Noise

[Bob Gundu]

My guess is that you didn't look at your exposure tools and instead used your LCD to expose. The LCD is very bright and many people perceive it as WYSIWYG, and it definitely is NOT.

 

[Patrick Tresch]

Well he was 4 stop off from the 800 asa mark.

Pat

 

[Robino_J]

How would you have approached this shot Rob?

I would have set the cam to 800ISO, dialed frame rate to 100 and shutter to 1/200. Open up until I get a decent exposure (F2.8 or below) . If I could not get a decent exposure because of shutter then lower the frame rate and shutter until you get one.. If you absolutely need 100fps /200 with your current lens and cannot get a decent exposure then you need to plan on using DNR or bring some lights. This applies to any camera out there - not just RED. (shooting at 100fps of course...not 24)

 

[Jason L]

As others said it was the exposure. I had to move the ISO to 4000 or 5000 to just put the histogram near the middle. Learn to use the histogram and false color for exposure, there are many tutorials from RED.


http://www.red.com/learn/red-101


http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/exposure-false-color-zebra-tools

 

[Damian Grady]

Thanks for the replies gents. I'm clearly in need of much more practice at high frame rate stuff.

 

[luigivaltulini]

We shot some slo-mo footage a couple of days ago at a local college at 100fps on our Epic-X and if I'm honest I'm a little dissappointed by the image quality. To me is seems pretty noisy coniserding the sports hall was pretty well lit and the aperture was wide open. The shutter was at 200/sec and iso was at 1600.

Here's an R3D and RMD snapshot: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xcube0oedfb7gth/0c51zuLb6h

Am I doing something wrong here?

Any help and/or advice would be very much appreciated.

Damian is very underexposure...
use little bit Neat..

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[David Mullen ASC]

It also occurs to me that saying that the aperture was "wide-open" doesn't mean much -- after all, T/4.5 is wide-open on some lenses. I had assumed an f/2 prime lens but seeing that this is sports photography, I guess a slower zoom may have been used.

 

[Damian Grady]

It also occurs to me that saying that the aperture was "wide-open" doesn't mean much -- after all, T/4.5 is wide-open on some lenses. I had assumed an f/2 prime lens but seeing that this is sports photography, I guess a slower zoom may have been used.

Hey David. It was a Canon 24-70mm L

 

[Gunleik Groven]

One thing which people some times seem to forget, is that the REDs love contrast, even at low expoures.

have not looked at the r3d, but from the above picture, there is allmost no contrast in the underexposed pic.

I have not done a lot of slomo, so hit me in the head with a big stick if this comes out wrong, but

the higher the framerate, the lower the resolution, the lower the exposure (on one hand), the more important there is to have some real contrast (even within that limited range an underexposure gives you) to get a good result.

you can have very useable results even at 3k, or 2k, but then you need to light and frame for it.

Best way to get there is to test the scenarios in advance.

Just my 2c

 

[Patrick Tresch]

Also remember when you have to compensate -30 in the hue it means that your light has some holes in the spectrum and you ll have to stretch you signal to Get a reasonnable picture and skin tones. If exposed well you would have some more headroom to get a less muddy picture.

Pat

 

[Mark Toia]

Hi Damian,
Just had a quick play with your file..
yes... what everyone else said, your just underexposed is all. by a few stops.
3200iso looks to be your optimum ISO for correct exposure in this shot, but the current MX sensor is not to good for anything past 1000iso if you want smooth shots.

Just a tip... and this is only the way I shoot low light. And you can discard this as rubbish you want... but it could help a lot.
I never shoot past 800 iso... ever. It's mainly on 320 iso for almost everything, Sometimes I push to 800iso at night, but thats my MAX.
I'm an old film boy, I pretend my EPIC has 500ISO film in it and it cant be changed... so all my exposures are set for that and that alone... If the shot is dark in camera, then you know your going into noise land.

