Saturday, April 26, 2025

Why haven't movie cameras gotten smaller and lighter while so many other electronics have throughout the years?

As we continue to innovate while the years pass, electronic components become smaller and more powerful at the same time. So why do motion picture cameras remain pretty large and pretty heavy?

And when will components get so small and good that smartphones can be used to film full-on movies?

Crossposts:

r/FilmMakers: r/Filmmakers/s/v8BeqtWbru

r/movies: r/movies/s/c6zbEL28FZ

r/Film: r/FIlm/s/9JKz4JQzLx

r/AskTechnology: r/AskTechnology/s/FHjQKrmGNI

r/Smartphones: r/Smartphones/s/OEcAXy8Pgo

all 7 comments

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[–]P1r4nha 2 points 5 months ago

I would argue they did get smaller. There are very dynamic scenes now that would be impossible with cameras that need to ride on tracks and be pushed by several people to move at all. Like some bigger parcour scenes come to mind or very long scened where the camera moves around a lot.

There's a technical reason though: optics. Good cameras need room for their lens systems. Any attempt to make that smaller leads to lower quality. Phones these days solve this with a complicated software stack to still get something useful out of a grainy, washy original. For film however you probably want more artistic control.. and also not necessarily add everything in post.

There could also be business reason where inovation in this highly specialized field has stalled, but I'm not so sure that's the case because there seems quite a bit of innovation in CGI, mocap, etc. and soon you can generate photorealistic, animated scenes with actors in game engines like Unreal.

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[–]space_fly 1 point 5 months ago

[–]collin3000 2 points 5 months ago

They are smaller. Heck Sony actually just came out with their new version of the Venice mini that's 70% smaller then their last one.

Some things though, will always stay big because the larger the surface area of a sensor the more light you can gather. But the larger your sensor is the larger your lens needs to be. And if you have a big sensor and a big lens then it makes sense to have a body that will balance it out. And if you've got a body that size you might as well jam pack it full of fancy electronics to processing new resolutions and formats previously unheard of.

So now we've got stuff like black magic's 17K camera or full 3D 8K PER EYE Camera. Since we wanted the big sensor and lens to match it. We also get a 140 megapixel image taken 60 times per second. Capturing more resolution data in one second than the first 1080p digital cinema cameras in 2 whole minutes. All at the same size!