6K 5:1 or 5K 3:1?

[Patrick Duff]

Howdy,

Just upgraded my Epic MX to Dragon. With my Epic MX, I was shooting 5K 3:1 to get the best quality image possible, and I've been finishing in 4K. Now that I have a Dragon, I can also shoot at 6K 5:1. (I currently use the now-discontinued red 512GB 1.8" RedMags. I will likely upgrade to the miniMags whenever I upgrade to Weapon.) I know this question may be self-evident, but which settings would give me the absolute best image to work with (when finishing in 4K): 6K 5:1 or 5K 3:1?

Is higher resolution or lower ratio RedCode better? 6K 5:1 and 5K 3:1 take up about the same hard drive space. I'm guessing resolution trumps RedCode, but I'm curious what others with more experience than me have to say.

Thank you for your input.

Cheers.

 

[Keith Van Orden]

Hi Patrick,

I encourage you to read over this thread:
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?124071-Compression-Wedges

It kind of depends what your delivery format is. Are you delivering/exporting you final product in 1080p? 4k? Personally, I think 6k at 5:1 looks a lot better than 5k 3:1, you just get a lot more out of each frame from shooting with the full sensor.

 

[Akin A]

Check this:
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?124071-Compression-Wedges

 

[Chad Lancaster]

This doesn't answer your question but a rule of thumb for myself is I always shoot the lowest compression for the frame rate settings. You can always lower the quality but you can't up the quality. Hard drives are cheap.

 

[Björn Benckert]

I allways find it better to use as much of the sensor ass possible that your lens and used frame rate allow.
The gain in Mb per pixel will for the most part be less than your loss of lens resolution if you start to crop in on the sensor. Also dragon compression looks far better than MX so to my findings atleast do not worry to much about the higher compression values in dragon they dont do as much harm as they did for MX.

But as you have the camera, it's quite easy to make a little test.

 

[Patrick Duff]

The Compression Wedges were very helpful. I can definitely see a difference between the 6k and 5k stills. At least with my eyes, I don't see much discernible difference between the 3:1 and 5:1 compression though. I'll have to do some tests anyway to see how my MP handles 6k footage in Adobe CC. Thank you all for your input.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Up to about 5:1 you won't visually see much if any of a difference in most shooting situations. If it's a really visually dense situation like a forest or a field of grass and also some big flat low detail areas like a plaster wall I would go 3:1 just because REDCode will suck up all of your data in the trees and then leave your flat plaster wall with like 20:1 compression and look like crap. As you can see in the wedges the first thing to go is hue and saturation, so if you're shooting something that depends heavily on hue and saturation like a Chroma Key then I would recommend edging towards lower resolution and lower compression ratio. Anything of 7:1 starts getting into "will probably have some form of compression artifact... just a question of how bad." Above 10:1 you also start to see chroma chatter and this kind of flickery look that I find very unappealing (The piano and tree shots demonstrate that).