Compression Artifacts

[Brian D. Goff]

The left half of the image is a HDCam 730 frame, the right half is Jims dragster footage. RED footage matches pixelsize of HD (RED footage zoomed in). This is the blue channel - Makes me feel good to know that I will soon never shoot HD again

[Brian D. Goff]

The left half of the image is a HDCam 730 frame, the right half is Jims dragster footage. RED footage matches pixelsize of HD (RED footage zoomed in). This is the blue channel - Makes me feel good to know that I will soon never shoot HD again

[Stuart English]

Re: based on Jim's two dragster R3D files I measured:

A001_C006_071102_001.R3D "Drag2" 2k 16:9 72 fps (526 frames)
Data rate: about 263 kB/frame, or 6 MB/sec at 24 fps

A003_C007_071105_001.R3D "Drag1" 4k 2:1, 23.98 fps (236 frames)
Data rate: about 1047 kB/frame, or 24 MB/sec at 24 fps

Just a comment, the target data rates have been increased since this footage was shot..

[Álex Montoya]

RED takes amazing pictures, but what you have posted can't be a pixel per pixel comparison. I believe you are comparing 1080 HDCAM with 4K RED downrezzed to 2K.

Though it is true that for a projection this would be the way to compare it.

[Warren Kommers]

From my observations it just seems like too heavy on the compression. Is 40 Mbps REDCODE impossible? It would possibly be the end of CF cards but nonetheless it's about low light images that are ready for a 50' screen more than data effeciency.

[Álex Montoya]

I wouldn't like to drop the CF option. In any case, I guess they would create two presets for transfer rates.

[Steve Sanacore]

I am sure in a few years as CF storage gets much larger and faster, going an uncompressed route will be possible as long as RED has that option available in the camera. I think I read somewhere about 64 and 128GIG cards on the horizon already.

[Luis de la Cerda]

Hello. I've been lurking around for quite some time and I guess now's a good time to start posting. I don't have any firsthand experience working with red footage except for the clips that jim posted. However, I' ve had to deal with some compression artifacts in my own aerial footage originated on hdv 60i (ouch). I recommend trying out an Aftereffects plugin called neatvideo. It does a remarkable job at denoising/deartifacting footage since with it's adaptive noise detection engine, and can be configured to denoise with specific aggressiveness settings for each channel. There's always a tradeoff when doing this sort of thing, and in this case it'll most likely be losing some detail. But depending on your requirements it might be worth it. Furthermore, some luminance masking might do the trick of only denoising the dark areasofyour footage. You really have to see it in action to believe it. I've managed to salvage 16db + footage shot in hdv with it. It's light years ahead of AE's native denoising engine. And if you select an artifact plagued area of your footage to analyze noise characteristics it also does a very decent job at getting rid of said artifacts. Ymmv. Hope someone finds this info helpful.
PS. It's also quite inexpensive.

[jbeale]

I gather NeatVideo is from the same folks that brought us Neat Image (denoising for still photos). I know there must be loss of detail, but not as much as I would think. The examples here are pretty impressive. http://www.neatvideo.com/examples.html

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Neat video works! Miracles! I've used it for everything from denoising to cleaning up sample flickering in renders with GI. It's the bee's knees. That being said. The problem with REDCode isn't that it's too noisy. It's that it's not noisy enough. High noise + Heavy Wavelet compression = De-noised image and unfortunately it's not temporally denoised (like neat will do) it's intra frame de-noised and fine details such as... distant trees in aerial plates... are assumed to be noise and just scrubbed away leaving a smeary mess (which is a lot better than a boxy DCT mess but still problematic).