Canon 7D vs. RED ONE - a real footage comparison

[Sanjin Jukic]

Graeme, I understood your zone plate tests, very useful indeed, but I'm not sure Sanjin's really stretching himself here. We need more creative camera tests - purely in the interests of science

Liam,

I'm just "burning" to see your R1+7D "creative tests" :ciappa: :rolleyes5::ihih:

Last thing to say is that those "advanced touristic cinematography" presented here at Vimeo samples are a bit far obsolete

just because a sort of any lesbian film (a soft or hardcore with use of 3 cameras simultaneously) is not shocking thing any more.

This more like a kind of 20th century shocking attitude but for today it looks as a bad joke...

Or any fine "video touristic" or "home" movies shot on kind of small cameras are already "rotten" type of "quasi" artistic and also a pretty boring concept.

It's just "an artwork" for a sort of spiritual grandma's or a similar.

 

[Alsone]

What I'd really like to see is 2 tests one in good light, one in poor of the same subject side by side and with both cameras set to the same ISO and with no adjustments in post and no attempts to prove the test one way or another. Only then do you get a truly objective result where only the camera and lens performance are the variables.

We all know the Red is going to out perform the Canon in many situations. What I can't understand is why people are so seemingly afraid of admitting that maybe in one or two situations the Canon may run it close or even better the Red. At the end of the day no camera performs well in all situations. Its far better to have a true objective view of what each camera is capable of because then people can make up their own minds as to what camera to use where. eg some might want a Canon as a B camera or as a substitute for low light conditions where the lighting is beyond their control and a Red as a main camera or for good or controlled lighting conditions. Give people the information and you give them the choice. Give people tests that perhaps aren't fully objective and you just deny people the right to make the choice. This isn't about persuading people to buy or not to buy Red. At the end of the day its about giving people the choice to buy a combination of equipment that best suits their needs and in some cases that might be Red PLUS something else such as a DLSR.

 

[Liam Hall]

Liam,

I'm just "burning" to see your R1+7D "creative tests" :ciappa: :rolleyes5::ihih:

Last thing to say is that those "advanced touristic cinematography" presented here at Vimeo samples are a bit far obsolete

just because a sort of any lesbian film (a soft or hardcore with use of 3 cameras simultaneously) is not shocking thing any more.

This more like a kind of 20th century shocking attitude but for today it looks as a bad joke...

Or any fine "video touristic" or "home" movies shot on kind of small cameras are already "rotten" type of "quasi" artistic and also a pretty boring concept.

It's just "an artwork" for a sort of spiritual grandma's or a similar.

Sanjin,

You're right the demise of western civilization is indeed truly shocking. It's good fun though

Anyway, I'm shooting solidly for the next couple of weeks, after which I'll gladly shoot you a 'fun' camera test. Let me know what 'floats your boat' and I'll dress it up spin it round and make sure it gets the right kind of exposure

 

[Álex Montoya]

both cameras set to the same ISO and with no adjustments in post

You can't do that to the Red One. The post devolepment is inherent to the format.

 

[Sanjin Jukic]

Sanjin,

You're right the demise of western civilization is indeed truly shocking. It's good fun though

Liam,

still could not get what you are talking about !!??

Anyway, I'm shooting solidly for the next couple of weeks, after which I'll gladly shoot you a 'fun' camera test. Let me know what 'floats your boat' and I'll dress it up spin it round and make sure it gets the right kind of exposure

No need but if you want then make it and I'm always open to see how you could do it.

 

[Madjid]

Sorry i don t know if that ve been discussed or not before here , ,but some people from a swedish video production company ve found a way to get uncompressed video sequences from the 7d .....They ve video footage, from uncompressed 7d video , you can download and see on their site and they ve wrote , after testing :

"the 7D sensor provides a key channel that beats competitors like RED or celluloid footage by far. This proves the theory that the HDMI 7D reconstructed source is optimal for chroma key shooting. It provides a far better picture source at a fraction of the cost of any other camera at this date. "

The link : http://www.syndicate.se/Default.aspx?Id=294

 

[Graeme Nattress]

Sorry i don t know if that ve been discussed or not before here , ,but some people from a swedish video production company ve found a way to get uncompressed video sequences from the 7d .....They ve video footage, from uncompressed 7d video , you can download and see on their site and they ve wrote , after testing :

"the 7D sensor provides a key channel that beats competitors like RED or celluloid footage by far. This proves the theory that the HDMI 7D reconstructed source is optimal for chroma key shooting. It provides a far better picture source at a fraction of the cost of any other camera at this date. "

The link : http://www.syndicate.se/Default.aspx?Id=294

I'm sorry, but even getting an uncompressed 4:2:2 off the Canon is not going to save it. The resolution is still sub HD. RED downsampled from 4k to 2k gives measurable full 2k resolution in each of R, G, B with the benefits over oversampling.

