About white balance...

[Hans von Sonntag]

Hans, I'm curious about these tests. Can you references the results? In theory, this shouldn't be the case because Meta is meta. The RAW data is recorded the same regardless of how you "paint" the scene on set. Setting the WB (or any other meta settings) in camera should be mathematically identical to setting those same values in RC or RA (or any other R3DSDK tool).

Kyle, I think I didn't make myself clear. Of course Red's metadata hasn't got any influence on the RAW, hence "meta"data. But they have a big influence on how the RAW will be processed to RGB. The metadata gives Red's SDK orders how the RAW footage will be processed. You can change manually the settings AFTER the shooting, substituting the camera's metadata which can be pretty tedious, or you set the metadata in camera BEFORE the shooting in such a way that the processing will deliver the best possible results. I find that 250 ASA and 5000K does excatly this.

If you expose your footage well to the right with nearly clipping highlights and set metadata in camera to say 500 ASA the highlights will be cut off in the processed RGB/YUV footage. IMO, equally unnecessary quality reduction will occur when Kelvin are set to 3200 or even lower because here the blue channel will be pushed and hence the noise increased. WB such footage later in post off the orange cast, 5000K developed RGB footage works much better and produces less noise in the blue channel.

You can test this with greenscreen work under tungsten. Developing at 5000K will produce less noisier and therefore better to key footage. In the wide sea of reduser there have been several threads, some with pictures, that showed that clearly. I just don't know where they are to dive after them...

Hans

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Graeme, for your interest: David Newman's approach in his applications to set the SDK to 250 ASA and 5000K is very convenient and prevents inexperienced user to develope their footage suboptimal. The RGB footage has a mild log curve with the blacks hovering at 40 for a "mild contrasty" look and the white's clip at 1023. This leads to quite presentable footage that is "contrasty" enough for editing and flat enough for "LUT-free" grading, close to that what RedLog does but with lower blacks. For people who are used to "vibrant" colours such footage looks a bit unfruitful. But then your RedSpace does excatly this. But IMO, RedSpace leads to something one could call a "Red-Look" which I find too predetermining when it comes to grading.

Hans