big studio $$$$ pushing it forward. Having a perfect depth map made in camera would feed so nicely into existing VFX pipelines, allowing for really amazing stereoscopic effects, but based on real depth and not an interpolation built from rotoscope masks made in india and depth maps made in a 3D conversion sweat shop in Vancouver.
I remembered this company had a very promising product/future. But it is also a risk of bringing new technology into the market. I think A.I generated image and animation will be interesting to investigate now.
i just want to point out that 755 megapixels at 300 frames persecond is one terrabit of data per second (1tbps) assuming 10 bit color, an hour of footage at that quality would be 450 terrabytes.
I remember the kickstarter, it was a big deal, and lightfields are invariably the future of display tech if we want to have holographic type 3D displays. I feel like Lytro never put out very much demonstration materials, it was all very hush hush with just a few promo things about their cameras but I never felt like they were doing a serious push to get their cameras out there. Lightfield displays are for sure in the future, but cameras are going to need to have an application demonstrated.
We only have the technology to store that much data in real time. The Depth compression came with H.265. And MultiView Compression has just been investigated. And that thing is too complex and too expensive to operate. Even for now, Light Field contains more information than a 3D Vision Camera. We need a lot of knowledge to remove that redundant information. A light field camera really helps with 3D Cloud Point Reconstruction. The technology is good, but not for real-world applications at this mount.
Records at 400 GBs per second. That's totally practical!!.... It would fully load an 8TB harddisk in like 17 seconds. Recording a 100 minute movie would only cost you like 50,000 dollars in hard drives. Have fun pulling 7TB video files from 300+ hard drives.
I'm not sure anyone would need the blurry effect at all, it's impractical for real life. In reality with perfect vision everything is crisp. Ray tracing tech was the key.
haven't watched it yet but i'm gonna gues storage and cost was probaby a major issue, the lack of a video editor that could handle the footage, let's see how wrong i am
I still own the 8gig photo version, their first and only real product. And it‘s not good, the picture qualiy is pretty low. But at that time it was worth taking a closer look, at least for me.
The 40K resolution! Lol... I was at the presentation.. the problem is all of the technology doesn't give you any benefit whatsoever to the end product... For all that technology the end product would be a low dynamic range 2K ... It takes the entire film process and flips it on its head by removing basically all the artistry out of cinematography.. no camera movement and limited focal range. And don't look behind the curtain because you'll see that the data this thing required to capture and the processing power it took to even do the simplest things. Can you say 1 GB frame sizes!! There is not one single improvement on the final product.. and it came at the cost of scrambling virtually every stage of the creative process...
Yet another invention sucked into a corporation that will never find any actual uses for it. The faster these are hoarders are dismantled the better it is for mankind and our collective future.
Hopefully! Though sounding like google may have only brought aboard employees and not the tech. At least I've been told from sources after the video was released. So who knows where it is now lol
And we thought the DALSA was a huge and unweildy camera. I remember seeing the promos that Lytro out out for that camera and was absolutely blown away by that tech. Hopefully we'll see more light field tech in the cinema industry in the future because there's so much promise in it.
Right? 😂😂 And I think we will. To me it's biggest potential in the near future is in VR tech. That was interesting what they could achieve in that regard
I hope this camera doesn't go away and it can be put to use somewhere. With how much it must have cost to develop I doubt another one like it will be developed for maybe even another decade or more.
oh, absoltuely. They had some other stuff they needed to figure out. Though the VR thing could have worked well, but I feel like that cinema camera had to have cost sooo much to make. Wouldn't be surprised if that's what really forced them to sell
Cool tech but come on their mistake was not developing the camera for a mass production, designing it smaller and developing the right compressed format so it wouldn't take 400 or so gb per second, there are small cinema cameras now days that can shoot 12k and also wtf is with the 120,000 subscription price?
40K who can handle this amount of data...we are already struggeling with 4K in our worldwide workflow...next year everybody will film 6K not because it make sense, only because they can. do it. 40K is insane...
