Weird artifacts in the BMD camera sample footage?

[Rudi Herbert]

I know this isn't RED related, but as it pertains to another camera that shoots and records RAW, I could stand to learn a couple of things if the thread is not taken down, hopefully.

So, as many of you know, BMD has finally posted some sample images from their camera, and all things considered, they look quite good. Not the crisp, detailed images that RED makes, but quite nice for such a small sensor/cheap camera. Anyhow, I was noticing that the two clips that were shot in low light exhibit some sort of checkerboard pattern that is barely visible, but still there. It looks like the pixel array of the sensor shows through, can it be? I've heard this camera does not have an OLPF, can this be the reason, anyone knows what this is? It's just something I've never seen before, in stills or video cameras.

 

[Robert Niessner]

That's very possible. I saw those kind of artifacts on all sort of low light footage of all sorts of cameras as soon as the noise was cleaned up.
Had that on RED ONE footage where the black shading hadn't been done for a while.
I had that on footage from a Sony HVR1E after creating a time lapse and removing noise.

 

[Justin Kirchhoff]

I know this isn't RED related, but as it pertains to another camera that shoots and records RAW, I could stand to learn a couple of things if the thread is not taken down, hopefully.

So, as many of you know, BMD has finally posted some sample images from their camera, and all things considered, they look quite good. Not the crisp, detailed images that RED makes, but quite nice for such a small sensor/cheap camera. Anyhow, I was noticing that the two clips that were shot in low light exhibit some sort of checkerboard pattern that is barely visible, but still there. It looks like the pixel array of the sensor shows through, can it be? I've heard this camera does not have an OLPF, can this be the reason, anyone knows what this is? It's just something I've never seen before, in stills or video cameras.

Do you have a link to these examples you speak of?

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Very likely a debayer artifact. It was in a lot of the early RED Mysterium and MX footage. Looks to be part of the tuning process for a bayer chip.

I still see something like it in Alexa ProRes footage. Really annoying when making clean plates.