Allright, I'm convinced :)

[Daniel Stilling]

Hey all,

I was one of the highly skeptical ones, wondering about noise, ASA, and all that good stuff.
I never doubted the Dragon color rendition and overall image quality, but I was worried about excessive noise in the picture, as I really like shooting dark, high contrast frames, obviously when the story calls for it.
When the opportunity came up for the battle tested Dragons, I jumped on the Scarlet Dragon. I knew that eventually the market will demand Dragons, so even skeptical, I went ahead with the purchase.
I was in the middle of a project I was shooting with the Epic MX, and decided to shoot the last day on the Dragon. It was a set in a studio, very dimly lit. It was mostly tungsten sources, and heavily dimmed, with one 2 bank Kino. I didn't change the way I lit the scene. For this shot I used a G.L. 18-35 wide open at T1.8
I shot it at 500 ASA and processed the same. The only thing I did in RCX was cool down the color temp. and turn down the chrome a bit. On purpose I didn't use DEB.
here's a frame grab:

As you can see, there's highlights and dark spots. Is there noise? Yes, but the amount is (given the complaints) surprisingly small and dare I say way less than 5219 would show grainwise at these light levels.
And the skin tone is just so great, somehow it feels "shinier", even there's no way that's possible.
This was shot with the V2 OLPF, so I can only imagine that V1 could make this even better, although I do not want to lose the skintone thats just really spot on.
Well, I'm sold. Good job RED.

 

[Brandon J.F.]

Awesome. Thanks for sharing, Daniel!

 

[Jake Wilganowski]

Cool, can't wait to have both!

 

[luigivaltulini]

welcome to the world of the amazing Dragon
I also often use the sigma 18-35, I really like

 

[Troy Bakewell]

Does the G L / Sigma 18-35 cover 6k on the Epic Dragon does anyone know?

 

[David Battistella]

Great post! Generally, that's all it takes.

Battistella

 

[Bob Gundu]

Welcome to the dark side :wink:

Here's a Dragon shot with the same 18-35 lens.

 

[Daniel Stilling]

Here's another one:

 

[luigivaltulini]

Does the G L / Sigma 18-35 cover 6k on the Epic Dragon does anyone know?

Troy cover from 22mm 6k DRagon

 

[Andrew Huse]

So Dragon has a better time with Tungsten sources than MX did? I think I remember reading the sensor's native kelvin has been lowered from 5000? So no more need for a CTB filters?

 

[David Battistella]

So Dragon has a better time with Tungsten sources than MX did? I think I remember reading the sensor's native kelvin has been lowered from 5000? So no more need for a CTB filters?

its not lower than 5000 but it might seem a smidge lower like 4600k.

Phil and I have both reported not really needing to add the 1/8 blue in tungsten.

Basically, the blue channel on dragoncolor does not have to be reigned in as much as it was on MX.

tungsten renders in a true way as you can see in the samples posted in this thread.

Battistella

 

[Troy Bakewell]

Thanks Luigi.

How about 6k WS?

Troy cover from 22mm 6k DRagon

 

[Andrew Huse]

tungsten renders in a true way as you can see in the samples posted in this thread.

well this is excellent news

 

[luigivaltulini]

Thanks Luigi.

How about 6k WS?

almost equal

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Great color is it's own reward

Great color is it's own reward

Daniel has made the same discovery I did - color rendition on Dragon OLPF V2/ST-H (skin tone - highlight) is so pure. Noise, schmoise - you'd have to pry it out of my cold dead fingers…

Cheers - #19

 

[Matthew J]

Thanks Luigi.

How about 6k WS?

You should be good to go at 18mm as 6K WS is pretty narrow. If any is present, it should be fairly faint.

 

[Matthew J]

Daniel has made the same discovery I did - color rendition on Dragon OLPF V2/ST-H (skin tone - highlight) is so pure. Noise, schmoise - you'd have to pry it out of my cold dead fingers…

I thought V1 OLPF did a pretty dang good job, but V2 is as good, if not better than the Alexa in highlights. Let's put it this way, I don't mind blowing the top end any more because it's not ugly. Tungsten is beautiful-even if you are pushing light the noise structure is much nicer and smaller than the MX. But what I've been excited about is that mixed light and ugly light (such as sources with a green spike) is much closer to how my eye sees it.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

It's the color...

It's the color...

Perhaps it was just fate, but several of the things I shot with OLPF V1 were compromised enough by the red orb issue that it skewed the color rendition across the image. YMMV.

Totally agree that OLPF V2 ST-H handles mixed sources quite well - try getting good color from a BMPC without proper lighting and tell me how that goes for you. Moreover, when I shot 3 subjects with differing natural skin tones and did some global grading on the R3Ds I was able to easily render those disparate skin tones with great accuracy. I think that is an indicator of a sensor/color matrix combo that is far more linear than anything I've seen from MX.

Cheers - #19

 

[Daniel Stilling]

Here's a lowlight shot with the OLPF V2:

Processed with DEB and ADD.

 

[Robert Ruffo New]

In all these examples the darks are crushed all the way to pure black, with virtually no details in the shadows. Sometimes what you want, but not always, and certainly a way to hide noise and/or a lack of information the darks.

I personally never light with Tungsten, only HMI, so again, all this depends on what you are doing. MX was not bad at all with HMI 6500 sources - agree that Tungsten skin color rendition could be odd at times on MX and is vastly improved on Dragon. I saw this in my tests. Could those MX problems almost always be solved by good grading? Again, yes, no problem, but not everybody gets a good grade on what they shoot so…