Man! While I love the fact that you're making it big as a UA-camr, I will always remember the days when you were a smaller channel and especially that cursed stream that crashed your computer so many times cuz of all the songs you tried to download 🤣
I was fascinated by Lytro but they were never able to offer a viable solution to a problem. Technical perfection doesn't matter much if you can brute-force it at a fraction of the cost in a hugely more practical way. Not mentioned in the video is the failure of 3D televisions severely limiting the market for 3D productions and Hollywood switching to computational up-converting 2D movies to 3D for cinemas. The whole industry was moving in the exact opposite direction of what Lytro was doing at higher cost in a more limited solution. Such a shame, if they would have been able to find a small niche where they could have been cost effective, over the years they might have still changed the industry.
Oh, it's already written and almost done being edited. But we got an interview with the follow up video on the digital bolex camera's creator that we want to add in some for the Ikonoskop as well!
Who here thinks they could mount this bad boy on a gimbal?
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A piece of cake for my DJI OM 4. But I have to go to the gym first...😂
Real men strap that to a steadicam mount
Not sure about a gimbal, but the smallrig tripod would handle it easily
😂😂😂 💯
Did google actually buy the company? I thought that their employees just went to Google without a buyout.
I actually bought a Lytro Illum back in 2018 out of curiosity for the light field thing. I payed around 400 euros since the camera was already a fail and reseller were trying to sell the last stocks remained. I should say that the camera was very disappointing, at the point where the unboxing experience was the best thing about it. The image was quite bad, especially for a camera supposed to cost €1300, the dynamic range was very very limited at the point where even my mid-tear samsung phone was almost better. It used a special format of file to save the images and you needed a proprietary software on your computer in order to be able to change the focus and iris (more on that later) in post, then you could save the final result as a Jpeg or even as a 3d image. I should say that the software part worked quite well at least for me and there weren't bugs I noticed. The problem was that the changes you could made on the depht of field were quite limited and when you changed the focus the edges of the objects certain times were quite rough. All in all wasn't (at least for me) enough of a feature to justify the price and the quality drop of the image. I think that camera was a very big missed opportunity: you could see there was a lot of potential, the camera was well build, the firmware worked very well (as far first generations go) and the technology behind it was amazing. The problem, in my opinion, was that they focused too much on the light field feature and not on the actual quality of image itself. I think, and I believe is the same for every photographer, that the light field tech can be a nice added feature but nothing more than that and surely not a replacement for good image, and I this is the massive mistake Lytro company did.
I'm an Italian speaker btw, so sorry in advance for grammatical errors.
Exactly, in the End the image quality is what makes or breaks a camera, just look at Arri or Blackmagic. They both focused on image quality, and both are quite successful with it, despite their competitor pumping out 12k sensors (for Arri) and generally having more features (for BM)
All oftheir experiments had this problem, expensive and poor quality, for A gimm8ck
Yup and instead of turning to VR and the cinema industry, they could have improved their colour science and other stuff. Literally, I'm quite sad that they had to shut down 😢.
I never had a Lytro camera, but I remember their app that showcased user submitted photos and liking the novelty of being able to change the focus and angles after the pictures were already taken.
I think the edges are bad because the edges of objects scatter light (like how the edges of shadows are blurry)
Half a meter wide sensor??? That's insane!
Nice video man, this series is really interesting and it never disappoints me!
Insane right? And appreciate it! Been fun creating and led to some cool stories. Lots more to come and spinoff series we've already started!
Not really.
They used an array of lenses and sensors to achieve a greater total sensor area.
@@mnomadvfx Yea but each new sensor meant more complexity in the lense paths if they used 200 full frame sensors and they extracted more information from the beam path that would get absolutely insane. It makes sense google bought them. That was the only company that would dare to even see a possibility in handling that kind of complexity
I worked at Lytro for a bit, during the Illum until just before the immerge. It's really interesting to see a historical documentary style thing on stuff I actually lived through. And seeing people I know personally. Good stuff :-)
Appreciate it! Been cool to hear from people who have worked for these companies and get feedback 😂 try to do the best we can with the information available for us!
