Soviet Montage Productions, a company in San Francisco that focuses on making short films, has produced the world’s first HDR video and it’s absolutely gorgeous.
Though high dynamic range imaging can be traced back to the 1800s, it is a relatively new trend in the imaging world, being featured in the new iOS 4.1 update for Apple products. Basically, HDR imaging takes an underexposed and overexposed version of a snapshot and combines them to form an extremely vivid end result, displaying a wider range of intensity levels captured in the picture.
In the video shot by Soviet Montage Productions, they used two Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR cameras to film the overexposed and underexposed scenes, claiming they were chosen because of their relative inexpensiveness. The sky and the segment featuring the person is particularly pretty, looking reminiscent of the graphical effects in 300. It says something that the first comparison that comes to mind for this particular way of filming reality is the special effects of a big budget movie.
(Gizmodo via The Daily What)
