Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons

claudio said:
When I started CCBB we were considering RED, D20, Dalsa and Viper. I looked at all these camera's. The only camera ready and best photographically at shoot time was the Viper. I do not believe there is anything wrong in stating I was not happy with the images I was presented. I have no allegiance to any medium. I have no sponsors. I shot Fincher's first HD (Viper) commercial (Xelibri). It is in my best interest to use the best camera possible for the job and if the camera is cheaper it will make the producers happy as well. I am very open otherwise I would not be doing these tests which we will all benefit from.
Click to expand...
I assumed looked at means evaluated, since this was before Boris and Natasha.

Either way, general discussion on dr and raw is cool, but it's the questioning Claudio's abilities that's funny to me.

Like I said, he's just one opinion and he hasn't seen the latest versions. He may really dig the camera.
This community has got to relax (have some perspective), but that's just my opinion.





Signed,

Respectfully, appreciatively, but honest reservation holder.
 
Both the F23 and RED were not available in time for CCBB when it started over a year ago, but the F23 was used in the final scene shot 3 months ago.

Here is a test I did to compare the F23 and the Viper. These images have been color corrected. Because the F23 has more range in the highlights the sky holds more detail. It's hard to tell without moving full rez images, but the noise on the F23 is much lower. Also look at what happens to detail on the ground when the sun hits the chip. This test was run at full rez and I did see it projected. But you can see where the F23 shines.

These test were to show:
How the S2 hard drives handled vibration. This test tore the bumper off our rental. Hard drive did not fail
Highlight and shadow detail.
Extreme over and underexposures
Recovery from under exposure
Recovery from over exposure
Day and night available light
See how far I can bring up underexpose before an unacceptable amount of noise.

This only shows a portion of the test.

http://www.claudiomiranda.com/f23vsviper

If we did not care about manipulating the image we would all be happy with jpegs.

We are shooting tests tomorrow. I will be running it side by side with the F23 which has more range and less noise than the Viper. Unfortunately I am working Wed thru Sun, so I will not be able to view the footage till after then plus I may need sometime to play with the red footage.

I really do not want to comment any more about RED till then.
 
Liked the test Claudio,
The F23 definitely showed the increased DR in the night shots, being able to lift the floor of the image without losing the detail in the highlights, as was starting to happen on a couple of the viper shots.
But I still love the Vipers shoulder on the daytime stuff, the roll-off into full white seems much more filmic in nature.... Although this is probably helped by the slightly warmer almost 'chocolatey' tint to the vipers footage (I'm a sucker for that hue in desert stuff)
 
This is exciting!

Claudio's test clearly show the F-23 to have more range and less noise than the Viper, it is undeniable, which would seem to signal the F-23 as the "standard" among all the ultra expensive HD cameras. If Claudio will test RED against the F-23, then I can't imagine a better test to really show the capabilities of the RED. Can't wait to see those images...Anybody care to do Claudio's gig from Wed thru Sun so he can concentrate on the test? :-)
 
Thanks for posting that test Claudio. Thank you for taking time to be here as well.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Don't forget that all of "Zodiak" went through an expensive but advanced noise reduction process at John Lowry's company, normally used for film restoration work. With that tool in your arsenal, you may be more comfortable with detail in the shadows that has some noise in it.
Click to expand...

I didn't realize that. That would explain a lot.

I'd read an article interviewing James Cameron where he touted the wonders Lowry could do to badly exposed HD. He went on to say that he would run his entire film through the Lowry process regardless of how well it was exposed (or looked) simply because Lowry's algorithm's were doing great things to the image.

Makes me wonder what this process costs. David mentioned above that it was "expensive". I wonder how expensive. Hundreds of thousands?
 
Robert Sanders said:
I didn't realize that. That would explain a lot.

I'd read an article interviewing James Cameron where he touted the wonders Lowry could do to badly exposed HD. He went on to say that he would run his entire film through the Lowry process regardless of how well it was exposed (or looked) simply because Lowry's algorithm's were doing great things to the image.