Buzz Hays was my S3D prof/mentor in college. I loved hearing about the tech and seeing what yall were working on when he was at class in person.
Was the big-ass camera with the half meter sensor made of smaller sensor tiles? I can't expect they designed and fabbed a wafer-sized sensor for only the price of a luxury car.
@@noname7271You pay a luxury car to rent the camera, there was no purchase option. I imagine the sensor was indeed wafer-sized.
Otoy made a really cool demonstration of lightfields for VR by simply spinning a DSLR camera on a rig around and that created 1 frame lightfields (not animations). There's still nothing like that out there. People who were developing lightfield tech absolutely sucked at commercializing it. Such a shame. Neural radiance fields are sort of getting there without the need to have expensive rigs and cameras.
Yeahhhh... The marketing kinda felt like it was coming from a tech college or something. Which makes sense lol. Fascinating tech, gotta wonder if it will ever be viable or even in this century lol
@@FrameVoyager I would like to know how they managed to capture the direction information of the light rays. Perhaps the 300G per second was necessary to collect images on multiple sensors so they could form a 3D space
@@yuxuanhuang3523 If you know the angle of the sensor to other sensors you can decide the angle of the "ray". It's actually not that complicated - lots of papers on this topic.
They weren't trying to make a camera though, they were demonstrating their new data compression system called ORBX that can also be used for light fields.
Lyto failed in many ways. The worst of which is that they did not make a product that can be realisticly sold or used my the market. They made a giant beast when the entire industry was moving to more compact systems
But still their vision was great. Steve jobs would have approved it! And maybe even bought it before Google did.
I think they had the right idea honestly, this type of cinema camera and pricing model is the type to be directed at very large production companies, and if even just one of the biggest film production companies rented this camera, their story would've gone much differently...
It's actually almost 21MP or almost 6k. There is a 6x6 grid of pixes under every microlens. So you take 755MP and divide it by 36. This equates to a resolution of 20.83MP or about 6k.
It wasn't sold for Google. It was an error in reporting, the employees went to Google.
Nope, Google did acquire Lytro the company mostly for it's I.P. assets I guess. It happened after many staff had already moved to google.
@@Neojhun I had already written why this is not true, but keeps getting deleted due to the links.
Anyways, only early reports said that. Reports that came out after clarify that they were not. You can find one on CNet as well as others so long as they are datedlate March 2018 or later. The early March reports were the erroneous ones.
You will also not find the purchase in alphabet inc 2018 quarterly earnings reports, or any SEC filings. Also for what it's worth in 2018 the year of the demise of Lytro the website for lytro redirects to Raytrix in Germany, and still does. Now, it is possible Google bought some items, but they certainly didn't buy the company there would be concrete company papers.
Light field photography is just insane, amazing and brilliant.
Couldn't agree more! I hope they really figure out how to use it one day. Imagine the cost cutting applications for filming movies or anything? You really can fix it in post lol
And also dead.
Owning 2 lytro still cameras
They are awsome (tho low res) bits of technology
as a videographer and editor i think this was the most amazing and mind blowing revolution of all time for camera industry now a days this can be made much much smaller even phones can use time of light and lidar to achieve re focusing and relighting but compared to this its so muchmore than that its the actual hardware thats capturing all of those things if you combine this hardware technology and todays sensors i believe it would be flawless
Leonardo da Vinci must have been a time traveler hahaha he knew exactly what he was talking about
Talk about being waaaayyyyy ahead of your time.
Ah yes , i remember that LYTRO refocus camera, it was featured on Tested by Norman Chan! I can't believe it was already 11 years ago! 😅 Back then that technology was mind-blowing! 😃
😅😅😅 such a fascinating camera... Don't know if it will ever be practical but still cool tech for sure
Im torn, on the one had this is a totally incredible technological breakthrough, but in the other hand i shiver at the thought of taking even more "artistic" decisions in the editing room, and without the need for a focus puller, or even a DP to consult to, it makes it too easy for the artistic vision of the DP to be deviated from or ignored, i love that Arri went for the Baked in looks from the camera in the alexa 35, its bold, but it puts the control back in the hands of the filmmakers, at least in my opinion, not that planoptic cameras dont have a place in cinema, i just wouldnt like it to replace the current tech completely.
