City night, available light - lens test on my SCARLET ... (C300 as ref' cam)

[Hector Berrebi]

I am putting together an article on SCARLET, and this was part of it,
and an oportunity to test how low light conditions are handled by good glass.
a friend lent me his Zeiss ZF set (85, 50, 35) and his C300 as a ref cam.

i keep hearing from clients they want to shoot C300 for its low light capabilities,
and when i suggest the SCARLET, the say its way too noisy and practically unusable.

aside from the fact that i don't believe in shooting without lights,
I think a good 1.4 lens on ISO 800 (and even 320 with some LED help)
produces a beautiful image with acceptable noise. (that's before digital noise removal)

i was happy to try this out.

this is not a scientific test., we had one tripod for 2 cameras, and both of us are primarily post people (and definitely not DP's)
we also didn't try to prove that the SCARLET is better than the C300 in lowlight conditions.

however, its definitely not a bad camera/sensor for lowlight work, especially with the right glass.

and personally, i like it much more image-wise than what i got out of the C300.

shot 25 fps, at 4K, ISO 800, 6:1,
REDCOLOR3 & RED GAMMA 3
lens at F1.4
processed in REDCINE-X to ProRes 4:4:4 1920x1080 at full debayer
no color work done

i dislike what the Vimeo compression did to the file.




I added a youtube version, in 1080 http://youtu.be/tD71BOhgjaI

the C300 movie is in my user on Vimeo.

hector

[Joe Shemesh]

Thanks for sharing this Hector!!!

best
joe

[Carey Lee Coffey]

Looks fine. I don't see any noise. Shoot that same scene with the HVX-200... then talk to me about an image being practically unusable. The Scarlet is incredible!

[Lliam Worthington]

Thanks for sharing.

I thought the c300 footage was pretty impressive as expected for lowlight. But on the Scarlet in low light I agree. Have been happy with what's possible personally,
and talk of unusable too noisy etc is just un informed rubbish and speaks more of how incredibly spoiled we now are.

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

For some reason the C300 video is HD and Scarlet video is not? I assume because non-plus vimeo users can only do one HD video per day or something. That said, it may be worth noting that the more downscaled more compressed Scarlet footage may have had a lot of the noise smoothed out of it by the low bitrate SD compression.

Were the same ZF lenses used on both the C300 and Scarlet cameras? I'm curious because the bokeh on the lens on the C300 looked quite bad and did not look the same on Scarlet. Maybe it was because one mostly had the 85 and the other mostly had a 35?

[Hector Berrebi]

For some reason the C300 video is HD and Scarlet video is not? I assume because non-plus vimeo users can only do one HD video per day or something. That said, it may be worth noting that the more downscaled more compressed Scarlet footage may have had a lot of the noise smoothed out of it by the low bitrate SD compression.

I wondered why it wasn't HD. can I re-upload it tomorrow? or will it be fixed by itself?
actually, it looks much better without the Vimeo compression

[Brian Boyer]

...That said, it may be worth noting that the more downscaled more compressed Scarlet footage may have had a lot of the noise smoothed out of it by the low bitrate SD compression...

The compression is masking the noise. When watching the .mov version, the noise is more visible but nowhere near objectionable. It has an organic quality to it that looks more like film grain than digital video noise.

Scaling down to 1080P from 4K is probably helping with that as well. I like that look.

[Hector Berrebi]

youtube 1080 looks much better than the Vimeo compression.
http://youtu.be/tD71BOhgjaI


hector