Dynamic Range in Redcine-X

[Tobias Buehler]

After seeing what you can get out in Photoshop/Lightroom with BMCC dpx RAW files i feel there's no direct way you can get the most (visible) dynamic range from the footage in Redcine-X.
What I'm missing is options like "shadow/highlight" or a better curves tool. For example when you lower the ISO to 50 you get nice tones in the parts that are blown out at ISO 800, but then the shadows are gone and vice versa.
It obviously records a lot of DR that you can't get into one picture without having to render 2 versions and luma-mask it as with HDRX. Actually I get better DR results when I adjust in Filmconvert than I can get in Redcine.
I feel like in Premiere, Resolve etc. the R3d's grade about as good as a Prores 422 proxies at the same meta setting, all the information in DR that's there, but you cant get out of in Redcine-X is just gone in most other natively .R3d supporting programs.

What good are 13 stops or so of DR if you can only decide which 4 or 5 of them you want to see?

Do I have a point or is there some ruler/option I totally missed?

 

[Jake Wilganowski]

Use davinci

 

[Graeme Nattress]

RC-X is primarily a RAW development tool. It's not that it's limited in this area, but that it focusses on "sticking to the knitting" and doing what it has to do best, without bloat. External grading tools are there to do exactly what you desire, with more degree of specialist control than could be fitted int RC-X.

That sais, if you can't see 11+ stops from an image developed on the RG3 curve you're doing something wrong.

Graeme

 

[Norbert Jalitsch]

shadow and highlight tools are what i'm expecting from a RAW DEVELOPMENT Tool.
or do i expect to much ???
best, norbert

 

[Mike P.]

shadow and highlight tools are what i'm expecting from a RAW DEVELOPMENT Tool.
or do i expect to much ???
best, norbert

You mean like the "Fill" and "Recovery" sliders like all other RAW formats have (CR2s, ArriRAW, CinemaDNG, etc. etc.)? Ironically, I just posted an inquiry about that in the REDcode thread...

I know exactly what you mean and agree; those functions somehow never cause the resulting image to go to shit... they always look good and extract much more "image" out of the image. When switching to REDlogFilm, there's a massive contrast and colour/saturation loss (to be expected), whereas with fill and recovery, all of that info seems to stay in the image (e.g. with fill, the black point seems to stay the same, but everything between black and mid gets ligther, whilst still retaining contrast/saturation... With recovery, it pulls down everything above mid equally to get back highlights... It's almost like lowering ISO, but only for the top 25-50 IRE.)

 

[Robino_J]

You mean like the "Fill" and "Recovery" sliders like all other RAW formats have (CR2s, ArriRAW, CinemaDNG, etc. etc.)? Ironically, I just posted an inquiry about that in the REDcode thread...

I know exactly what you mean and agree; those functions somehow never cause the resulting image to go to shit... they always look good and extract much more "image" out of the image. When switching to REDlogFilm, there's a massive contrast and colour/saturation loss (to be expected), whereas with fill and recovery, all of that info seems to stay in the image (e.g. with fill, the black point seems to stay the same, but everything between black and mid gets ligther, whilst still retaining contrast/saturation... With recovery, it pulls down everything above mid equally to get back highlights... It's almost like lowering ISO, but only for the top 25-50 IRE.)

Would love to be able to use something like that too.

 

[jake blackstone]

When switching to REDlogFilm, there's a massive contrast and colour/saturation loss (to be expected)

Sorry, but there's zero loss of contrast and a minimal decrease in saturation.
The problem is you're looking at the image without the nessesary display LUT. Once you'll use it, it will look almost identical to RG3.

 

[Mike P.]

That's right, the LUT reintroduces contrast and saturation back in, as per it's look-up table parameters based on a log source image (and precisely why one would NOT apply a LUT to RG3 footage). Moreover, you can't apply LUTs within RCX.

What I'm saying is that "Fill" and "Recovery" maintain the look (whether in RG3 or RLF) while seemingly retaining all the colour and contrast... No LUT required... No secondaries required to bring the levels in line... It's a much more foolproof and elegant implementation for rendering out of RCX (unless you're going to a pro post house for CC/Grade... in which case RLF would offer the most options.)

Also I meant a perceived/visual loss, not that the data was destroyed or thrown away. And besides, using "Fill" and "Recovery" would work just as well regardless of the gamma space (RG2, RG3, AND RLF) you are in...

 

[jake blackstone]

May be the better question would be why is there not a mechanism to apply the display LUT for viewing Log images inside RC-X?