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  • 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 :)

Arri Alexa and Mysterium-X...

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Rob Ruffo said:
I would strongly suggest repeating it to the ladies on first dates!
Click to expand...

LOL...thanks! My wife Pam was living through it on the California end, and all she could think of was getting me back home in one piece. We're married, but we still go on dates with each other. I'll try that story on her again and see if I get a better reaction this time...:)

BTW - she's a pro stills photographer who usually travels and works with me. I'm way glad she didn't go on that trip...
 
what an amazing story....

Steve Gibby said:
We were staying in a small building right next to the dunes, about 200' from the ocean, and just about 8' above sea level. The earthquake hit at 3:34am on February 27. The severe shaking lasted around two minutes. We knew a tsunami was highly probable because we knew that Chile has a long history of large quakes followed by tsunamis.

We scrambled around in the dark, threw a few quick things in our truck, I grabbed Bud Anderson's Red 5543 and chucked it in the back seat, then we raced up a dirt road from the beach. Our second truck, driven by our Chilean friends, was right behind us. They said they could hear the first tsunami crashing ashore right behind them!

Down cracked roads and past avalanches we worked our way up into the hills, spending the remaining hours of darkness there amid many aftershocks. At dawn we ventured down the hill to what looked like a war movie disaster zone - huge muddy brown lakes, bridges out, etc. At about 9:30a we witnessed another smaller tsunami coming up the river past where we stood.

Since then we learned that the epicenter was just a short distance offshore from where we'd been staying. The first tsunami (about 8 meters) reach the coast in an estimated 7 minutes from the start of the heavy shaking. That tsunami caused the most life on Chile of the entire disaster - killing over 500 people camped on a small island at the mouth of the Rio Maule, by the city of Constitution, which was just 7 miles south of where we'd been staying on the beach. It has been estimated that 8 tsunamis slammed the coast there, ranging in height from 8 meters to 12 meters in height.

The Red I rescued had no battery with it, thus we got no Red footage when it got light. We did shoot many digital stills and some low resolution video of that small tsunami (2.5 meters) coming up the river past us.

--------------------

Back to the thread - I'm way happy with the digital cinema options Red has offered us. I also like the idea of Arri bringing in other DC cameras. A little competition never hurt any marketplace.
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Jannard said:
1st off... we would like to congratulate Arri for having the courage to step up and develop this camera. Good on them.

We had expected the images to be very similar and it appears that this test confirms that. Both cameras, the Alexa and an M-X RED ONE, will improve from here as both companies get a handle on what we/they have and do some "tuning". While we wished EPIC was used in this test... it wasn't quite ready in time.

We have believed, since IBC last year, that these two platforms would be the ones standing for the future. We are very proud to be in such good company. But for the moment, we tip our hats to Arri.

Jim

http://www.awn.com/blogs/tracking-m...ide-arri-alexa-and-red-mysteriumx-camera-test
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Here is the link of the full text of that "comparison" test between MX and Alexa from the same guy Marc Weigert,

the CEO of Uncharted Territory in Los Angeles, founded in 1999 with business partner Volker Engel.


So what happened at the end?

The Marc Weigert's article is a bit biased towards Alexa and he actually tried to "nicely slash" RED1-M-X at the end.

How?

Marc Weigert: "To be honest, I never thought the dynamic range discussion was a valid reason. Just look at the final result.
It’s hardly a reason to baulk at two stops less than film, if a theatrical print made in a high-speed printing process
has at best seven stops dynamic range, and your TV (that goes for DVD and Blu-Ray as well, of course) only displays
8-bit colour. But anyway, if that’s your only reason, it’s gone. The dynamic range of these two cameras blew me away.
ARRI has measured 13.5 stops. What we found seemed to support that. Which brings me finally to our test...

...The RED had slightly less dynamic range than the Alexa. I would put the RED rather in the range of 11-12 stops usable range,
which is still excellent. I’ve heard of other test shoots for the RED coming in at 13 stops, and that may be true, too.
But in direct comparison, we could see detail in the blacks of the ARRI footage that was gone in the RED, and the same with highlights.
But, as I mentioned before, I believe none of this practically matters much, unless your DP grossly over or under exposes,
which would be pretty much impossible if you have a calibrated monitor on set."



