Director’s View: Another iPhone App from Chemical Wedding
If you liked Helios, the sun position calculator, you’ll like Artemis, a digital director’s viewfinder available as an iPhone app from the same folks at 
Chemical Wedding. “Artemis is designed with both cinematographers and directors in mind,” says Chemical Wedding’s Toby Evetts. “It works in much the same way as a traditional directors viewfinder, although it’s much more accurate and much more convenient.” The price, $29.95, is the same as that for Helios.
How easy? The user selects a camera format, aspect ratio and lens type, and then Artemis uses the camera in the iPhone to simulate the lens view that you can expect with the configuration you’ve selected. “You can either compare all the lenses or hit zoom and the camera will zoom in to fill the viewfinder with the equivalent view of the lens you’ve chosen,” says Evetts. (Watch the video below.)
There is one caveat. Field coverage is limited to the field of view of the iPhone camera which, says Evetts, is “more or less the equivalent of 27mm in Super 35mm.” “We are currently exploring the use of a supplementary wide angle lens to extend the coverage to include at least 18mm and perhaps as much as the 14mm,” says Evetts, who asks interested users to contact Chemical Wedding so they can let them know when a supplementary lens becomes available.
Anyone who has shot with a digital camera knows that the lack of accurate information can create blunders in nearly every step in the pipieline. Evetts says that Chemical Wedding has field tested Artemis with every camera in the database to make sure the field of view is accurate. “With digital film cameras we found that relying on the information from camera manufacturers was not always wise,” says Evetts (without pointing fingers).
Another caveat: Artemis is only available for the iPhone OS 3.1. The Chemical Wedding guys apologize in advance, and explain why: “To make Artemis we need to have access to the iPhone camera and customize it a bit and this is only legally available in the 3.1 SDK (software developer’s kit),” Evetts says. “So unfortunately we have no choice. It’s just not possible in 3.0.”
In the current version of Artemis, images cannot be saved out, but this feature is in the works and, when available, will be a free upgrade. In the meantime, the solution is a kludge: “You can take screen grabs by holding down the “on button” and the “home button” together,” says Evetts. “It kind of works.”
The following formats are covered so far. Once again, Chemical Wedding asks users and potential users to contact them to add any additional formats in the next version.
Standard and Super 16mm
Super 16mm Anamorphic
Standard and Super 35mm
35mm Anamorphic
65mm
35mm Digital (D-21, RED, F35, Genesis)
2/3 ” Digital (F23, Viper)
1/2″ Digital
1/3″ Digital
Stay tuned for more developments.
Tags: Artemis, Chemical Wedding, cinematographer tool, digital camera, director's viewfinder, field of view, Helios, iPhone app, OS 3.1, wide angle lens
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Advertising/Marketing, Content, Devices, Events, Home Feature, Video.
