A full-scale mock-up of a new Panavision 70mm digital cinema camera was unveiled this November at the Plus Camerimage festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland. The unit on display was non-functional — the sensor and the cooling system are still being finalised — but Panavision’s representatives at the festival were happy to walk through the design philosophy and a tentative spec sheet, and what they described is the most ambitious large-format digital body the company has ever attempted.

Sensor and format

The camera is built around a sensor in the same size class as 65mm/70mm motion picture film. The sensor is windowable: it can be cropped down to a 42mm format and again to a regular Super 35mm, which means a single body would cover everything from anamorphic large-format work to standard 35mm digital coverage without an additional camera on the truck. Panavision’s own newly announced Primo 70 lens line was developed in parallel for this format and shown alongside the body.

Final resolution is not being committed to publicly yet, but a 70mm-class sensor is going to land in the upper end of current digital cinema — somewhere north of what the Alexa or F65 deliver — and Panavision are emphasising VFX-grade image data as the use case rather than a specific pixel count.

Body and recording

  • Construction: titanium chassis. Field-weight target is “a couple of pounds lighter than the ARRI Alexa,” which is a non-trivial claim given the sensor area.
  • On-board media: built-in SSD recording, with reference capacities cited around 1.5 TB. No external recorder needed for the standard codec workflow.
  • Codecs at launch: DNxHD and Apple ProRes, in RGB. RAW capture is on the table but not confirmed for the first prototype.
  • A new open codec is also under development internally at Panavision, suggesting the long-term workflow will not be tied to existing third-party formats.

“The VFX department’s dream camera”

The talking point Panavision returned to most often was metadata. The body is being designed to capture and embed an unusually wide set of on-set metadata — lens, focus, iris, shutter, exposure data, timecode, geometry — directly into the recording, so that visual effects, DI and stereo conversion teams downstream receive the kind of frame-accurate data that today usually has to be reconstructed by hand. One representative described it as “the VFX department’s dream camera,” and the design clearly targets the same large-budget productions that currently push their negative through ARRI Alexa Studio and Sony F65 bodies.

Where it stands

A working prototype is still at least six months away. The two outstanding engineering questions are the sensor itself and a cooling system that can sit inside a body this small without compromising the image, and Panavision’s team was candid that those problems are not yet solved.

The mock-up shown at Camerimage was, in other words, a statement of intent: Panavision wants back into the body-and-sensor business at the very high end, and the camera was named — internally and unofficially — the “Alexa killer” by more than one person on the floor. Whether the production version makes it that far will come down to the sensor.

We will follow this one closely as more details emerge.

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