Contrast Optical and the amp Technology Team has released a new video that compares the amp camera to a SI-1920 standard cinema camera. Additionally, we debut our real-time video tone-mapper that was developed in conjunction with Erik Reinhard just for the amp camera.

 "amp: Getting the Whole Picture" is a brief video that shows various ways to view amp HDR footage. It's impossible to display amp HDR footage in its raw format, because today's displays (LCD screens, plasma TVs, digital projectors, etc.) do not have enough dynamic range to show all the data we capture. So we use a few different methods to show the extraordinary range of light-levels that we capture.

The amp prototype camera used to capture this footage comprises three SI-1920 camera sensors, to capture high, medium, and low exposure images for each frame of video.

To demonstrate the amount of dynamic range that the amp system adds to the standard SI-1920 camera, we show comparisons between the amp footage and the same footage seen with the medium-exposure SI-1920 sensor, or what a "typical" camera might see for each scene.

Working together with Erik Reinhard, we have developed a new video tone map operator (TMO) to provide real-time, natural-looking output from our next-generation cameras (via HDMI).

This new fully-automated video TMO, which we call the Kiser-Reinhard TMO, gets applied to both the raw SI-1920 (single sensor) videos and to the amp HDR videos. On a properly-calibrated video monitor or projector, you can see the extension of color and details, as well as the removal of significant noise, both up into the highest highlights and down into the darkest lowlights of the scenes.