Alexa_Microsalon_02.jpg

Another Alexa's presentation at MicroSalon in Paris told us that it has 13 stops of latitude or (?)...


For Marc Weigert more resolution of R1-M-X doesn't matter at all:

Marc Weigert: "Other observations we made were that the ARRI ALEXA footage was generally softer (part of that is obviously because of the different resolutions
between the two cameras, which makes them tougher to compare). ARRI’s sensor has a resolution of 2280×1620 pixels, downrez’d internally to 1920×1080.
We actually liked the slightly softer look; it did seem film-like, since the edge sharpening is usually a give-away for broadcast video cameras.
But RED M-X’s recording of 4480×1920 pixels (a cinemascope-like aspect of 2.33:1) does have the advantage of displaying slightly more fine detail.
After looking at lots of different areas in the picture, we noticed, though, that resolution and detail-behaviour is very hard to pinpoint.
For instance, if you sharpen an image only slightly, it gives the ILLUSION of more detail, so it’s easy to have a difference of opinion with many people
in the screening room.

In terms of colour reproduction, the ARRI was slightly ahead of the RED. In the low light areas, we found slight colour shifts into magenta or green with the RED,
while the ALEXA showed a stable reproduction of the brown wall. A similar effect happened in the gradient areas where the light streaming in from the window
falls off into darkness. In some situations, the RED showed a rainbow-like array of colours, while the ARRI showed a straight gradient from white to brown.
But both of these effects only become visible when playing around with the colours and lifting the gain in DI. The RED – and this could be due to the higher
compression – shows a tendency to ‘flip’ colours faster than the ARRI. For example, if you correct the hues and try to take out just a slight amount of green,
the RED footage would flip faster towards magenta than the ALEXA footage."

To conclude is to say that this article "sounds" a bit as a part of well organized plot and campaign against RED.

Who could stay behind it I know well but should say here only: No comment!

But anyway you could guess!!!

volkermarc_euro_premiere2012_small.jpg

Volker Engel and Marc Weigert on the red carpet at the European Premiere of "2012" in Berlin, Germany.
 
Remembering the M-X they used was an early one, with early firmware and that the M-X's out there now with the new firmware have demonstrably significantly more DR.

I don't know why the talk of sharpening - we don't do it. As for providing "slightly" more detail at 4480 pixels across.... I think that's slightly understating the visible detail difference.

RANT: Anyone get fed up with DR and Latitude being used interchangeably when they're not the same thing? Drives me mad.

Graeme
 
Lattitude is how much you can under or over expose a given scene and still have a usable picture. DR is the difference between the brightest and darkest detail you can record in an image. Lattitude is equal to recordable DR minus scene DR (the difference between the brightest and darkest detail in the scene to be recorded).

Lattitude varies per scene. DR is not scene dependent.

Graeme
 
Thank you. So if I understand correctly, cameras don't have measurable latitude, they only have DR.

What is the correct practical application of the term then? Is it just to communicate a "cushion of safety" when lighting?
 
Yes, cameras only have DR - they don't have latitude. It's the combination of scene and camera DR that leads to latitude.

Say you're shooting a typical scene of a "Macbeth chart" - which has a 5 stop range between the brightest chip and the darkest. Say your camera has a 13 stop DR. That means you've got 8 stops left - 8 stops of latitude. You can over expose the chart by 4 stops or under expose by 4 stops and still get all the detail in the chart. However, practical latitude will be less as when you try to exercise that latitude, the image will get noisier as it gets more under-exposed.

Now say your scene is a DSC CDM with cavi-black, giving you around 10 stop scene DR. Your latitude is now 3 stops, maybe less with your noise tolerance.

So latitude is utterly scene dependent, DR is utterly camera dependent.

Graeme
 
I guess I shouldn't have said cushion of safety "when lighting", but instead when matching the camera's mid-gray to the scene's mid gray (wherever you may prefer that to be) by means of aperture and filters.

Thank you yet again Graeme.
 
Dynamic_range.jpg

Dynamic range by Kodak iPhone Glossary

Latitude.jpg

Latitude by Kodak iPhone Glossary.

Exposure_latitude.jpg

Exposure Latitude by Kodak iPhone Glossary.

