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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 :)

Gibby's RED takes a dive...Underwater RED 4K

Wagsy said:
Nice but what cleaning your lens next time.
Also the operator is abit wobbly for such a larger housing.

If only I had the bucks....
Wags
www.hdvunderwater.com
Click to expand...

The spot is on the interior of the dome actually and not the lens - good eye though and the "wobbly" is not all that bad considering the operator's heroin habit :-)
 
sharkguy said:
The spot is on the interior of the dome actually and not the lens - good eye though and the "wobbly" is not all that bad considering the operator's heroin habit :-)
Click to expand...

I thought you kicked that?
 
Thanks for sharing this (I know, it's been here for 5 months, I was a little slow in finding it.) Do you have any more recent footage?

Another question, I'm a little confused by the references in this thread regarding using the "new paradigm" of shooting RAW (e.g. white balance is not an option - assuming grading will be done later?) and therefore no control for WB is needed. WHAT??? I've have reviewed some of the RAW RED footage (which looks like really stepped down footage) compared to the CC footage, and the color looks great. Will this be a common practice for U/W with RED as well?

Pretty exciting stuff, please let me know if you ever need an extra U/W housing tester in the SoCal area - especially aboard those yacht cruises to Catalina ;)

MyDivingBlog
 
White balance actually doesn't do anything.

White balance actually doesn't do anything.

ScubaBob said:
Another question, I'm a little confused by the references in this thread regarding using the "new paradigm" of shooting RAW (e.g. white balance is not an option - assuming grading will be done later?) and therefore no control for WB is needed. WHAT??? I've have reviewed some of the RAW RED footage (which looks like really stepped down footage) compared to the CC footage, and the color looks great. Will this be a common practice for U/W with RED as well?

MyDivingBlog
Click to expand...

Bob, you can set white balance but it doesn't affect your recording AT ALL, it only affects the output at the time, it doesn't change the recorded data, so it makes no difference whatsoever if you set the white balance or not.

Here's why. (This is for illustrative purposes only - technically it may be a little different) Single chip sensors use what is called a Bayer filter - microscopic RED, Green, and Blue filters over the pixels on the sensor. For example in a group of four pixels you would have two pixels covered by green filters, one covered by red, and one covered by blue. The pixels themselves are only reacting to the BRIGHTNESS of the signal, it is only by knowing the pattern of the filters that you can interpolate and reconstruct the color of the image. In a normal single chip video camera the data would be immediately processed, so whatever white balance you selected (and whatever gamma, colorimetry, saturation, highlight rolloff, etc. that the designers selected-and traditionally this is where the "art" of the engineering came in and why people might like the Ikegami, or Sony, or whatever "look") alters those ratios and it is turned into a color signal and then recorded. Once you convert it to RGB and record it, you are very limited with the amount of change you can make without creating noise or other artifacts.

The "RAW" paradigm says "we don't need to process this data right now - let's just store the RAW BRIGHTNESS data and if we wait, we can make major adjustments later without messing things up". You do all of those calculations after the fact and basically you are only playing with the "look" - you always have the raw data - even when you want to output an NTSC or DV or HDCAM or whatever signal you only basically create a copy.

As far as the white balance setting, it only tells the camera to do a quick "debayer" to show a color signal on the LCD/Viewfinder or on the live camera output - but the harddrive or CF card is still just recording the RAW BRIGHTNESS data. It also records the white balance number as METADATA - i.e. just a text code similar to when you look at your digital still photos and if you hit the INFO button it tells you that you shot at F3.5, 1/125 of a second, on Feb 25 at 1:25 PM. But again, that just allows you to set your software to default to that setting when it comes up on your computer screen.

Bottom line is that even though we may give you a white balance control on the housing - IT HAS NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER ON YOUR RECORDING.

The same is true of other things that you might normally set on on your Z1, HVX200, EX1, HV20, etc. where you have picture profiles so you can choose settings for GAIN, colorimetry, "filmlook" GAMMA, white balance, knee setting (highlight rolloff), saturation, black stretch, etc. NONE OF THOSE THINGS AFFECT YOUR RED "RAW" RECORDING - all of that is done in post processing (REDALERT, REDCINE, FINAL CUT, SCRATCH, ETC.)

It does mean that your footage kind of looks like crap on the computer until you do at least some processing - curves and such - in REDALERT or REDCINE.

Besides the fact that people that are good with color processing can really make your footage look great, it also means your footage can actually get better looking over time as guys like Graeme Nattress and all the other gurus figure out improved algorithms for debayering, noise processing, etc..

In other words, footage that Sharkguy shot last September - even if he had it color graded by a top colorist and it looks great now - could actually get better looking, in terms of noise, sharpness, or color separation, later this year if RED or someone else comes up with a better debayering algorithm.
 
Thanks Aquavideo so much for your response. I'm sure you've had to give that explanation many times, and I probably should have been able to read it from 100 other posts on this board. That definately clears up alot of my confusion about RED (and the RAW format -which I have never worked with.) I've only worked with DV (NTSC) and HDV.

Thanks again for all of the information here, it's greatly appreciated!!!
 
Any insight into zooming capabilities?

Any insight into zooming capabilities?

Was just wondering whether any of you guys who're ranting about RED have tried to see how far one can zoom into a good glass port with, lets say, the 18-50 zoom lens.

I realize that in an ideal world we'd change to a flat port for macros, but how far could one push a "generic" short zoom through a dome?
 
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