Lytro announces Cinema, a 755 megapixel 300 fps Light Field camera

Lytro just announced the first professional light field camera solution for movies and broadcast. The Lytro Cinema uses a light field camera, a server, and associated software to capture 3D light data of a scene. TechCrunch reports that the 755MP camera, generates 40K video, shooting at 300 frames per second, and uses up 400 gigabytes of data per second. For comparison, a conventional digital camera, the Epic M Red Dragon is a 19.4MP camera that generates 6K video at 100 frames per second. The Lytro cinema is anything, but a conventional digital camera.The light field camera captures all the light rays, their luminosity and direction in a frame. Every pixel can be placed in a 3D location in space in relation to every other pixel. This feature is terribly useful in post production, as it allows editors and VFX artists to use the footage in a number of ways. As there is depth information for every pixel, objects in the background can be edited out of the frame.The software creates a virtual screen, called the depth screen, which can be used to remove and edit any information beyond a certain point in 3D space. This eliminates the need for greenscreening, a masking technique where the green background in a scene is replaced with video from another source, such as stock footage or graphic visualizations. Potentially this could be used anywhere from the CGI heavy summer blockbuster to the weather report on the news.The Lytro Cinema also allows the focus, aperture, perspective and shutter speed to be changed after the shot has been taken. This simplifies the shooting process, allowing for more creative and precise controls over output. Once the information is stored in the software, the adjustments are computed.VentureBeat has background information on Lytro, and the process of making the camera.