Makes me wonder what this process costs. David mentioned above that it was "expensive". I wonder how expensive. Hundreds of thousands?
Click to expand...

It's very expensive. Intially they were budgeted for a few scenes and then Fincher made it happen on the entire film. Zodiac is definately not representitve of the Viper out of the box. Let's hope Apple buys Lowry's magic algorithms like they did Final Touch(now color) and it will be availble for $699 to all!

On Panic Room he intentionaly underexposed 5277 by a ways so that the only way it could be recovered is by doing a DI with noise reduction. That's how he got the studio to pay for the entire film to be DI'ed. This is back when hardly any films if any were finished this way. That's at least what Technique's(technicolor DI facility) story was when I was there. Good story at least.
 
That F23-Viper test shows me that there is an extra stop of information at either end on the F23, and the image seems less "muddy" at night. There is also some color casts creeping into the whites in the sky on the Viper footage. I don't know if it's whole "green" thing that people talk about.

Of course, the F23 is a few years newer than the Viper, with a 14-bit A/D instead of a 12-bit A/D, etc... I'm sure the "Viper 2", if that comes out, will have some improvements.
 
HOLLYWOOD SCHMOLLYWOOD said:
It's very expensive. Intially they were budgeted for a few scenes and then Fincher made it happen on the entire film. Zodiac is definately not representitve of the Viper out of the box. Let's hope Apple buys Lowry's magic algorithms like they did Final Touch(now color) and it will be availble for $699 to all!

On Panic Room he intentionaly underexposed 5277 by a ways so that the only way it could be recovered is by doing a DI with noise reduction. That's how he got the studio to pay for the entire film to be DI'ed. This is back when hardly any films if any were finished this way. That's at least what Technique's(technicolor DI facility) story was when I was there. Good story at least.
Click to expand...

Those are great stories! I'd heard rumors of dailies from Panic Room appearing almost completely black.

I noticed the noise problems on the "available light" scenes in the HD Quicktimes of the trailer for Zodiac Apple released about a month or so before release. I still have them saved on my hard drive. It was that tell-tale noise coupled with the Miami Vice footage that convinced me that the Viper's noise floor was not very pleasant (at least to me eyes).

And then the final release of Zodiac looked silky smooth and relatively noise free (looking forward to the HD-DVD release of the director's cut). I'd love to know more about what Lowry's proprietary technology is doing to reduce so much noise yet retain all that detail. It's pretty amazing. But I'm sure that's what an entire room full of Xserve's is for, eh? LOL

I've been playing with the Nattress FX plugins for Color. Particularly the noise reducers. They're cool. But the amount of detail loss is surprising.
 
Claudio does the F23 have a cine mode like the Vipers Filmstream mode that doesn't apply gama curves or a color matrix to the image? I liked the quality of the Viper myself even though it had a little less latitude. I does seem to have a bit of green cast to the image compared to the F23 which seems colder or more neutral. The F23 seemed a little bit sharper. Were the same lenses used on both cameras? This could play into the color cast a bit but chances are it didn't. My big gripe with the F23 is the cost which is close to $200K I think, the Viper is around $100K and the Red comes in at $17.5K, $30K with some acc. The one thing these expensive cameras do have is non-interpolated color so you have max color detail and increased image detail compared to a bayer sensor of the same resolution. But it would be pretty difficult to make a 4K 3-chip camera and the lenses would be huge!
 
And remember that too much sharpness can be a bad thing if it leads to excessive aliasing. Anyone shot a Viper or F23 pointing at a nice high resolution zone plate?

Graeme
 
That's the nice thing about starting with a 4K image, it holds it's detail and clarity longer without adding sharpness (unsharp mask) to it.
 
RCFisher said:
Claudio does the F23 have a cine mode like the Vipers Filmstream mode that doesn't apply gama curves or a color matrix to the image?
Click to expand...

Actually the FilmStream mode does convert the linear-ish RGB signal into a LOG gamma curve. That's pretty much all it does, however -- for other features, you have to use one of the other modes.

The F23 can do the same thing -- you can use their S-LOG curve and nothing else basically and record information outside of broadcast color space.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top