Alexa, Red MX & Sony F3 Camera Test Comparison

[Jens Jakob Thorsen]

What is the reason for the almost absent skew in the Alexa?
Is it because of the fewer(bigger) pixels(photosites) and thus faster updating of the global shutter?
Must admit Alexa looks a lot like film in this respect...but with half the res.
I do realize, that the bigger pixels is what gives the extra DR.
What, if any, of these two things are improved in the Epic(with its 16bit processing), or is it just colour depth?
(happy RED owner for nearly 3years, that have shot a few TVCs on Alexa, and 1.000+ on film)
Looking forward to my Epic X this summer and the FF monstro with bigger photosites later!

 

[Patric Ralston]

Planet earth was also shot on Super 35mm Aaton 35 cameras and ARRI 435s. ICE Film in London where I worked at the time supplied an Aaton 35 Kit + spare body. They spent almost a year i Antarctica!. We also hired the production a 435 kit that went to Africa.
So, this "Hi Def" program was also originated on "super Hi Def" 35mm Film. A fact that was kept very quiet....

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I have to admit one of the more interesting aspects of the F65 is the "Film emulation" which I imagine goes beyond adding a log curve and hopefully actually simulates existing film stocks. +1 feature request for future REDCineX features. RC2 and RG2 are really nice though.

 

[Michel Hafner]

He He, I recently bought the blu-ray remaster of Jacques Tati's Playtime, filmed in 65mm originally. Absolutely stunning in HD. Looking forward to Lawrence of Arabia done the same way.

Well, thank God it's not done the same way. Playtime was scanned from a 35mm inter negative. Detail and sharpness on Blu Ray are disappointing for a film shot on 65mm. LOA is scanned at 8K from the 65mm camera negative. It will look superb and blow Playtime away.

 

[Keith Walters]

My point is that shooting 1080P is a huge mistake. That is why I started RED. I saw this in 2004.

Jim

2004?
Hmmm I saw that in -when was it - 1996? when the HDW750 came out.

But about eight years before that, (just when we were starting to really like CCDs in broadcast cameras) the film-slayer du jour was the Sony/NHK "Hi Vision" 1125 line analog HDTV system, a blurry, smeary comet-tail-ey "sorta" 1080i system with a dynamic range of about 5 stops, ultra -fragile "HARP Saticon" tubes that could be permanently fried by pointing them too long at a studio light, and had an operational life of six months if you were lucky, and NHK cheerfully admitting that they didn't really understand how they worked anyway, and the entire studio camera and VTR assembly drew so much power that you couldn't plug it into a normal power socket, and the production rig looked like something out of the 1950s, and performed pretty much like it as well.
(The temptation to laugh out loud at the memory is overwhelming, but the problem is, once you start, it can be very hard to stop):smilielol5:

But "very soon", ALL Columbia features would be shot on Hi-Vision (Which is pretty hilarious from this distance considering that until quite recently just about all Columbia movies were shot on film, and now that they are starting to accept digitally shot movies, many of those are shot with RED cameras, while most other studios seem to prefer Sony cameras.)

But the same old same ol' same ol' 'twer ever thus: If you shoot on film, there will inevitably be new techniques developed that allow you to extract more information from the negative than was available when you shot it, count on it.
If you shoot on 1080 x 1920, on the other hand, it's always going to be 1080 x 1920, count on it :coolgleamA:
Compare "Taxi" and "Barney Miller"....

 

[Andrew M.]

1080 was making sense for TV signals not the cameras. It was not mistake but reality of these days.

Camera builders designed around this signal standards because electronic engineers are not the artists, OK some are

Sure 3K acquisition for 1080 or 2K for 720 would make more sense but at that time there was not enough bandwidth available with DSPs or CPU/GPU combination and RAW idea was just emerging in single shots cameras.

So engineers were working with what they had at this time.

 

[András Puiz]

András, it's all to do with MTF. When you shoot at 4k (or even much better still, 5k on Epic) the MTF at 2k is incredibly high - there's very little loss of contrast with detail meaning things look sharp - very sharp, but because there's no electronic sharpness added, the image looks natural. Project that at 4k and you need less (or no) sharpness added for display. End result is a sharp and supremely natural looking image, like 65mm I think.

Start at 1080p and you have a dilemma - either a reasonable MTF at full detail and strong aliasing, or poor MTF and negligible aliasing. Either way you either get a soft image, a soft image with electronic sharpening or an aliased image. The soft image will look natural enough, but neither the sharpened nor the aliased image will look natural.

End result is very high resolution capture looks more natural, less forced, less artificial - higher measured resolution is just the rather nice cherry on the top of the cake - the other benefits that derive from that high resolution capture are equally important.

Graeme

Graeme, thank you for the explanation. Just curious, what would be the resolution that's "high enough," i.e. after which the curve of benefits flattens so much that it's not worth it to pursue any higher resolution?

 

[Graeme Nattress]

I'll tell you when I get there, András!

Graeme

 

[András Puiz]

I'll tell you when I get there, András!

Graeme

So I take it that 5K is still not it?

Theater screens aren't getting any bigger. Maybe TVs are (maybe they will occupy an entire wall one day, who knows). So maybe there will be 5K cinema and TV screens one day. But do you think there's need for more than that, even?

In other words, if 1080 was a big mistake... Do we know that 4-5K isn't also a big mistake?

 

[Graeme Nattress]

So I take it that 5K is still not it?

Theater screens aren't getting any bigger. Maybe TVs are (maybe they will occupy an entire wall one day, who knows). So maybe there will be 5K cinema and TV screens one day. But do you think there's need for more than that, even?

