Day 1 of RED tests... unsharp?

[Pawel Achtel]

Things that go wrong:
1. Mount not put on properly.
2. Back focus off (which is why we made ours easy to check and adjust.
3. Looking at sharpness in a QT proxy. Make a 4K tiff from RED Alert! or REDCINE to see exactly where you are.
4. Missed focus (this should probably be closer to #1)
5. Soft lens (usually last on the list) but can happen if an older film lens is shot wide open.
6. Shooting wide. Apparent resolution can drop off significantly with wide lenses.

Am I missing something?

RED footage should be painfully sharp. If not, you are likely doing something wrong.

Jim

Yes:
7. Shooting closed (f/11 and beyond)
8. Motion blur when looking at individual frames
9. IR contamination if heavy filtering was used

Am I missing something?

[Uli Plank]

wow.. i just made a tif.. its a LOT sharper than a quicktime.. quicktime just lost my respect.. VLC love ya!!

The QT proxies are not fully decoded for the sake of speed. If you generate QuickTimes in ProRes from RedCine or RedAlert you are in for a surprise.

[McDiver]

Cinemano,
Glad you found the source of your problem.
But also keep in mind that part of the brilliance of Red is that their engineers think far off into the future. Graeme has been quite clear that sharpening a picture in-camera can be quite detrimental to resizing later. Apparently the Red team prefers to keep the Red pipeline as clean as possible, which means that you can sharpen the image yourself, and be surprised at how well it works, without introducting ringing and artifacting!
Red is not like the other camera companies, so some of the traditional no-no's for post processing don't always apply. I wish this were emphasized more often.

Try it . . . you'll like it.

[cinemano]

thanks McDiver.. ill keep that in mind.. I guess i like razor sharp stuff but its clear its a question of taste. to me it all looks out of focus :D

[Uli Plank]

On a Sony EX-1 I didn't even find a menu to switch off sharpening (or at least turn it down). Even A Canon HV20 can do it…

[Justin K Phillips]

Speaking of HV20, it amuses me how similar its cinemode looks to RED footage at 1:1 pixel scale.

[Joel Kaye]

On a Sony EX-1 I didn't even find a menu to switch off sharpening (or at least turn it down). Even A Canon HV20 can do it…

Detail off shuts off all sharpening in that camera. Detail "0" still has sharpening. Detail -1,-2 etc. adds softening.

[cinemano]

actually my hv20 looked sharper than my hvx :D Especially when connected via HDMI to my plasma.. sold my hvx before you can say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious :)