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  • 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 :)

Heeelp Needed!!

By the way, Justin where are you living? I'm in dallas and I got my RED #846 two weeks ago.
 
I have growing worries about the noise issue. I'm glad you backed me up on this one... fastlayne
It seems to me that people are very busy about having the best lenses, all kinds of issues (like phantasizing about scarlet, but again I don't consider myself an expert) and are ignoring noise problems.
I'm not saying I'm an expert, in fact I'm a very small videoproductioncompany (making nice programs though and growing fast) trying to improve on overall quality (including my camera).
I would say that my customers would sooner fall over noise, than see the advantages of a shallow deph of field, the brighter colors and all the other advantages of Red.
I must say I saw some great video's shot with Red, some without noiseproblems, some with noiseproblems.

Of course I didn't have the chance to work with Red until now. It's time I ask my Dutch collegues on this one. I like to be reassured on this one.
 
Certain situations trigger noise issues, both during production and during the handling of your footage in the digital lab process (REDCINE, RED Alert, etc). Like any camera/tool, you need to optimize based on the camera's strengths and weaknesses. I'm still in the process of trying to acquire as much footage as I can under various conditions to be able to come to some conclusions and create my own best practices guide for being able to advise people on how to get the most from RED. But things may change with Build 16. And they will continue to try to improve the image quality.

I believe it is in the best interest of every camera owner, DP, and even editors to test, test, and test even more to know how to work with this camera. It's kind of like this, and I apologize for the bad analogy. You finally get a date with the best looking girl you know, and after a couple of dates you realize she has some quirks. Doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day, you're still dating the best looking girl you know.

The camera is capable of stunning images, but it is taking some time for me to learn how RED shoots, and how to process it in post. The RED team is working hard to reach perfection. We will benefit from their determination.
 
I like your humor and your comparisons Steve... I really live together with the best girl in town! And of course: I want the best camera for my job.... and nobody and nohing will ever be perfect.
I know the Red team is determined. I know there are stunning images produced by the Red One. If I didn't believe in Red I would not have ordered.
Point is, and I'm investing a lot of time to find out: what worries me is the noise. I know Tungsten light and a blue screen are not ideal. What really worries me is that people go along with pictures containing too much noise while making all kinds of statements about very interesting issues which are intersting to me as a filmmaker, but are not very important for my custamers.
 
I am hypersensitive to noise in images. That's why I find the HVX200 a difficult camera to fall in love with because when conditions are not nearly perfect, there's noise. However, I love film grain. So for me, it really comes down to learning what a well exposed, correctly processed RED image is so I have a baseline and then I can learn how to manipulate it. The wildcard is, RED keeps improving it, so that baseline is a bit of a moving target. And I'm okay with that. Like many others, I'm trying to learn RAW, trying to reprogram my brain a bit.

Johan, I suggest in your case maybe doing some side by side tests, lighting the same scene with tungsten, then with Kinos or HMI. Also, experiment with some of the filtering that some have been doing to balance the sensor. Acquire enough footage, then hit the edit suite for a few days, looking at the footage in a calibrated environment at the highest quality you can. Go through REDCINE and RED Alert a lot, trying different settings, seeing what the results are.

This is tedious, and I'll admit, I'm nowhere near where I wanted to be at this point, still have a lot of testing to do, but I'm learning daily.

Steve
 
Well,

First of all thanks to all the mates who have posted so far, but still I haven't found an answer to my worries yet.

First of all, I'd like to say that I've been always shooting on video, HDCAM and Digital formats. What I can't simply understand is;

1. What's the difference between shooting 4K or 2K in noise terms ? It seems to me that these are different issues.
2. Shooting 3200 (and lighting with tungsten) means that you get a hell of noise in the shadow areas? If so , what's the point in having a 3200 K Preset on the Red Camera.

The only way we've found the pictures to have less grain is by exporting DPX and Cineon files, but still very grainy, there is no possible way to play with contrast, color correct or do anything to those pictures because what you inmediately get is an awful amount of noise. It seems to us that we recorded on MPEG2 rather than RAW, don't know if it was a firmware prob 2.1.7 Beta (we shot 100fps) , but the result quality is absolutely unacceptable. I do not what to think that by shooting 2K, tungsten that's what you get, HDV would have performed better, what I'm trying to say
is that the solution to this problem has to be in a different direction.
 
Noise performance is WAY better if shooting in 4K. Personally, I find 2K to be too noisy at the moment without ideal lighting conditions (and even then....). Hopefully this will change in Build 16.