Kodak_glossary.jpg

Kodak Cinema Tools iPhone Glossary

Exposure latitude is the extent to which a light-sensitive material can be over- or underexposed and still achieve an acceptable result.
Since the acceptability of the result is dependent on both personal aesthetics and artistic intentions, the measurement of exposure latitude is
by definition somewhat subjective. However, the relative values between different types of film are generally agreed upon: reversal film tends to have
very little latitude, while color negative film has considerably more.
It is not to be confused with dynamic range, which is, in photographic context, the range of light intensities a medium can capture. A recording medium
with greater dynamic range will be able to record more details in the dark and light areas of a picture. Latitude depends on dynamic range. If the same
scene can be recorded using less than the full brightness range available to the medium, the exposure can be shifted along the range without clipping data
values in the shadows or highlights. Greater exposure latitude allows one to compensate for errors in exposure while retaining quality.
In the advancement of digital cinematography, expanding the exposure latitude is a critical ingredient which has often been a central part of professional
critiques of the new camera systems because digital systems have a much narrower latitude than film.

LINK>>>


"Exposure latitude is a measure of the ability of a recording material to represent differences in intensity of exposure by differences in density.
Thus, materials with a wide exposure latitude would respond to a wide range of exposure intensities by showing differences in image density,
while materials with a narrow exposure latitude would, for the same range of exposure intensities, show fewer differences in density."

LINK>>>

Below are the quotes from Norman Koren:

"Dynamic range

If we assume that the darkest useable zone has 8 levels (remember, the eye can distinguish fewer levels in shadows), the chart tells us that a 12 bit A-to-D converter has a potential dynamic (exposure)
range of 9 zones and a 14-bit A-to-D has a potential range of 11 zones. Both these numbers are far in excess of the range ordinarily achieved with digital cameras. What is happening?
We can gain some insight by looking at a simple imaging system-- a camera/printer combination that reproduces images with no editing or manipulation.
The two gamma equations in the section on RAW conversion are applied exactly. The contrast of the print would be identical to the scene contrast-- a nice idea in theory, but one that rarely produces
"fine" prints because a print can only reproduce a tonal range of about 100:1-- 6.6 f-stops. In this case the system dynamic range would also be 6.6 f-stops-- well under the camera's potential dynamic range.


The transfer curve (on a logarithmic scale) would look like the straight dashed blue line in Fig. 2. (Logarithmic scales correspond to human vision better than linear scales; they are discussed in detail below.)
Camera manufacturers are faced with a classic tradeoff: contrast versus dynamic range. Most images look best with enhanced contrast, but if contrast is increased, dynamic range suffers.
Dynamic range can be increased by decreasing contrast, but images tend to look flat. That won't sell cameras!
One way around this tradeoff is to apply a curve, shown in solid black in Fig. 2. Contrast is reduced in the shadows and highlights, but increased in the important midtone area,
which is responsible for perceived contrast.

S_curve.gif

Figure 2.

I don't know whether curves are applied in the RAW conversion algorithms used in cameras. There's no reason why they shouldn't, but if they are, camera manufacturers aren't saying.
It would be part of the proprietary signal processing package that gives them a competitive advantage. Camera manufacturers could do even more-- they could make conversion adaptive.
Low contrast scenes could have contrast expanded and contrasty scenes could have contrast compressed. Again, if any camera manufacturers are doing this, they aren't telling.
Perhaps it will be next year's big "advance."

In the meantime you can apply curves manually with a flexible RAW conversion program like Capture One DSLR, or in an image editor. Both approaches are described below.
One of the best uses of curves is to bring up dark levels that are lost when RAW conversion is performed inside the camera, as described above. This enables you to access your camera's hidden dynamic range.

The number of A-to-D converter output levels isn't the only factor that limits dynamic range. Noise is another, and it's extremely important. Unfortunately you won't find much about it in camera spec sheets
or glossy brochures. It's difficult to quantify-- the amount of noise depends on the exposure and ISO speed, and it has a spectral distribution-- it's not a simple number. But it has a few important properties.