Graeme

 

[Madjid]

I'm sorry, but even getting an uncompressed 4:2:2 off the Canon is not going to save it. The resolution is still sub HD. RED downsampled from 4k to 2k gives measurable full 2k resolution in each of R, G, B with the benefits over oversampling.

Graeme

Also thy said :

Syndicate 7D Tool is a Windows utility that recovers the actual shot material from a HDMI capture of the 7D. The process is done without any loss of information in the captured stream.

7D Tool also gracefully does automatic reconstruction of the chroma from the captured 4:2:2 chroma subsampling to a complete 4:4:4 stream.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

Chroma reconstruction has been around for simply ages......

Graeme

 

[Madjid]

Thx for the info Graeme, ....

For 3000 dollars that s what you can get from the 7d uncompressed video , For the moment ,including a good canon l lens, and the hdmi recorder, not too bad i guess , not too bad .

Good luck with the conception of the red 2/3...;-)

 

[Graeme Nattress]

No, it's not too bad. It's just not what's advertised... (full 1080p). I've always been absolutely brutally honest with the RED specs. I've told it exactly how it is with regards to measured resolution. I've done the tests, shown the results. The results are not perfect, but they're 1000% better than what we see on the new vDSLRS, and as good as I've seen on any movie camera.

I've read comments on the RED that it's "not quite 4k", but I don't see the same comments being made on "1080p" cameras. I think that's changing though, and these kinds of tests and analysis are part of that. It's all part of the learning process. And it's not about picking on Canon. We can see exactly the same kind (but a bit different looking) issues on the GH1.

What I'd like to see when anyone (including RED) says something like "see here our new 5k / 4k / 3k / 2k / 1080p / 720p camera" - that the immediate question is "Ok, but what's the measured resolution horizontal and vertical, and what is the aliasing performance?" And that's not an unreasonable question, is it?

Thanks for the wish of good luck with the new products. That is always appreciated.

Graeme

 

[Liam Hall]

And that's not an unreasonable question, is it?

No it's not. I'm sick and tired of explaining sub-sampling, line-skipping and all the rest to producers who can't trust their own eyes.

It's worth pointing out that Canon aren't alone in making nefarious claims about their cameras performance, Sony, JVC, Panasonic and the rest all do it to varying degrees.

 

[Sanjin Jukic]

According to the latest discussions about Canon 7D HDMI out possibility

and image quality I contribute with one "photo simulation" about all process like this>>>

You could capture 7D HDMI out with BM Intensity Pro card where you can get something like this:

HD Format Support 1080i50, 1080i59.94, 720p50 and 720p59.94.
HDMI Video Sampling 4:2:2.
HDMI Color Precision 4:2:2.
HDMI Color Space YUV 4:2:2.
HDMI Audio Sampling Television standard sample rate of 48 kHz and 24 bit.
Card type PCI Express 1 lane, compatible with 1,4,8 and 16 lane PCIe slots.


So you feed your drive with 1080i YUV 4:2:2 footage from 7D.

Shot with Canon 7D with Leica Elmarit R Macro 60mm f/2.8 @ f/3.4, ISO 1600, shutter 125, 25 fps,
Canon 7D HDMI out on Panasonic 1080 plasma shot with Leica D-LUX 4.

Canon 7D HDMI out 1080 download>>>

Then in Apple Motion, Adobe AE, etc,... crop your footage at 720p and you get something like this:

Shot with Canon 7D with Leica Elmarit R Macro 60mm f/2.8 @ f/3.4, ISO 1600, shutter 125, 25 fps,
7D footage cropped from 1080 to 720.

Then 720p up-sample to 1080p 4:2:2, add a bit of sharpness and you could get a quality that can almost match with R1 footage down-sampled from 4K.

