Mysterium-X Poor quality 100fps. Fuzzy and blotchy image.

[Glenn Taunton]

Hi there, I recently shot a short on the Mysterium-X.

Most of the footage looks fine, however I shot one sequence at 100fps on to a RED Hard Drive.
It does play back in its entirety, but the quality is atrocious, with erratic noisy blotches over the whole image.
We shot other sequences in 50fps and 80fps which turned out fine.

I have created and H264 and it is downloadable here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9000179/RED%20MX%20poor%20quality%20100fps.mov

And a trimmed R3D here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9000179/A023_C006_0221P0_001.R3D


I used RED Cine X on Full Quality Debayer.

My feeling is that it may have corrupted during file transfer, and this wasn't flagged by DIT as it played smoothly through proxies.

I'd appreciate if anyone has dealt with a similar issue could shed some light on this.

Thanks,
Glenn Taunton

 

[Tom.Wong]

are you debayering to 2k? debayer to a 720p and see if that helps. the 2k made only has enough resolution to give you a really nice 720p. it's a cropped sensor mode, so you're literally windowing on the sensor which makes 2k the softest shooting mode with the most amount of artifacts in.

that actually looks about right to me on 2k. you'll have the most noise, it's gonna be softest. also what iso were you exposing for? and were you at a 180 degree shutter?

 

[Nick Gardner]

Unfortunately, over 96 or so fps is broken. Red is aware of the problem but for some reason (legal liability? I have no idea) won't make an announcement about it, and for some reason they seam unable to fix it. The problem was not there in earlier builds.

In my experience, this bug affects every other frame, so you can drop the offending frames and get 50fps usable footage.

The buzzing around the fine detail is the normal frame and then the compressed/pixelated looking frames bouncing back and forth.

Sorry for your loss,

Nick

 

[Miltos Pilalitos]

There is no doubt that there is a problem with the footage.

The codec run out of bandwidth and couldn't handle the detailed natural landscape and the high fps.

You may have also noticed that the shot is divided in two vertical halves with one being more compressed than the other. If you know your RED history you might have seen this again 2 years ago when RED was trying to fix the codec problems.

Congratulations, you broke the REDCODE.

 

[Glenn Taunton]

Thanks Nick, I must say I'm horrified if this is the reason...
I looked online pre-shoot regarding 120fps on the MX, and I'd only seen posts regarding problems over 115fps. So I chose to go for 100. Ran some tests on 100 and looked fine beforehand. Does the bug you're referring always strike, or does it happen occasionally?

I will try your fix thanks for this, will the overall quality still suffer on the 'usable' frames because of the bug, or do you reckon this would how it should have looked at 2k regardless?

I'm assuming that it's not worth considering corruption during the file transfer stage.

Maybe I'll have to resort to twixtor for this one.
Glenn Taunton

 

[Glenn Taunton]

Militos - So are you in agreement with Nick that it's a camera bug?

I assume that there is not a way of fixing this 'broken redcode.' That the footage is irretrievable. Should I contact RED and ask for an explanation?

This is terrible news, as you can see we had quite a setup in place for this shot.
Thanks for your help,
Glenn

 

[Carl Dieker]

I have no experience of M-X but can think of some reasons for the bad looks: extreme high contrast scene combined with a wideangle fixed shot (no camera movement).

I have shot tons of 2K slowmo footage in 120 fps (25p) with 250/s in shutter, and have got some great results with both wideangle (w/ camera motion) and zoomed shots. And with plenty of headroom even for 2K or 1080 out.

Kite surfing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls844wXfFmM

speedcats/thundercats:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP1yBNbsjP8

 

[Glenn Taunton]

Thanks Carl, yeah your stuff looks really nice at 120fps.

Luckily for me the rest of the video came out very well on the MX. I decided to use a RED for the slow-motion capabilities, so its ironic the camera tripped up on this. As I've said I have footage shot at 60 and 80 which looks perfect.

Regarding the distortion, I highly doubt its a matter what image I was filming. Even if it was a contrasty forest and lots of intricate detail with the trees etc it would not explain the the messy, fuzz that my image was getting and surely must be a problem with the codec as suggested above.

Glenn

 

[Meryem Ersoz]

broken codec - I had similar results trying to shoot super slow motion 2K footage of a snowmaking equipment blowing snow out of a forest...

it looked great in the LCD but proved un-useable upon review. fortunately, it wasn't cruxy, just b-roll for a larger project...everything else I shot that day and for an additional 3 weeks before and after...looked great. still drove me nuts trying to figure out what went wrong.

