RED/Canon Intercut Demo ...

[Neil W. Smith]

.... Canon and Nikon are great companies that make great products. They just have a different plan than RED. Neither plan is necessarily better than the other.

... If you are on a budget and can live with the compromises of the new DSLR motion capture systems, they make a good alternative. If you want uncompromising motion, we think that RED is a much better solution.

Jim

As ever, Jim's words of wisdom are refreshing, insightful and pragmatic.

We had the pleasure of shooting side-by-side tests of the RED ONE and Canon EOS 5D Mk II and Canon EOS 7D with Rodney Charters (ASC DP on the TV show '24') a couple of Saturday's ago and were reminded of just how good the RED RAW codec is for image quality and post work .... it produces a really "thick negative" with a rich color dynamic …. whereas the H.264 codec has some severe limitations in terms of image quality and robustness in post-production processing.

None-the-less, both camera systems have their strengths and weaknesses and in the hands of a capable DP can produce esthetically pleasing motion imagery …. we shot all three cameras from sunrise to sunset with a black, brown and white actor in different lighting conditions so we could see how the cameras reacted to different skin tones. We used RPPs and Canon glass and are in the process of producing the ‘RED/Canon Intercut Demo’ reel.

See our Hdi RAWworks website for more details … there are 1500 BTS photos that document the day:

http://hdirawworks.com/index.html

We showed the one minute teaser of the ‘RED/Canon Intercut Demo’ reel to 150 people at the DGA Digital Production seminar last Saturday (2k DLP projector onto a large 40 foot cinema screen) and most people had trouble telling which clips were RED and which were Canon. Check out the Teaser Trailer on the RAWWorks website but don’t draw any conclusion about overall image quality …. it’s a small H.264 QuickTime movie and not finished yet.

The completed four minute ‘RED/Canon Intercut Demo’ reel will be shown at the HD Expo Canon Intensive Workshop on Thursday November 5th at 11am in Burbank.

We’re also holding the RAWworks Open House Day on the Warner Hollywood Lot on Saturday Nov 7th (10am to 4pm) where we’ll be demoing the RED ONE along side the Canon EOS 5D Mk II, EOS 7D and the newly announced Canon EOS 1D Mk IV ….. we’ll have plenty of cinematographers there and be screening all the test footage from the RED/Canon Intercut day.

Hope to see some of you on Saturday 7th.

Cheers,
Neil

 

[Stephen Strangways]

There are some interesting BTS photos there, but 1500, many of which are nearly identical, is a lot to wade through, not to mention how long it takes the page to load.

 

[Shane Betts]

No problems here. The gallery loaded pretty quickly. Enlarging 1500 images to more than thumbnail would be a poor way to spend the next three days of your life IMHO.

There's some great locations there. Concrete, foliage, machinery, interiors, exteriors. Very interesting.

The thing that concerns me about DSLR for motion is the possibility that you come back from a days shooting with an unusable shot. Doesn't matter how nice the rest is if one critical shot doesn't hold up.

 

[Mike N]

whereas the H.264 codec has some severe limitations in terms of image quality and robustness in post-production processing.

What would those limitations be aside from probably H.264 not being RAW with 4:4:4 and not using such a smart compression as the Red codec ?

What is the dynamic range of the 5 and 7D (I imagine it must be pretty similar for both cameras).

The teaser looks great. The part with the blonde guy jumping and doing tricks looks less filmic than the other parts.

 

[Albert Armes]

The teaser was interesting. There was so much aliasing on it that I really wonder if the test is going to be useful. I presume you'll be putting up a full rez version?

Albert

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

What would those limitations be aside from probably H.264 not being RAW with 4:4:4 and not using such a smart compression as the Red codec ?

It's 8bpc.
It's more heavily compressed.
DCT Macroblocking is imo less appealing than fuzziness.
It's 8bpc.

 

[Mike N]

Thanks. What is the compression employed by the canon ?

 

[Neil W. Smith]

Thanks. What is the compression employed by the canon ?

Its H.264 (essentially a form of MPEG4 compression which is pretty efficient for lots of uses) but the point that Gavin was making is that it's 8 bit color depth (256 shades of grey) whereas RED ONE records a 12 bit Linear image which we typically transcode to a 10 bit color depth (1024 levels of gray) ... much more color information to play with.

This is what I meant by RED ONE giving a 'thick negative' .... plenty of color information to play with in post .... with the Canons, the DP has to hit the sweet spot of the sensor ... and if he does, all is good in post .... if he doesn't, you can't push the neg as far as you can with .r3ds.

H.264 also introduces compression artifacts and aliasing issues ..... RED Code is a far more robust and forgiving compression algorithm.

Neil

 

[Mike N]

OK cool. Thanks for the info. But I was referring tothe actual mbit compression of the codec because as I know H.264 has a range of compressions available in it's profiles.
RED's is somewhere between 28 and 42 (are these mega bits or mega bytes ?) depending on what you choose. What is canon's ?

 

[Matt Gottshalk]

The 7d is 45.85 mbits/s for HD.

Mega-bits.

 

[Neil W. Smith]

RED's is somewhere between 28 and 42 (are these mega bits or mega bytes ?) depending on what you choose. What is canon's ?

Yes, around 40 mbits per sec (8 bits to one byte) depending on scene content, complexity and degree of lateral movment .... RED compression rates are typically quoted in Mega Bytes per second .... a lot less compression hence a much thicker "negative".

Neil

 

[David Rasberry]

A 4k RC36 40 second r3d file I have on my laptop to play with is a 1.5 gigabyte file.
That's 300 megabits per second.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

OK cool. Thanks for the info. But I was referring tothe actual mbit compression of the codec because as I know H.264 has a range of compressions available in it's profiles.
RED's is somewhere between 28 and 42 (are these mega bits or mega bytes ?) depending on what you choose. What is canon's ?

MB or Mb per second is also somewhat irrelevant when comparing differing compression schemes.

It would be like comparing a JPEG and a Jpeg2000 image of equal size. The JP2k file is going to be far more efficiently compressed per MB and look much better.

Also H264 employs an interframe compression scheme where as red doesn't so that's one more aspect where comparing Mbps is misleading.

Speaking of misleading "Thick negative" keeps making me think of an over exposed image.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

Also, remember h264 is a whole family of codecs with different properties and efficiencies. You can't compare how good h264 looks when you compress a movie, with care, on your home computer, to a real-time implementation in a camera.

Graeme

 

[PatC]

Also, remember h264 is a whole family of codecs with different properties and efficiencies. You can't compare how good h264 looks when you compress a movie, with care, on your home computer, to a real-time implementation in a camera.

Graeme

Didn't think about it this way, thanks!

 

[Graeme Nattress]

Then you get into all the different parameters and options the codec takes. I doubt most hardware / realtime applications of the codec have access to the nicer features that give the very high compression efficiencies you see on downloaded movies.

Graeme

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Not to mention most high end H264 compressors are multi-pass. Kind of tricky to do real-time multi-pass optimization on live footage.

Unless of course you hold entire sections of the clip in memory uncompressed for a few seconds to process it.... but that would be a whole bottle of gummy worms in of itself.