Totally get what you're saying! We are kind of at a weird crossroads at this point in the history of filmmaking. Will we keep more grounded like we always have or will everything start to become more automated? And which is better? Fascinating times
I don't foresee plenoptic cameras completely replacing conventional digital ones (heck, analog films are still around to some degree). However, there is a possibility of some aspiring directors or cinematographers experimenting with light field cameras.
@@FrameVoyager I just got a super 16 krasnogorsk, lol.
Lytro would never have taken away today's traditional Digital cameras even if it was smaller and lighter because there is so much character in Lenses and even in the Dynamic Range of your sensor, Lytro tech is amazing but the results are extremely digital, I believe the DOF is SImulated and until they simulated good looking DOF with some character I think the results always looked really really nasty, Think Fast blur on Premiere or After effects.
I had the chance to see the camera and equipment at the company in Dec 2016. Not only the camera but the hard drives were as big as a large mini fridge with hundreds of petabytes of capacity! There were so many wires all around which could transfer terabytes of data to the hard drives. It looked like a sci-fi machine! My mind was blown...
I remember this thing, it was for sure an interesting idea and the PR was so bad.
I still dreamed of getting to try it out and I still dream of owning the one they made someday. My own white whale
It would be cool to get a miniaturized version of this someday for sure! Sad it didn't work out
I remember when the Lytro was released to the public. It sounded fancy-schmancy. If they had only improved on the consumer product, expanding to a professional photographer level version, they could have been relatively successful. Imagine if development had progressed enough to fit it into an iPhone?
The irony of this video: The most replayed moment (1:46) has the most potato quality images captured as a 4K video.
if it actually recorded at 400GBps there literally would not be any feasible way to record data from it. even now the fastest commercially available drives top out below 10GBps, and in 2016 things were a lot slower. you would need enormous drive arrays of dozens of drives in RAID 0, which would be very very unreliable, if they used anything commercial, and even if the solution was custom with custom interfaces, would still need thousands of NAND Flash storage chips to record at that data rate for more than a few minutes. No way in hell they had anything approaching a working prototype that would deliver those results
Yeahhh, I know they had some kind of "special storage" solution for it. But who knows, no one ever really got to use the camera for real so we'll never know 😭
@@FrameVoyager it would need 40 drives with write speed of 10GB/s or better strapped in raid 0 and a lot of multisocket server's to handle 400GB/s also if you would take 30TB ssd's then you could fit 75s of footage on it for hour of footage you would need 48 of these arrays aka 1920 drivers with is 7680 lanes of PCIE that equals to 60 AMD EPYC CPU's and that hour of footage would be in total of 57.6PB totaly reasonable right??
27 PCIe Gen5 SSDs running RAID0 🤯
Ah I was following Lytro from launch but had no idea they went into broadcast/cinema. I really hoped Panasonic, Sony or other camera manufacturer would buy them and optimise the technology. Panasonic in particular, because they have always been at the leading edge of capturing frames from video in their GH series micro 4/3rds cameras. And light field tech seemed the next logical step.
Yeahhhh, it's probably what killed Lytro as a company too. I think they tried to do too much
I know this isn't strictly 'camera' related but it kind of is! And since this camera was going to allow you to change the DOF in post; I need to talk about this.
So in videogames, you are essentially always looking through a camera. But even though there is so much you can do with a manual DOF; it is hardly utilized ever. The only time you may see it is when you are playing a FPS and you look down the barrel of a gun.
One game that bucked this trend blew my mind when it used it and even now; no game has tried to do what this game did. That game was Alien Isolation.
Alien Isolation allowed you to shift your focus between your radar and the environment. Something you don't even think about is that when you do something as simple as look at your phone; that is DOF. The background is blurry but you don't even notice. However in games DOF is rarely used in these instances. But in Alien Isolation they used it to tremendous effect. It was so immersive.
