Re-grade your footage...

[Lauri Kettunen]

Originally Posted by Deanan

The raw exposure overlays does this by showing the highlight clipping point in red(or last reverseable point in your terminology?) and the noise floor in purple. Or do you mean something else? The goalposts, histogram, and highlight bar (next to the histogram all do the same also but in different ways.

In fact, up to the latest release build 21, people from RED have confirmed that only the 'barber's pole' indicates true raw metering. Furthermore, when the upper most red bar of the barber's pole is on, then clipping already occurs. So, only the orange light may be on.

But, and this is the big but, the sensor seems not to be fully linear up to the orange light but there is some roll-off/compression (or whatever you want to call it) meaning the graph showing the response of the sensor bends before clipping. If one exposures over this bend, then linearity and reversibility in post is lost.

So, the question is, which bar of the barber's pole corresponds to the highest point of linearity?

Second, Graeme has confirmed that the raw view has a mild gamma curve applied. In practice this shows up such that when using raw view often the red bar in the barber's pole is on indicating clipping but none of the trafic lights is yet on. Consequently, the raw overlay is not reliable (and I've fell to this pitfall and spoiled couple aerials by relying on the trafic lights/raw overlay when setting the exposure).

The second question is, which setting in RCX scales downwards the image along the linear part of the affine line? I assume now that there is some roll-on/bend of the sensor response graph in the dark end as well. Is this the case?

Third question, am I fully mistaken here?

And another detail here: It's not possible to choose simultaneously both the focus assisting tools (black & white view with the edges highlighted in blue) and the raw overlay to the quick buttons on the LCD and camera. Instead, one has to go through the menu system, and in practice in wildlife shooting one has to choose one or the other. There's no time to change the selection from the menus when situations come and go quickly.

Originally Posted by Deanan

It sounds as though what you're asking for is to be able to expose to the right and then have the camera automatically figure out where mid grey should be (ie. set the iso metadata and/or FLUT). But in the ETTR case, there is no real way to know what your intended midgrey point would be after you've ETTR.

No, I don't want the camera to do anything automatically as I don't believe such an automatic system were possible at the first place. And in fact, the midgreys have nothing to do with the exposure -that is with the map between light intensity before the sensor and the voltages after the sensor. So talking of midgreys in the context of exposure have no conceptual meaning, and I would like to avoid thinking of post issues while shooting as there's nothing I can do to the prevailing light. (Midgreys has to do with the post stage and they get a meaning once one gets to set/choose the gamme curve.)

What I'm asking for is:

to have in parallel a clearly documented workflow that separated the exposure (in-camera issue) and establisment of the gamma map (in-post issue) from each other.

Clear documentation means clear camera metering indication and clear documentation which setting in RCX corresponds to scaling in the desired way.

EDIT: Deanan, since this conclusion that I'm after the camera automatically figuring out where the mid-greys should be is quite against of what I'm trying to say here's an analogy: Say you were an recording engineer in a music studio. If you have only a stereo recorder and you make a live recording of some band, then you have to mix the whole thing simultaneously while you record the band. But, if you have a multitrack recorder, you record every single instrument using as high level as possible without distorting the sound to get the best possible sampling despite that some instruments are going to mixed very low in the final recording. While recording you often have to provide the musicians also with a preliminary mixing into their ear phones.

In the same sense, in the raw workflow one should try to get the best possible sampling and the preliminary 'mixing', i.e. gamma map adjustment, is left to metadata. The beauty of the raw flow is in linearity which allows to make a clear distinction between exposure (analogy: recording) and setting the gamma-map (analogy: mixing the final recording).

[christopher witzke]

Originally Posted by christopher witzke

1st time I've ever quoted myself to get some opinions... any advice would be appreciated. So, what's the fasted way to get to 2K editable in FCP from redcinex without a rocket?

thanks folks... so helpful....

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