In the dead of night. I use the brightest glass I can get my hands on. I'm a F1.2 guy at night... And when the glass and the ISO fail me.. only then do I push past that in the grading process... never in camera.
This way I never get caught out with having to much noise.

i've put up a few night samples to show you what we are getting from really low light situations from the MX EPIC by using this rule of thumb. Put it this way, what you see in these shots, I couldn't really see on the night of the shoot. (DRAGON how ever is a different story)

PS... leave your tint alone. Leave it at 0. Save yourself having purple shots. Even though you can delete kelvin, tint, iso meta data later when you get to grading from the R3D.. its still good to forget about tint adjustments in camera. Kelvin however I always adjust on set, just so I can see what mixed lighting is going to me.

Anyways.. just sharing. Everyone has there own ways, Take out of this what you want, throw the rest of it in the bin.

 

[Damian Grady]

Hi Damian,
Just had a quick play with your file..
yes... what everyone else said, your just underexposed is all. by a few stops.
3200iso looks to be your optimum ISO for correct exposure in this shot, but the current MX sensor is not to good for anything past 1000iso if you want smooth shots.

Just a tip... and this is only the way I shoot low light. And you can discard this as rubbish you want... but it could help a lot.
I never shoot past 800 iso... ever. It's mainly on 320 iso for almost everything, Sometimes I push to 800iso at night, but thats my MAX.
I'm an old film boy, I pretend my EPIC has 500ISO film in it and it cant be changed... so all my exposures are set for that and that alone... If the shot is dark in camera, then you know your going into noise land.

In the dead of night. I use the brightest glass I can get my hands on. I'm a F1.2 guy at night... And when the glass and the ISO fail me.. only then do I push past that in the grading process... never in camera.
This way I never get caught out with having to much noise.

i've put up a few night samples to show you what we are getting from really low light situations from the MX EPIC by using this rule of thumb. Put it this way, what you see in these shots, I couldn't really see on the night of the shoot. (DRAGON how ever is a different story)

PS... leave your tint alone. Leave it at 0. Save yourself having purple shots. Even though you can delete kelvin, tint, iso meta data later when you get to grading from the R3D.. its still good to forget about tint adjustments in camera. Kelvin however I always adjust on set, just so I can see what mixed lighting is going to me.

Anyways.. just sharing. Everyone has there own ways, Take out of this what you want, throw the rest of it in the bin.

Hey Mark,

Thanks you so much for your reply. Very much appreciated and very valuable. In fact, thanks so much to everyone so far for taking time out of their day to reply to this thread. You have all really helped me BIG TIME.

 

[Andy Roberts]

That is the usual approach; particularly when shooting "normal" footage. But you have a tradeoff here. At 100 fps there is tremendous potential for underexposure -as you found out - and getting an extra stop of light by shooting at 100th would have, IMO, been an improvement.

Terry and Damian,
Shutter speed should generally be 180 degrees or FASTER (90 degrees) but not slower (270 degrees). Meaning, you can shoot:
- 24 FPS at 1/48 shutter (180 degrees)
- 48 FPS at 1/96 shutter (180 degrees)
- 100 FPS at 1/200 shutter (180 degrees) OR
- 100 FPS at 1/300 shutter (120 degrees)

Faster makes the frame sharper and sharper.
But you really DO NOT want to slower as motion blur starts making the image look very funky.

100FPS at 1/100 is mathematically a non-closed frame, so motion looks strange and blurry.
100 FPS at 1/100 shutter = 360 degrees

Check out Red's little tutorial here:
http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/shutter-angle-tutorial

 

[Terry VerHaar]

Terry and Damian,
Shutter speed should generally be 180 degrees or FASTER (90 degrees) but not slower (270 degrees). Meaning, you can shoot:
- 24 FPS at 1/48 shutter (180 degrees)
- 48 FPS at 1/96 shutter (180 degrees)
- 100 FPS at 1/200 shutter (180 degrees) OR
- 100 FPS at 1/300 shutter (120 degrees)

Faster makes the frame sharper and sharper.
But you really DO NOT want to slower as motion blur starts making the image look very funky.

100FPS at 1/100 is mathematically a non-closed frame, so motion looks strange and blurry.
100 FPS at 1/100 shutter = 360 degrees

Check out Red's little tutorial here:
http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/shutter-angle-tutorial

Yes, but - how much motion blur will you get at 100th of a second? Yes, it is a 360 degree shutter but at 100th of a second the shutter is open a lot less (meaning less motion blur) than shooting normally at 1/48th. Did I miss something? :smiley:

As I mentioned, not ideal but it is worth considering.