So why do I bring this up? Well if this camera ever became a reality; imagine what we could do with movies? VR movies could be the thing of the future.
Imagine it. They film an entire scene with this camera and with eye tracking; the movie knows where you are looking and focuses on that object. You could watch a movie and focus on what the person was reading whilst your friend watched the same movie and looked at the characters expression instead.
I don't think we will get this for another 20 years or so but goddamn it could be amazing.
I am more excited to watch the new ABANDONED episode than any show out right now! You put a lot of work in your videos and it shows.
😅😅😅 appreciate it! Just happy to be able to bring these stories out! Such cool cameras
This is the the kind of fringe tech you’d find in an alternate universe.
if they had made a 1080p consumer video camera for $5000 that would have been cool. especially if aimed at VFX (same size as the big original black magic ursa, but with ability to create easy chroma screens would have been interesting for smaller VF workflows).
After all this years I still don't know what is Squarespace and newer seen any website related to it.
Light field camera to me just sounds like pure magic to me. Weird how I was early to watched this even though I am not subscribed yet. Subbed.
It really is! I mean I did a deep dive into conceptually how it works but it still blows my mind. And appreciate the Sub haha!
Like many things we use today, when they first invented, they were way ahead of its time. Most basic network and internet concepts were conceived in the 1960's and it took 40 years for the other technologies to make it practical to the population. I still think lightfield idea is revolutionary, we just haven't found the right application and current electronics is not powerful enough make it good enough.
What's really happening, is they divide up the sensor into many tiny chunks, each with a micro lens in front with a different focal length. Basically they're taking one small photo for each focus distance, and that's all there is to it, there's no 5D uber math going on, all you're doing is pick out the small slice of the photo that's the focal distance you want.
Their cameras, because of this fact, still require focusing, they just don't have to be as precise because each shot is taking a matrix of smaller photos at different distance of focus.
Sure they could do some 5D uber math with these information but there's no need to do that for the results they produce in practice. All they have to do really, is compose the images together for a smooth DOF effect. Kind of like the fake bokeh we have in phones today.
Sounds a bit like Canon's dual pixel RAW.
Exactly, all of the talk of light fields, math transformations, photon direction, etc... Was all nonsense when talking about the camera. Sure, those things are real when talking about actual light fields... But no Lytro camera was actually capturing light fields.
@@hbp_ yes, there are some similarities. Canon basically splits every pixel in two and there's a normal number of pixels. Where as Lytro splits every pixel into a million, and there's like 16 pixels.
I doubt they had the technology to build such microlens array with different focal lengths, my guess is they are just spherical "dots" like embossed plastic sheets for decorations. I'm guessing the 5D uber math is both real and not, like they might be just overlaying all the images but with different blur strengths to turn up locally unblurred images, but for the lack of words in geniuses' heads the way they explained was "preserving incident angles of photon beams" and all that
How do you think all those tiny chunks come together to a picture? You guessed it: Math.
Honestly, this would be the savior for 3d video. I always thought it was stupid because IRL, things you aren't focused on are blurry. With current 3d video tech, whatever was in focus in the shot is the only thing that can ever be in focus when viewed. It's quite distracting if one wants to look at something else in the scene. It breaks it down into a gimmick.
Was looking forward to this one. Such a fascinating camera conceptually. Definitely the VFX & VR uses were the most interesting conceptually. Probably way too ahead of the industry. And, 40K is ridiculous resolution. The cinema camera was literally the size of a tank turret. Although that would be a funny sight to see a tank rolling up and telling others "Oh, that's just the camera."
It really is such a fascinating camera, but it's just so impractical haha. Wish they had done something a bit more compact!
@@FrameVoyager Cinema cameras are already impractical. An IMAX camera is hard to lunk around and requires huge film rolls. I don't see like it's that much of a difference beyond the storage issues.
