Footage looks awful. Looks worse than iPhone footage from two years ago.

I apologize for this negative comment, but the footage looks quite bad. Shooting in 60fps was a huge mistake. I suppose there is value in shooting 60fps to use as stock footage but it makes the images themselves look cheap. Also, for all the in-depth technical information about the color grading process, the color grade itself looks very not good. All the colors are far too saturated and the contrast is very displeasing and unnatural. I understand this is supposed to be HDR but it does not look good at all. The visuals would have looked far better if you had shot in 24fps and not done any color grading. That the highly compressed, 4k footage from the Phantom looked as good as the RAW, RED footage should tell you that you made a huge mistake with the RED footage. Sorry, guys. Hopefully you will make your money back from stock footage licensing.

Eran, thanks for taking the time to share this information with us.

I apologize for seeming negative but some of what you've written is slightly misleading. Lytro seems like a really cool product but there are a number of massive shortcomings that have yet to be addressed.

You mentioned a handheld action shot and being able to easily manipulate it in post with Lytro. Have you seen any handheld shots with this Lytro Cinema Camera? No. No one has. A huge question mark surrounds the ability of the Lytro camera to do anything other than a nearly locked off, entirely studio controlled shoot.

Have you seen a wide angle lens on a Lytro camera? No. No one has. How would you shoot a handheld action scene without a wide angle lens?

Take an objective look at the image quality of the Lytro camera. It looks like pre-Genesis quality footage. The camera that no one used because it looked very bad. Despite the fact they're trumpeting 16 stops of DR, all of the shots they've shown thus far look very, very not good in terms of pure image quality.

A number of cloud based rendering services already exist and prices associated with most of them are out of reach of most indie filmmakers. I understand that Elara has more features than just rendering but why should we expect anything other than incredibly high prices aimed at high end productions?

I get that these are really good new pieces of technology and MAYBE someday they will trickle down to indie filmmakers. But in the meantime you can spend 10k for a Blackmagic Ursa Mini and lenses and get better image quality than the Lytro. Thanks again for the article, Eran.