With this BM Intensity Pro capture solution for 7D you could pretty good intercut 7D and R1 footage without any H264 compression artifacts.

As you can see I still didn't try out this in real but that right now exists as an idea that I will do the test "realization" as soon as I can.

Shot on R1 with Leica Elmarit R Macro 60mm f/2.8 @ f/3.4, ISO 1600, shutter 1/50, 25 fps.



Below you get 1080p files from the "7D HDMI out by photo simulation" to compare with R1 1080p (4:2:2):

7D HDMI out 1080i (photo from 7D HDMI out to 1080i plasma) for download>>>

R1 shot with ISO 1600 4K down-sampled to 1080 for download>>>



One more thing:

Don't forget that Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC, DFF, British cinematographer, the ASC and Academy Award® Winner captured some shots on Slumdog Millionare

with SI-2K tethered to to MacBook Pro.

What does it mean?

You could do it almost a similar type of shooting with this kit:

Magma Express Pro Box with Black Magic Intensity Pro card inside

connected to MacBook Pro 17" using Magma ExpressCard/34 card and cable.

Lightweight higher ISO camera that can get 1080p 4:2:2 in post is in your hands just for $1700.

720p as a 1080i HDMI out to capture card BM Intensity Pro HDMI in, crop to 720p and then 720p upscaled and sharpened to 1080p is a way to go!!!

Even you could do the same for less money (just for $649.95) with Pentax K-x that is somehow intentionaly painted in red color

PENTAX K-x digital SLR in red

 

[Jamie Havill]

Sanjin, you are my hero. Please can you attach more cameras to that rig and take many, many more photos.

 

[Alex Coelho]

At times these tests feel more like Red One owners protecting their investment than providing any useful knowledge. I mean..how dare you even remotely compare my 40k investment to some consumer STILL camera that only does video as an after thought.

The question should not be whether the 7d or 5d is better than the Red One but if it is good enough. Good enough is not an easy thing to quantify and as a 5d owner, I think it holds up pretty well. The fact is people are using these cameras in a professional enviroment in all sorts of applications and getting PAID for it. No camera is perfect..not even the Red One believe it or not.


Just remember that content is king and the rest is conversation.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

Alex, it's all about education. Cameras and imaging in general are mighty complex things when you get into the details of how they work. When new technology comes out, we all learn new things. I remember way back when DV came out, and through articles by Adam Wilt, we all learned about chroma sub-sampling.

When HDCAM came out, it was the new big thing -1920x1080 HD. How long after that did we learn it was really 1440x1080 with 3:1:1 chroma sampling? But we did, and when HDV came out, we knew it was 1440x1080 4:2:0 right from the start - no doubt because the consumer was more educated and knew what questions to ask.

Now it's happening again... As much as I'm part of what RED is doing, I've always been an educator, writing articles about video technology, explaining things on forums, and RED has always been upfront with explaining elements of it's technology.

No the RED is not perfect. Nobody ever said it was. It is however, in many ways, very good indeed.

Content may be king, but that should always be used as a reason for better scripts, not an excuse for poor technical quality.

Graeme

 

[Alex Coelho]

Absolutely Graeme and I value your insight when trying to understand the technical aspects of a camera. I also feel educating yourself will help you avoid the pitfalls of any camera your using whether its the 5d or the Red. In the end, the user will have more of an impact on the quality of the image rather than the camera.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

Ideally the user should be the limiting factor, not the camera. I guess that's a very good goal to work towards...

Graeme

 

[Stuart Hooper]

As an outside in most of this, interested in buying a RED when I can, owning a DSLR and other smaller video cams meanwhile, I do not understand why people try and compare HDSLRS to the RED and why RED feels the need to 'defend itself'.

There is no comparison, in potential resolution, image quality, or price.

They're not on the same scale, in the same league, or playing field.

The choice of a camera is going to be motivated by budget concerns and the application. The RED and 7D are so far away from each other on the budget end, that the only way I can see a choice of RED vs 7D coming up would be on a larger budget production, using the red, that wants to get some kind of tight or stealth shot that might be able to intercut with the RED if they're very careful, and the RED physically won't fit in the space, or something like that.

If you can afford not to, you aren't shooting your feature on an HDSLR! If you can't, then you aren't using the RED!

To me it seems like legitimate comparisons would be GH1 vs 7d vs 5D vs maybe HVX or HVX + Letus, maybe even an EX1.