A guy I worked with got the consumer tube (is there a word for a 3D rectangle?) and the fact you can change focus points afterwards was neat. But was bummed out by the obvious need of their software making distribution of said files challenging. I had zero idea the cinema thing even happened! I do hope to see it again someday and not buried in some warehouse to whom eventually owns the IP
Thanks for sharing this fascinating technology. This is the field in which I'm doing my PhD. Just a quick correction on how a light field camera works: they don't have multiple sensors inside them, just a regular camera sensor. The difference is in the array of tiny lenses in front of the sensor and the processing you can do with that additional information. Light field cameras are in regular use in industry but have yet to find their niche in the consumer market.
Haha! 40k resolution, when most cinema projectors are 2k...
Man what a joy to see an "On The Verge" clip from when they were good, those were good times.
It doesn't use multiple sensor, just one normal sensor with a lot of small lenses. Essentially capturing several low resolution pictures focused on different layers.
But data alone beats physics using various level of computational imaging. Think between stacking for denoise/super resolution, to depth estimation, to nerfs
Light stages are used. Which simply shoot from different angles to get frames of 3D models.
If they released a true 6k camera with proper workflow they'd be great for steadycam work and not worrying much about pulling focus when running.
💯 they just went too big with this
@@FrameVoyager also their single camera true 3D capture was so promising.
This is better than any Csi:Miama episode. You don't even habe to nerd about cameras to enjoy the format.
Love this channel! You are the best and keep me up to date on everything I care about. Thanks for all your hard work and time commitment!
Appreciate it! Lots more to come!
I feel when the new CEO took it over , the company started to die, as original CEO was more correct in making consumer products, which they should had improved over time. But the cinema camera specs sounded too much like a scam.
Yeah it was definitley a pie in the sky kind of company
I can't see any other comments mention this , but the technology lives on in Google, in stuff like project starline , which basically uses the lightfield tech for video calls
We're already seeing that Technology is action, especially for Google and their Pixel series devices. I'm literally positive they bought Lytro explicitly for all the Computational Photography they could harness from the company. And now they shoehorn all of that into the Pixel series phones.
I was on set in a shoot and I saw you uploaded a new video, I apologised to the ACs and came home to watch it as soon we did the last shot
😂😂😂 hope it was worth it! Hahaha
I do recall Google made something out of it and there were big demos all over the place. They might still be available on the web
They tried to solve problems no one was having. It's an interesting technology but if your image was out of focus, you simply just took another photo. Maybe the VR application would be useful but it's still way too early.
That moment I realise it's also Lytro that made the lytro illum allegedly camera of the future a buggy laggy terrible quality camera which had terrible battery life and was oversized with a tiny sensor..
i wonder where the actual cinema camera went to. I kinda hope its in a F-117 like state of retirement where its technically retired and not public facing but is still being used and studied
I have a feeling that google would take advantage of the technology to suddenly compete in the camera market by making it compact and stuff. but regardless I hope this concept got to be developed and be open for public,. vfx cgi and editing stuffs would go ballistics with this.
The only thing I could properly rationalise for the scale of that camera was "400GB/s" That's both something I can imagine and also unthinkable. I think something like 24TB a minute of footage. While you can make storage that will support that, its an entire server rack on wheels in traditional storage terms of just SSDs, thousands of them.
This story is much deeper and it is really strange. Lytro invented a new camera that had no lenses, but just a ball radar like and could see. Then Google bought the company and created a tech which is just multiple common cameras together, and they used the same name, as if they wanted to make that new tech Lytro invented disappear, and confuse the public, no ask yourself, what could that new tech camera see? and why they rushed to cancel it?
I bought 18 Illum cameras (when they were heavily discounted) for an array. Worked great ....but the computing power necessary was way too much for live action!
Don't sleep on this technology, it was way ahead of it's time. When semi-conductors / processors can catch up, this technology will come back.
That giant Lytro cinema rig reminded me of the "Blimp" -- the old Technicolor camera with three film strips for each primary color. Big, expensive, noisy and a chore to work with the material. Lytro simply used brute force to achieve fundamental post-process gimmicks already possible with the advancement of machine learning algorithms for image processing, at much lower price and keeping your existing tool-chain setup.
