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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 :)

Knowing and 2k

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Obin Olson

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Just out of Knowing, sure looked good guys... Even the local cineplex christy projector looks great, it's funny to see Red on a big screen with big budget.... It still looks exactly like what I am used to seeing in Scratch all the time..... So cool to once again see it on a big screen.

Congrats Jim your baby had a lot of talent behind it for that film.
 
I decided to see knowing tonight at a theatre that showed a filmout print to see how the footage and grading would hold up.

Excellent!

It was nice to see something shot with regular working Red and not a prototype. I stuck around to see the Red Camera credit at the end. I threw up a cheer to an all but empty theatre as everyone else had long since left by then.
 
Looked a bit soft in the wides on film at the Arclight but I could tell it was the print.
Overall I couldn't tell it was even shot on Red, which is about the best compliment I could think of. Shadows looked GREAT! The more movies I see shot on S4s the less I like that star shaped bokeh. VFX were awesome and skin tones looked stellar (inside joke).
 
Evin Grant said:
Looked a bit soft in the wides on film at the Arclight but I could tell it was the print.
Overall I couldn't tell it was even shot on Red, which is about the best compliment I could think of. Shadows looked GREAT! The more movies I see shot on S4s the less I like that star shaped bokeh. VFX were awesome and skin tones looked stellar (inside joke).
Click to expand...


"Soft highlight clips are where we start, we add selective de-saturation of the colours that tend

to go “video” and finally, although we may not include this as it makes the render times horribly long,

a little highlight glow, only at 90% and above and only a tiny amount but it really works.

Now the real deal J the most important thing that we’re doing to make the pictures look better,

and I really don’t mean like film, just better, is that we’re adding grain. Very soft low level grain

but it’s amazing the change it makes to the pictures.

What it is doing is making the pictures look sharper and losing the plastic skin tones that we

sometimes get with digital pictures.

The level that we are using is invisible at SD and only barely visible at HD, but the effect is staggering!

On faces that were very smooth we can now see the occasional wrinkle, laugh lines appear, it’s really cool :) .

So, would I shoot RED again? Like a shot :) .


Cheers

Geoff Boyle
DP
EU based"

................................

"The grain addition and the selective CC aren't to make it look more like
film, it's simply to make the images look better, as I said at SD you can't
see it and at HD you have to look hard.

Cheers

Geoff Boyle
DP
EU based"

Text in Yellow>>>Copyright © 2009 CML
 
Jim and Team-

Fantastic accomplishment! I have met you guys at NAB for the last couple of years and I have seen the RED footage projected in your small theater, however, I have never seen it projected on a huge screen. I have been using my RED like crazy over the last year- and it was absolutely amazing to see Knowing last night and to know that it was shot with only RED cameras. (I am very curious as to what their budget was on that movie because it certainly looked like a huge budget)

To have such a new camera used on a huge motion picture like Knowing has to be an honor! It looked fantastic!

I had a huge smile at the end of the credits when I saw your RED logo come up.

I am excited to see CHE as well, however, it was not playing near us. Hopefully I can see it soon.

Once again guys- Fantastic accomplishment. You guys pulled it off and I am beyond proud of you all.

- And to anyone reading this who was involved in shooting Knowing-

Amazing guys! That movie looked like a ton of hard work to make. Fantastic job- and fantastic story!
 
Aha, if they were applying highlight "glow", that answers why I've been confused and disappointed with the skin tones in 'Knowing'. That explains it. Looks artificial and plasticized to me, but that's just my personal taste.
 
Charles Angus said:
I don't believe Geoff Boyle was the DP on Knowing. He was talking about his own experience grading RED footage on a different show. IIRC, they didn't end up adding the highlight glow as it added too much render time (don't quote me on that, though).
Click to expand...


Geoff Boyle was not the DP on Knowing as WE KNOW! :) .

He was talking about to make RED image better and closer to the film/analog look with use of a slight grain

that some "orthodox" video shooters here doesn't like with RED1 :) .

Please search the recent treads and find an example of that "orthodox" video aesthetic.
 
curves curves curves...dont think GLOW is going to cut it...just work the curves people! this camera can look just about like anything you want!
 
I saw the film up here in the bay area and noticed the soft wides as well. That's the first thing that bothered me about the film. Overall I thought it looked good but didn't understand why the wides were so soft. The projection was the first thing to enter my mindas well. If I get a chance to see it digitally projected I will look for the soft wides which I would assume would be remedied.
 
I saw a really weird artifact at the beginning of the movie, probably only an isolated incident. In the beginning of the movie, when the teacher is looking for the freaky girl, she finds her outside the front of the school. The shot if from behind. The back of the girls legs are terribly macroblocking. Did anyone else see this?
 