Shooting in 4K is extremely clean, and 3K is great for high speed stuff.... although obviously if 100fps is a requirement, you're gonna have to drop down to 2K.
 
Justin, I did test the camera , and I also got information about the camera before the shot, And the reason for me to use the RED is probably the same reason wich one day made you decide to do so , to see by myself the wonders that the whole world talks about. When I mention HDCAM is to compare one format to another I'm familiar with , nothing else, as a second issue I'd like to mention that we've found some takes to be less noisy than others, and no changes were made to the camera parameters between takes, we still investigating....
 
Well...

I'd like to point out that; so far, all the opinions and my personal experience leads me to believe (or think) that shooting 100 fps,2K tungsten scene, bluescreen and dark suit-dressed characters tends to create an awful amount of noise that red camera can not handle. Am I wrong?
 
No Ramis,

You're not wrong. This is an issue and hopefully the RED boys are on the case. It's silly of us to say that you should have shot GS with daylight balanced lights. There are times when you have to shoot BS and tungsten lights at that point it should be possible, maybe not optimal but possible.

I've seen this noise very often with the camera and voiced my fears for it. We tend to hide from the fact that it exists because we so badly want the camera to be so much more.

I hope that RED is looking at this thread reading it knowing it's an issue, doing something about it behind closed doors.

YES noise is an issue in the blue channels on all cameras, but this is very noisy, especially in low light conditions.

I was able to grade your thing successfully without any noise but I can't lift the midtones, they have to stay as are. That means that your shot has something like a dynamic range of 6 (or even less).

All we can do is wait.


Fredrik
 
Thanks Fredrik, this is something I've been pondering...

I saw the LART test with the girl with black scarf on bluescreen - looked good, but black has been a problem for me in my so far limited tests. Everything else keys like nothing I've worked with.... I'll check this file, though.
 
Sir Pancake said:
As far as I can tell, NR doesn't do anything when enabled. If it is doing anything it's subtle.
Click to expand...

NR in RC (OSX) does a lot to the blue channel, but you have to view at 1:1 to see what it actually does. WHich sometimes make me think it only does its magic when exported in 4k...
 
There is progress.... Several people acknowledge the noise issue. For some time I believed to be one of the few that had serious problems with it, and I reacted furious when I thought te problem was being denied by some in this thread (didn't mean to offend). Red is coming up with a new sensor that will give better NR and I hope build 16 will allready give much better performance.
I think Steve put things a little in perspective with humor and his knowledge (what else is humor for), but Red could perform better as it does on this issue.
I hope Ramis will get out of trouble with the suggestions you all did.
Maybe it's wise to use this thread as a way to help Ramis out and to start another thread on noise in general.
 
I don´t know.. I thought this clip would prove to be more troublesome than it really was. Ramis used a good bluescreen with plenty of saturation in it. I´ve seen other posts with literary nothing in the chroma, proving to be a hopeless situation.

Im not really a compositing dude, but I did a fast test. Other that poor lights on the right/left sides of the shot that I suspect will be cropped anyway, it worked really well. I used a unsharp mask to preserve the details in the hair before pulling the key. It normally something you don´t do, but since Red is absolutely without any internal sharpening (thank god.. Uhu let me re-phrase that, thank Jim + crew) atleast a small amount let you extract the finer details. You won´t end up with the weird looking halos, you get with other cameras..

I didn´t touch anything in Redcine except turning of the sharpening and enabling the noise reduction (Without noise reduction you are totally smoked on a blue channel looking like this)..

I´ve done several test here, and throwing alot of daylight is the only thing that really helps. When you can feed the sensor with alot of light, the quality is nothing but amazing. Underexposing, and you will have a hard time pulling a nice key.

I´ve put up a test at: http://www.cgsweden.se/Test_key.mov

Sorry for the 40mb file, but I didn´t have anything here to compress it proper with :/
 
Thanks To All

Thanks To All

Thanks to you all , mates for all your opinions and help!!! We've come to the conclusion that, certainly the camera does not work properly in such conditions, and this should be pointed out clearly by the red team. It can literally ruin a shooting.
 
Ramis said:
We've come to the conclusion that, certainly the camera does not work properly in such conditions, and this should be pointed out clearly by the red team. It can literally ruin a shooting.
Click to expand...

the conclusion you should have came too should have been.. have a prep day before going into a production...

if you properly prepped the camera and ran some quick workflow tests. you could have easily identified these issues.

its really not RED's responsibility to insure proper pre-production.
im not meaning to sound harsh at all. I am bummed out that your production didnt go smooth:( hopefully next time!
 
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