 

[Carl Dieker]

It would be cool to see a fine 60fps shoot of that same scene. Woulde it be possible for you to share one?

 

[Glenn Taunton]

Meryem, unfortunately this is a key shot for me, and I'm going to have to go ahead with it despite the problem. Its all going to be viewed at 720 eventually anyway so hopefully I can get away with it.
I assume you never came across a fix.

Glenn

 

[Carl Dieker]

OK, sorry, once loaded in RCX I see what you mean. Something really strange going on with the flickering there.

Still, as a side note, I would have tried to avoid shooting a scene with such steep contrast between highlights and darks with almost no room for midtones. But maybe I am wrong.

 

[Nick Gardner]

Hi again,

It's not an every time thing.It's also not limited to above 115. I have noticed, and the other instances I have seen have always been in high detail, high contrast situations. Looking at your footage, it has the every other frame is fucked thing going on. You could try removing the crappy frames and then retiming in twixtor if you need the slow mo.

I just hope that everyone can become aware of this problem because it really ruins your day when you are counting on a shot and the camera fails.

Nick

 

[Meryem Ersoz]

Meryem, unfortunately this is a key shot for me, and I'm going to have to go ahead with it despite the problem. Its all going to be viewed at 720 eventually anyway so hopefully I can get away with it.
I assume you never came across a fix.

Glenn

I re-shot mine with a heavy filter which mitigated the contrast issue -- same kind of day, gray/white and snowy, and the second effort was much improved, though ultimately I scrapped those shots, since they were non-essential - some of the same issues were still visible though greatly reduced. I didn't figure out a good post- solution. Re-shooting is the best option.

 

[Miltos Pilalitos]

Regarding the distortion, I highly doubt its a matter what image I was filming. Even if it was a contrasty forest and lots of intricate detail with the trees etc it would not explain the the messy, fuzz that my image was getting and surely must be a problem with the codec as suggested above.

Glenn

Actually it does matter what you are shooting. It's the way the wavelet compression works. The more detailed the subject (high frequency detail) the less efficient the codec it's going to be.

In the early beta testing of the REDRAW i remember some user had a tree in his backyard shaped in such a way that could brake the codec every single time until RED tweaked the codec in a way that it finally recorded without a problem.

I had problems with vegetation and forested locations too early on with my RED1. It's very rare now that i face such issues but i guess it's still there if you push too much.

I hope you will find a way to fix it post somehow. 720p delivery will help i think!

 

[paulherrin]

have you attempted to drop half of the frames and get 50fps? if that looks clean, you may be better off using kronos or twixtor to slow it down to the desired speed.

 

[Meryem Ersoz]

It's not an every time thing.

It is actually a very rare thing and only occurs under very specific conditions. And doesn't show up in the LCD or the histogram.

I've had 2 instances in 2+ years. The first one was shooting baby owls - the trees broke the codec - but since then, RED fixed the problem, for the most part, in response to user feedback.

But the convergence of several conditions - motion, high-detail trees, and super contrasty environment - can still push the limits. But you can't easily re-create the phenomenon, I don't believe, unless all three of these are present at the same time. I filtered heavily because I thought I was looking at IR pollution, at the time, which you have to worry about when you shoot in glaring snow . Shooting snow-making gear blasting out snow is like shooting a million little reflective mirrors.

But the filter didn't completely remove the issue, only mitigated it in the re-shoots, I couldn't get footage which looked as clean as what I was seeing in the LCD and meters, which led me to this same conclusion - broken codec. Too much data tilted the wavelet compression. I don't know this - it's a hunch.

 

[Nick Gardner]

It's not that rare, and it wasn't an issue on older builds. I have shot reams and reams of slo mo that never had a problem until 2 builds ago. It is pretty easy to recreate with slo mo and high detail.

nick

 

[ericyoung]

OK - people on this thread are obviously having a problem - has anyone with a problem raised a support ticket, submitted logs and R3Ds, and what was Red Support's response?

 

[Chris Park-Kennaby]

I tend to hear a lot of negative comments about Red but I generally regard them as misinformation. Usually they are 100% misniformation which is very frustrating.

However this would seem to validate a number of them... Some official word from Graeme or Stuart would be appreciated here.

Is it possible to break the Redcode codec in this way?