 

[Damian Grady]

Hi Damian,
Just had a quick play with your file..
yes... what everyone else said, your just underexposed is all. by a few stops.
3200iso looks to be your optimum ISO for correct exposure in this shot, but the current MX sensor is not to good for anything past 1000iso if you want smooth shots.

Just a tip... and this is only the way I shoot low light. And you can discard this as rubbish you want... but it could help a lot.
I never shoot past 800 iso... ever. It's mainly on 320 iso for almost everything, Sometimes I push to 800iso at night, but thats my MAX.
I'm an old film boy, I pretend my EPIC has 500ISO film in it and it cant be changed... so all my exposures are set for that and that alone... If the shot is dark in camera, then you know your going into noise land.

In the dead of night. I use the brightest glass I can get my hands on. I'm a F1.2 guy at night... And when the glass and the ISO fail me.. only then do I push past that in the grading process... never in camera.
This way I never get caught out with having to much noise.

i've put up a few night samples to show you what we are getting from really low light situations from the MX EPIC by using this rule of thumb. Put it this way, what you see in these shots, I couldn't really see on the night of the shoot. (DRAGON how ever is a different story)

PS... leave your tint alone. Leave it at 0. Save yourself having purple shots. Even though you can delete kelvin, tint, iso meta data later when you get to grading from the R3D.. its still good to forget about tint adjustments in camera. Kelvin however I always adjust on set, just so I can see what mixed lighting is going to me.

Anyways.. just sharing. Everyone has there own ways, Take out of this what you want, throw the rest of it in the bin.

Out of interest Mark, what f1.2 lenses do you use most often?

 

[Bob Gundu]

Out of interest Mark, what f1.2 lenses do you use most often?

I believe Mark uses his Zeiss f1.2 super speeds.

 

[Andy Roberts]

Yes, but - how much motion blur will you get at 100th of a second? Yes, it is a 360 degree shutter but at 100th of a second the shutter is open a lot less (meaning less motion blur) than shooting normally at 1/48th. Did I miss something? :smiley:

In the context of sports, 1/100 is still a pretty long exposure. And when 100FPS is played back at 24FPS project base, the sharp effect of clean frames in slow mo will be gone.

He just needs to get a Dragon that can see in mostly dark

When I get my camera back this weekend, I'm going to do a test and see what 100FPS at 1/100 looks like?

 

[Terry VerHaar]

Andy - in still photography you probably wouldn't shoot sports at 100th. But, this isn't Formula One and, what exposure would you use for normal shooting? I am guessing 1/48th? :smiley: Again, motion blur for this shot is not likely to be that much. And, don't forget he massively underexposed and needed a way to compensate.

 

[Burke Doeren]

Terry, remember that while you are shooting 100FPS, you're playing back at your project time base (most likely 23.98FPS). If you expose at 360deg shutter angle, your frames will appear to have the same amount of motion blur on playback as if you exposed any other framerate at 360deg. True, you will see life happening in slow motion, but your motion blur at 360 will look very "video-ish" with longer trails than the traditional 180deg film shutter angle.

Even if you're shooting 1000FPS on a Phantom, you still need to consider your shutter angle with that in mind so every frame has the look you intend. If a 180deg shutter angle is your look, then that's precisely how you should expose every frame.

Try this on your camera then go into playback mode and you'll see what I mean.

 

[Andy Roberts]

Andy - in still photography you probably wouldn't shoot sports at 100th. But, this isn't Formula One and, what exposure would you use for normal shooting? I am guessing 1/48th? :smiley: Again, motion blur for this shot is not likely to be that much. And, don't forget he massively underexposed and needed a way to compensate.

I'm not trying to win a debate here, I'm just saying I'd rather have the noise than the perceivable weirdness that gets introduced in 360 degree shutter situations. I'm not the first person to say that 180 degree shutter, whether for 24FPS or 100FPS has a specific feel or cadence that our minds are used to. The issue isn't purely motion blur but cadence of shutter closing in relationship to frame rate.

I just felt the need to go on record that in general, greater than 180 degree shutter is NOT a good idea. And if someone chooses to, they need to know why they are doing it.