Noise is strongly correlated with pixel size: the larger the pixel, the lower the noise. Digital SLRs, which have 6.8 micron or larger pixels, tend to have lower noise than compact digital cameras,
which have 3.4 micron or smaller pixels. Hence they have a larger hidden dynamic range. This is one of the major advantages of DSLRs.
Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR)-- the amount of noise relative to the signal, is worst in the darkest zones.
The higher the ISO speed, the higher the noise. Digital cameras increase ISO speed by amplifying the signal-- moving a given exposure to a lighter zone. For example, an exposure that would fall in zone 9
(in Table 1) at ISO 100 would be fall zone 8 at ISO 200 and zone 7 at ISO 400, etc. Unfortunately, noise is amplified along with the signal, and if it's amplified enough-- if ISO speeds are high enough, noise
can become objectionable, particularly in dark zones. This can be particularly significant if you use curves to expand dynamic range.
To take maximum advantage of your camera's hidden dynamic range you should set it to its lowest ISO speed. High ISO speeds increase noise and make it difficult to expand dynamic range through the use of curves.


Exposure

It may seem backwards to discuss exposure after RAW conversion, but it isn't. The optimum approach to setting exposure depends on the format you choose for storing the image;
it's slightly different for RAW than for standard image formats such as JPEG or TIFF. You select the storage format-- by intent or by default-- before making the exposure.
If you choose to save the images in a standard file format, you should expose for tones that look good-- as close as possible to the tones you want in the final print.
This works best if the scene dynamic range is close to the dynamic range available in a print-- about 5 to 7 f-stops.

If you choose to save images in RAW format, you should expose to capture maximum information: to maintain as much highlight and shadow detail as possible,
even if the middle tones aren't what you want in the final print. You should strive to capture all highlights except for bright light sources and specular reflections.
You should expose enough to capture detail in large shadow areas. I mostly agree with the Luminous-Landscape.com article, Expose (to the) Right,
which recommends setting the exposure to the maximum value that doesn't burn out highlights. (This applies only to images saved in RAW format.)
However I wouldn't go too far. A little margin doesn't hurt; there are plenty of levels in 12-bit A-to-D converters. In extreme situations, you may want to make two exposures and combine them.



LINK>>>
 
Graeme Nattress said:
Remembering the M-X they used was an early one, with early firmware and that the M-X's out there now with the new firmware have demonstrably significantly more DR.

I don't know why the talk of sharpening - we don't do it. As for providing "slightly" more detail at 4480 pixels across.... I think that's slightly understating the visible detail difference.

RANT: Anyone get fed up with DR and Latitude being used interchangeably when they're not the same thing? Drives me mad.

Graeme
Click to expand...

Graeme

Which MX was used for this test?
 
latitude

latitude

Drives me nuts too Graeme!

Put it this way...if your taking a picture of a light gray object in front of a medium gray background in flat light, that is a low contrast scene and there is lots of room for exposure error and still be able to print the scene effectively.
Make that a black object in front of a white wall and bang...NO room for exposure error. That's exposure latitude, and it changes with each scene you are presented with. This is the concept that makes the spot meter and its use as taught by Ansel Adams invaluable, not so much as an expsoure tool, but as a tool to measure scene contrast in order to make informed exposure decisions.

Bill
 
Michael Bravin said:
Graeme

Which MX was used for this test?
Click to expand...

We found out about the "test" after it started... we weren't consulted or invited. Turns out that they got hold of Ted's demo camera... one of the 1st to get upgraded to the new sensor.

Michael... now I'd like to see if you will answer a question that has been floating around. Can you shoot the Alexa at ISO 320 or 400?

Jim
 
Jannard said:
We found out about the "test" after it started... we weren't consulted or invited. Turns out that they got hold of Ted's demo camera... one of the 1st to get upgraded to the new sensor.

Michael... now I'd like to see if you will answer a question that has been floating around. Can you shoot the Alexa at ISO 320 or 400?

Jim
Click to expand...

Jim

Of course, you know me, I would love to share this information right here right now but we have decided to wait till our "Meet ALEXA" event at the DGA April 6th to share information about ALEXA, publicly, its less than 10 days.
 
The Alexa prototype displayed at the BSC Show a couple of weeks ago went down to 200. I forget what it went up to.
 
I want to see Jim armwrestle Bravin at NAB.
 
RBI (RED Bureau of Investigation) and RIA (RED Intelligence Agency) were collaborated

and detected that ARRI stood behind some of the latest MX vs. Alexa press rumors and mostly FUD before NAB.
 
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