They tried to solve a problem no one had and the marketplace let them know this.
Arri, Panavision and RedBox are all left feeling deeply disgruntled as their left asking, "are we all a bloody joke to you??" 🎥 🤭
😂😂😂
If 3D makes a big comeback like it did between 2009 and 2012, this camera would get a metric shizton of big studio $$$$ pushing it forward. Having a perfect depth map made in camera would feed so nicely into existing VFX pipelines, allowing for really amazing stereoscopic effects, but based on real depth and not an interpolation built from rotoscope masks made in india and depth maps made in a 3D conversion sweat shop in Vancouver.
I remembered this company had a very promising product/future.
But it is also a risk of bringing new technology into the market.
I think A.I generated image and animation will be interesting to investigate now.
Always is a risk. And trying to get into the film industry is not necessarily easy or profitable
i just want to point out that 755 megapixels at 300 frames persecond is one terrabit of data per second (1tbps) assuming 10 bit color, an hour of footage at that quality would be 450 terrabytes.
We have absolutely no reason for 40k resolution. Our eyes top out at about 36k.
I can also download confetti from Envato and put it over my footage. Cool.
Maybe Panasonic is frantically trying to put light field tech into their mirrorless cameras to finally solve their autofocus problems 😂
I remember the kickstarter, it was a big deal, and lightfields are invariably the future of display tech if we want to have holographic type 3D displays. I feel like Lytro never put out very much demonstration materials, it was all very hush hush with just a few promo things about their cameras but I never felt like they were doing a serious push to get their cameras out there. Lightfield displays are for sure in the future, but cameras are going to need to have an application demonstrated.
This series is genius, and that trailer is something else. I doth my cap to you sir.
😅😅😅 appreciate it!
We only have the technology to store that much data in real time. The Depth compression came with H.265. And MultiView Compression has just been investigated. And that thing is too complex and too expensive to operate. Even for now, Light Field contains more information than a 3D Vision Camera. We need a lot of knowledge to remove that redundant information. A light field camera really helps with 3D Cloud Point Reconstruction. The technology is good, but not for real-world applications at this mount.
that's some crazy stuff
@12:08 well now we would kinda know what's behind the recently very good cameras in the Google Pixel phones?
that technology came too early...
Records at 400 GBs per second. That's totally practical!!.... It would fully load an 8TB harddisk in like 17 seconds. Recording a 100 minute movie would only cost you like 50,000 dollars in hard drives. Have fun pulling 7TB video files from 300+ hard drives.
Ya but, does it actually work? If they have gone out of their way to remove that content just says it does not work.
Supposedly it did, they were renting it. But usually the content gets removed when someone else takes over.
Always imagined of creating something similar
I'm not sure anyone would need the blurry effect at all, it's impractical for real life. In reality with perfect vision everything is crisp. Ray tracing tech was the key.
haven't watched it yet but i'm gonna gues storage and cost was probaby a major issue, the lack of a video editor that could handle the footage, let's see how wrong i am
💯
Bro I've beeeen waiting for this!
haha gotta pace out these cool ones!
Their consumer cameras were neatly designed, but in my experience they were like a complicated iPhone portrait mode, really a shame!
I thought its the size of a broadcast super tele zoom camera. Turns out its as big as Goddamn nuclear missile
I still own the 8gig photo version, their first and only real product. And it‘s not good, the picture qualiy is pretty low. But at that time
it was worth taking a closer look, at least for me.
I've heard the same. Feels like something that really needed to be fine tuned
Do Abandoned video on SI-2K!
It's on our list!
The 40K resolution! Lol... I was at the presentation.. the problem is all of the technology doesn't give you any benefit whatsoever to the end product... For all that technology the end product would be a low dynamic range 2K ... It takes the entire film process and flips it on its head by removing basically all the artistry out of cinematography.. no camera movement and limited focal range. And don't look behind the curtain because you'll see that the data this thing required to capture and the processing power it took to even do the simplest things. Can you say 1 GB frame sizes!! There is not one single improvement on the final product.. and it came at the cost of scrambling virtually every stage of the creative process...