The RED should be compared to the new Arri cameras, to film, to the other high end Digital Cinema cameras. Right? Aren't these groups of cameras in more similar price ranges and suggested applications?

What I'm getting at hear is that I don't believe there is any real comparison between a 7D and a RED One. Those of us with small budgets can be excited about how revolutionary and cinematic and image we can get out of incredibly cheap cameras, and the HDSLRS are very cool, but they don't compare in any meaningful way with the RED! Apples and oranges!

 

[Neil W. Smith]

Arri, RED and Canon

Arri, RED and Canon

The RED should be compared to the new Arri cameras, to film, to the other high end Digital Cinema cameras. Right? Aren't these groups of cameras in more similar price ranges and suggested applications?

The ironic thing about your statement, Stuart, is that the Arri engineers say exactly the same about the RED as you're saying about the Canon EOS range of HD DSLRs .... we're working with Arri on the three new digital cameras coming out next year and they never make comparisons with the current RED ONEs ... they think that R1 is far too slow, has not enough DR and has too much noise in the blue channel for serious movie making .... they're not even worried about the Epic, quite frankly. Arri positions their camera against other high-end vendors such as Sony and Panavision .... and precisely because of the low price of the RED and the Epic, Arri doesn't take them seriously and would be really annoyed if you ran a comparison test between the RED cameras and their new digital sensors, which are truly amazing by the way ... and they have ARRI RAW which is uncompressed:

http://www.arridigital.com/teaser

We've been a RED post-house for three years now - the very first images of the first RED prototype were graded in our place for IBC 2006 ... we had Jim on the phone to Graeme for days, fine-tuning the debayeriing algorithms to get rid of the horrific banding issues in the shots of Jim's two 959 Porches ... the original RED 4k images were 76mgb TIFFs each .... I still have a few of them on our SAN .... we've graded a ton of RED material since then and were the first to show the ASC well shot RED imagery and also argue with them on the ridiculous methodology they employed on the ASC Camera Assessment Test .... we graded the first movie shot on RED and out put to ProRes444 (GIAI screened at Toronto this year) .... we had Jim in our theater demoing the RED ONE to David Fincher when he was prepping for 'Benjamin Buttons' two years ago ... we still recommend RED file-based workflow to anyone coming to us for advise ... and our RAWworks colorist Jeremy is a creative genius in getting RED footage to look brilliant .... the point being we know RED, we love RED, we recommend RED to most of our customers.

So, be careful about arguing for comparing Apples to Apples .... Arri engineers would not put the RED ONE in the same basket as other true high-end digital cinema cameras such as the D21, F35 and Genesis.

The other ironic thing about quoting Arri as your reference point, is that when we showed the Arri engineers the Canon/RED Intercut demo they jumped out of the seats and got up real close to the screen, not to examine the RED footage but to check out the Canon 7D and 5D Mk ii footage .... they were genuinely surprised at how good it looked and the low-light capabilities.

I joked that we should re-do their current low-light shootout comparison test against the Sony F35 using the new Canon EOS 1D Mk IV .... they were not amused :-( ... Germans are not known for their sense of irony.

And BTW, we spent all day yesterday putting the EOS 1D Mk IV through its paces ... the camera is a beast - HD video imagery is amazing .... we'll be putting some charts and cool stuff up on RAWworks website as soon as the camera ships.

Really hope that Jim makes a serious announcement about Scarlet on the 30th and that RED starts shipping it soon .... SCARLET versus the HD DSLRs is where the real market-share battle is going to take place ... irrespective of what Zone charts do or do not prove.

Sometime, next year its going to be EPIC up against the new Arri AE range of cameras and SCARLET up against the HD DSLRS and that means great news for filmmakers everywhere ... more competition means more choices to make the movies you want at the budget you want .... the digital filmmaking revolution really will commence at NAB 2010.

In the meantime, continue to shoot on the RED ONE - its a great camera ... we have David Fincher, 50 yards away from our DI theater about to shoot 'The Social Network' on three Mysterium-X kitted out RED ONEs .... as soon as we can we'll put Tattoo through its paces.

And will we ever do an Arri/RED/Canon Intercut demo showing the Arri A-EV intercut with Epic intercut with 1D Mk IV? .... you bet! ... and will most people have trouble telling the difference? .... what do you think?

May the games commence.

Neil