In other words, if 1080 was a big mistake... Do we know that 4-5K isn't also a big mistake?

5K on the Epic is appreciably better than the RED One in this regard. As for when this MTF benefit runs out - I don't know. As we get larger and higher resolution sensors I'll be in a position to comment.

The big mistake is not so much as to shoot 1080p, but to shoot 1080p for 1080p delivery. The error was in thinking that the shooting format and delivery format had to be the same. In my mind, the goal should always be to ensure that the acquisition format is greater than the display format. Film had always been that way, but with the move to video, the camera was made to the deliver standard and that was the "big mistake".

The first step was moving digital acquisition to 4k. Next step was to move beyond that, which the Epic does.

Graeme

 

[fALk Gärtner]

thought we made way progress on the rolling shutter front - is epic going to be as bad as the MX in this test?

 

[Stuart English]

Beyond 1080p

Beyond 1080p

In my mind, the goal should always be to ensure that the acquisition format is greater than the display format. Film had always been that way, but with the move to video, the camera was made to the deliver standard and that was the "big mistake"

And that reflects the ENG-centric design philosophy of most electronic cameras. Quite apart from MTF benefit of downsampling, there is also the benefit of re-framing without the need for image scaling if you shoot slightly oversize...

... again the film community knew this, but RED ONE was the first electronic camera to deliver that.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

And that reflects the ENG-centric design philosophy of most electronic cameras. Quite apart from MTF benefit of downsampling, there is also the benefit of re-framing without the need for image scaling if you shoot slightly oversize...

... again the film community knew this, but RED ONE was the first electronic camera to deliver that.

It's hard to be in disagreement with you Stuart!

Graeme

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

So I take it that 5K is still not it?

As a point of reference from the CG world, if we render a 2k plate we usually render at 4k-8k adaptively to reduce aliasing. Actually, interestingly enough I'm finding that even when we need to render 4k we're still rendering about 8k samples as the detail is larger than the resolution of the image and there is just no finer detail to super-sample. There are certainly exceptions where we sample 12k+ samples for a 2k image but that's usually to minimize moire or other details that would be fixed on a sensor with an optical low-pass.

But something to keep in mind is that with extra resolution comes new workflows. We sometimes render off 12k+ plates for spherical environments. 5k wouldn't be enough resolution on an fish eye if you wanted to for instance take a 2k 45*fov pan across a 180degree panorama.

Also in the future we might start to see plenoptic systems come into favor when the resolution can support it. In which case 5k will deliver nowhere near 5k delivered resolution. Even if 5k is enough for projection I'm sure we'll find many more uses for extremely high resolution capture devices .

thought we made way progress on the rolling shutter front - is epic going to be as bad as the MX in this test?

Yeah, I think all 3 failed that test. Has the improved MX refresh been implemented? I remember when it first came out it was set back to the same as the original M while some firmware bug was being worked out. I don't remember that being reversed though.

 

[Jeremy_Sawatzky]

It's a shame that much of PLANET EARTH was shot at so-called 720p on Varicams. When you see portions of PLANET EARTH on a good 1080p HDTV, it looks like trash, image quality wise. It's just a shame, considering how much effort so many shooters put into that series.

dont worry Tom ive got that covered... see below :w00t:

 

[Sanjin Jukic]

And that reflects the ENG-centric design philosophy of most electronic cameras. Quite apart from MTF benefit of downsampling, there is also the benefit of re-framing without the need for image scaling if you shoot slightly oversize...

... again the film community knew this, but RED ONE was the first electronic camera to deliver that.

Stuart,

that's true

Have a look at my old example of that feature posted at the forum about a year ago (April 2010)

Leica Apo-Summicron M 75mm f/2.0 on RED ONE.

Shot on RED1 M with Leica Apo-Summicron M 75mm f/2.0.

Shot on RED1 M with Leica Apo-Summicron M 75mm f/2.0.

Example footage @ 1080p widescreen >>>

 

[Jannard]

thought we made way progress on the rolling shutter front - is epic going to be as bad as the MX in this test?

EPIC is vastly improved... tests encouraged by anyone with an EPIC.

Jim

 

[Gunleik Groven]

And that reflects the ENG-centric design philosophy of most electronic cameras. Quite apart from MTF benefit of downsampling, there is also the benefit of re-framing without the need for image scaling if you shoot slightly oversize...

... again the film community knew this, but RED ONE was the first electronic camera to deliver that.

This point is definitely overlooked while projects are in planning.
My experience from onlining a few hours of material is that this is a highly appreachiated feature in post. Also that you can go up to 150% for 1080 delivery without either color OR resolution hit.

And this is done more frequently than many would like to imagine...

 

[Gunleik Groven]

EPIC is vastly improved... tests encouraged by anyone with an EPIC.

Jim

I want Epic... )

 

[Kholi Hicks]

This point is definitely overlooked while projects are in planning.
My experience from onlining a few hours of material is that this is a highly appreachiated feature in post. Also that you can go up to 150% for 1080 delivery without either color OR resolution hit.

And this is done more frequently than many would like to imagine...

Well, Gunleik, be careful who you say this too because, as you saw elsewhere, I got ripped a few new ones by people who claim to have a stake in the industry and thought I was "drinking the koo-laid" when I made this argument for 4K acquisition.

Apparently, just because you can only distribute 1080 for now, 4K is overkill for anything but feature films... right?... And, hey, clients can't tell the difference between RED MX footage and F3 footage when both are at 1080P... so, why would you use it?

That makes a lot of sense.

/Sarcasm/