"I saw a really weird artifact at the beginning of the movie, probably only an isolated incident. In the beginning of the movie, when the teacher is looking for the freaky girl, she finds her outside the front of the school. The shot if from behind. The back of the girls legs are terribly macroblocking. Did anyone else see this?"

- I saw this too. Looks to me like artifacts from a poor HSL key/matte in either VFX or color correction. This was the only place I noticed it. Also noticed a fair bit o' noise in the bedroom scenes between the father/son. These scenes were not only noisy but also the blacks were a bit lifted. Looks like they tried to dig a lot of information out from the darkness and thus, achieved some noise. All in all, the film looked like it was shot RED. BTW, Saw it projected on a Sony 4K with a Silver-Screen at Muvico in Thousand Oaks. Does anyone know if the DCDP was 2K or 4K? I'd guess 2K by watching it, but who knows.

This is not to say the movie didn't look great, it did. It is wonderful that larger budget films are shooting more than just VFX with the RED. The camera/cinematography was totally adequate for a major release, no real complaints. (Other than the story, acting, etc...)

thanks RED!

Aaron Peak
Colorist/Hollywood-DI
http://www.hollywooddi.com

PS: Can someone change my UserID to Real Name?
 
Went to see this tonight only because it was shot on Red...but once the movie started, I frankly kept forgetting the fact. The movie is fun. I can't think of the last time I enjoyed a Nick Cage movie. Anyhow, my real point is that it looks enough like a 35mm feature film that I just kept forgetting to look for any "artifacts" or telltale digital signs. I just saw a movie.
 
In the trailer I can see a shot of Cage standing alone in a bedroom, putting some papers on a board or wall (sorry for not being so specific) but the grain level was higher than usual, and that struck me as the DP trying to get the same look as the Minority Report shots of Cruise inside the old apartment after the eye operation (I think those shots were shoot with ISO 800 filmstock, right?).

Is this shot really there, and grainy on purpose?
 
I noticed slight softness at the Colorado theater I went to; however, the credits had the same softness, so it was most likely a projector problem.

One thing I noted was that highlighted skin tones seemed to be very milky. I noticed this in a number of exterior scenes. I don't know what other term to use: just 'milky' with no texture to that area of skin. Not blown-out white, but no texture either. Problem is that I don't know if this was a color choice, a slightly 'off' print or a projection problem. Anyone else notice something like this?

Otherwise the film looked terrific. The dark values really held a lot of detail.

Nelson
 
Highlight extension

Highlight extension

On the outdoor shoots rather than use the highlight extension which cannot provide true color in the highlights, I would reduce the expsoure and use more fill light. Fill light does not always need to be only from the camera position, you can model the fill to some degree, like lighting for two ranges.

In the classroom shots I would have, given the budget, used heaver gels on the windows and more fill light. You can always knock the shadows down, but you cannot get the highlights back, so using more fill is a better idea that overexposing to avoid noise, at least how I would have done it...

Overall, I think, the REDONE gets a B+ to A- for overall effect. When they get a sensor with 14stops of range I think they will be about where they need to be to replace ECN as the primary media for filmmaking.

It is a remarkable achievement to have developed and marketed the RED ONE camera, and now to see the "Shot on RED" logo in the tail credits of one of the biggest grosing films, wow!

When they started taking reservations I told my Brother to sell all the 35mm movie cameras and to reserve a RED ONE, he just could not get his mind around how quickly the film making world was about to change. Now we are stuck with a pile of worthless junk when we could have had something to shoot at a high ratio with...

I did notice that the head credits were soft on the edges, it did not seem to be a projection focus issue, more antialiasing maybe, or the film recorder used. Does anyone know what film recorder was used and was the printing negative 2K or 4K, or rather was the DI 2K or 4K, uncompressed or compressed, and if compressed what codec?
 
Dan Hudgins said:
On the outdoor shoots rather than use the highlight extension which cannot provide true color in the highlights, I would reduce the expsoure and use more fill light.
Click to expand...

Dan, thanks for the reply. Could you elaborate on 'highlight extension'?

I was actually very impressed with how well blown-out highlights were handled (the windows, etc.) and wondered how those were dealt with in post (thinking of Geoff Boyles posts about highlight 'glow' in the CML), assuming they were. The DP could have added another .6 ND and we'd have gotten more detail out the windows, but for me the blown out look worked well, and gave me a sense of how the camera can handle that degree of overexposure.

By the way, the credits I mentioned were the end credits - which I expect to be pretty sharp, being text only.

A lot of us would probably enjoy knowing (:cute:) the lurid production details. I noted, for instance, that two 'image wrangers' were credited.

Nelson
 
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