Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

anyone point me in the right direction to info regarding compression 8:1 vs 12:1 ??

J

Joesef o.

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 6, 2012
Messages
246
Reaction score
0
Points
0
I'm new to owning a scarlet and wanted to find the specs on the difference compression settings

I wanna know how much card space is saved by using say 12:1 vs 8:1 or vise versa - Just trying to calculate if its worth using more compression to make my cards last longer


How bad is image quality when using more compression?
 
I had some pretty horrible result once in a scene highly textured backgrounds, deep focus and low light at 12:1. I'd say it depends a lot on the situation. High contrast scenes with dark backgrounds out of focus usually looks fine in 12:1.
 
Thanks for all the tips, whats the average you guys use? I've been shooting 8:1 today, thats all I've really used, just got my camera
 
To give you some perspective on what recent features are doing, on Prometheus they shot 5:1 and relied on 3:1 for the really "stressful" shots that featured highly textured backgrounds (foliage, water, etc).

As a point of reference.
 
I always use 6:1 but I used 13:1 for a webshow with a lot of low light and it worked quite well for 1080.
Quite surprising actually, I thought it was unusable.
 
Hmm seems like if 5:1 was good enough for Prometheus, it will be good enough for me :)
 
I'm typically shooting at 8:1, but since getting the camera, I have run a series of tests and found that even 18:1 is very usable under the right conditions.

I shot an interview session at 18:1 static camera with good light levels against a painted drop and it was almost indistinguishable from the 8:1.

I also shot a test outside in a field of ferns gently moving on the wind with static camera and 18:1 fell apart in the shadows. The shadows looked like they had been painted.

I tested out 18:1 on a ballet performance with a static camera under what was sometimes lower light than I would have liked and it looked perfect. All of these tests were shot at 4K. At 3K the results might be different.

As a rule I test before using higher compression settings and default to 8:1 for everything else except wide shot green screen where I use 6:1. Generally I find that as long as the camera and the subject don't move much in the shot you can use rather high compression with few adverse consequences. The most I've usually noticed at higher compression is a very slight increase in apparent noise level which when scaled to 1080 is almost invisible. This noise might be more of an issue if the footage is not exposed well. I always try to expose to just safely below clipping levels when possible and bring things to their ideal appearance in post. Most of these tests were shot in this way.

Hope this is useful
 
hmm interesting...

Here's what I find. I was a Sony F3 owner this whole time, I had the first batch of cameras when I pre-ordered. Loved the image, the blacks are so clean, and 0 noise until you pushed to super high iso.

Just got my scarlet, shooting in fairly low light situations and I'm seeing A LOT more noise than I had anticipated. So I figured it was compression causing the noise, and wanted the most information for the least amount of noise. This is also a new camera to me and I have to learn the settings to understand how the camera exposes and all that.
 
One other thing is learning how to shoot the blacks with post in mind.
What you wanna crush, what you don´t.
This was important for my learning process.
 
Joesef o. said:
hmm interesting...

Here's what I find. I was a Sony F3 owner this whole time, I had the first batch of cameras when I pre-ordered. Loved the image, the blacks are so clean, and 0 noise until you pushed to super high iso.

Just got my scarlet, shooting in fairly low light situations and I'm seeing A LOT more noise than I had anticipated. So I figured it was compression causing the noise, and wanted the most information for the least amount of noise. This is also a new camera to me and I have to learn the settings to understand how the camera exposes and all that.
Click to expand...

I don't know how it is on the F3, but I know the onboard monitor on my old EX1R tended to show things a bit darker, so I'd end up with slightly brighter footage in post, which I'm sure helped mitigate noise.

On the flip side, I've found the Red LCD to be misleadingly bright - in that it makes me want to stop down more than I should. The first project I shot on Epic was mostly in a dark basement, and the first day's dailies were a bit noisy. Now, obviously it's better to put your trust in histograms and other meters, but I think there's something to be said for a reasonably correct monitor image as a guide.

Also - the F3 has in-camera noise reduction, which Red cameras do not. It's for this reason that I'm still highly considering buying Neat Video - though I'd love to get the NR in Resolve working better for me, to save a transcoding step.
 
look at the goal posts and shoot with the image exposed in between and it should work even att rather high compression rates. The histogram slides with your iso and other settings so do not get fooled by it.
 
I haven't tested it, but aren't the goal posts tied to the histogram - i.e. they also are ISO-dependent? I tend to use the stop lights and the Exposure check, which are both always raw.
 
Bob Gundu said:
8:1 is my limit. Proceed with caution if you need more compression.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I agree. I never go under 8:1 and even that is too much for scenes that involve small details like leaves on a tree in the distance moving with the wind. I've had to reshoot 2 shots like this because I used 8:1 compression and the image fell apart.
 
Hi Brandon,

You had 8:1 fall apart on you? I pushed things in some tests based upon what I know most compression does not like and it took some effort to get even the 18:1 to fail. Honestly with most things the high end of compression is unusable. The Red is pretty amazing in this respect. I have never been able to get 8:1 to fail .

To what degree did the 8:1 image fail on you? I'm just curious.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top