And just to let you know I'm a fan of the technology in "theory"
Oh! Same! But I agree with most of your conclusions too 😂
This series is the best on the internet!
😅😅😅 appreciate it!
yooo I remember this! I was so hyped for Lytro!
Yet another invention sucked into a corporation that will never find any actual uses for it.
The faster these are hoarders are dismantled the better it is for mankind and our collective future.
💯
wow this is sad to see this is such a cool camera. hopefully google does something with this.
Hopefully! Though sounding like google may have only brought aboard employees and not the tech. At least I've been told from sources after the video was released. So who knows where it is now lol
And we thought the DALSA was a huge and unweildy camera. I remember seeing the promos that Lytro out out for that camera and was absolutely blown away by that tech. Hopefully we'll see more light field tech in the cinema industry in the future because there's so much promise in it.
Right? 😂😂 And I think we will. To me it's biggest potential in the near future is in VR tech. That was interesting what they could achieve in that regard
This technology only failed because artists are slow to accept leaps in technology, to imagine what is possible.
I cant believe this failed
I hope this camera doesn't go away and it can be put to use somewhere. With how much it must have cost to develop I doubt another one like it will be developed for maybe even another decade or more.
Imagine a space telescope but for video
My god these videos are fascinating.
😅😅😅 appreciate it!
this camera was amazing cannot understand how it failed in the consumer market!
Even if you had a 40k camera, the problem would be how to project it on a screen
400GB/s?! No wonder it failed
that small camera in the beginning thats what they should have worked on.
oh, absoltuely. They had some other stuff they needed to figure out. Though the VR thing could have worked well, but I feel like that cinema camera had to have cost sooo much to make. Wouldn't be surprised if that's what really forced them to sell
@@FrameVoyager i am wondering if Google gonna use this technology in their future mobile camera.
@@JaspreetSinghArtist See I would assume they'd use it in their AR And VR tech
Finally a camera capable of the Imperium of Man Standard Resolution
Jesus, what kind of computer power do you need to handle the RAW files this camera spits out =O
Cool tech but come on their mistake was not developing the camera for a mass production, designing it smaller and developing the right compressed format so it wouldn't take 400 or so gb per second, there are small cinema cameras now days that can shoot 12k and also wtf is with the 120,000 subscription price?
fuck that camera was probably a century ahead of its time.
40K who can handle this amount of data...we are already struggeling with 4K in our worldwide workflow...next year everybody will film 6K not because it make sense, only because they can. do it. 40K is insane...
some things are just TOO GOOD for overseas consumers
Man!
While I love the fact that you're making it big as a UA-camr, I will always remember the days when you were a smaller channel and especially that cursed stream that crashed your computer so many times cuz of all the songs you tried to download 🤣
😂 that was an epic Livestream! Won't forget anyone who was at the start with me 😉
I was fascinated by Lytro but they were never able to offer a viable solution to a problem. Technical perfection doesn't matter much if you can brute-force it at a fraction of the cost in a hugely more practical way. Not mentioned in the video is the failure of 3D televisions severely limiting the market for 3D productions and Hollywood switching to computational up-converting 2D movies to 3D for cinemas. The whole industry was moving in the exact opposite direction of what Lytro was doing at higher cost in a more limited solution.
Such a shame, if they would have been able to find a small niche where they could have been cost effective, over the years they might have still changed the industry.
suggestion : Digital Bolex
Already got ya covered 😉 we actually got to do a 3 hour interview for that episode with the creator of the camera!.
if my screen could be 40k in 10 years instead of 720p
Still waiting for the Ikonoskop A-Cam DII video to happen 🤓🤙
Oh, it's already written and almost done being edited. But we got an interview with the follow up video on the digital bolex camera's creator that we want to add in some for the Ikonoskop as well!
@@FrameVoyager Awesome! You guys are the best! Keep up the good work!