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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 :)

Canon 7D vs. RED ONE - a real footage comparison

Neil_Hdi said:
The ironic thing about your statement, Stuart, is that the Arri engineers say exactly the same about the RED as you're saying about the Canon EOS range of HD DSLRs .... we're working with Arri on the three new digital cameras coming out next year and they never make comparisons with the current RED ONEs ... they think that R1 is far too slow, has not enough DR and has too much noise in the blue channel for serious movie making .... they're not even worried about the Epic, quite frankly. Arri positions their camera against other high-end vendors such as Sony and Panavision .... and precisely because of the low price of the RED and the Epic, Arri doesn't take them seriously and would be really annoyed if you ran a comparison test between the RED cameras and their new digital sensors, which are truly amazing by the way ... and they have ARRI RAW which is uncompressed:

http://www.arridigital.com/teaser

We've been a RED post-house for three years now - the very first images of the first RED prototype were graded in our place for IBC 2006 ... we had Jim on the phone to Graeme for days, fine-tuning the debayeriing algorithms to get rid of the horrific banding issues in the shots of Jim's two 959 Porches ... the original RED 4k images were 76mgb TIFFs each .... I still have a few of them on our SAN .... we've graded a ton of RED material since then and were the first to show the ASC well shot RED imagery and also argue with them on the ridiculous methodology they employed on the ASC Camera Assessment Test .... we graded the first movie shot on RED and out put to ProRes444 (GIAI screened at Toronto this year) .... we had Jim in our theater demoing the RED ONE to David Fincher when he was prepping for 'Benjamin Buttons' two years ago ... we still recommend RED file-based workflow to anyone coming to us for advise ... and our RAWworks colorist Jeremy is a creative genius in getting RED footage to look brilliant .... the point being we know RED, we love RED, we recommend RED to most of our customers.

So, be careful about arguing for comparing Apples to Apples .... Arri engineers would not put the RED ONE in the same basket as other true high-end digital cinema cameras such as the D21, F35 and Genesis.

The other ironic thing about quoting Arri as your reference point, is that when we showed the Arri engineers the Canon/RED Intercut demo they jumped out of the seats and got up real close to the screen, not to examine the RED footage but to check out the Canon 7D and 5D Mk ii footage .... they were genuinely surprised at how good it looked and the low-light capabilities.

I joked that we should re-do their current low-light shootout comparison test against the Sony F35 using the new Canon EOS 1D Mk IV .... they were not amused :-( ... Germans are not known for their sense of irony.

And BTW, we spent all day yesterday putting the EOS 1D Mk IV through its paces ... the camera is a beast - HD video imagery is amazing .... we'll be putting some charts and cool stuff up on RAWworks website as soon as the camera ships.

Really hope that Jim makes a serious announcement about Scarlet on the 30th and that RED starts shipping it soon .... SCARLET versus the HD DSLRs is where the real market-share battle is going to take place ... irrespective of what Zone charts do or do not prove.

Sometime, next year its going to be EPIC up against the new Arri AE range of cameras and SCARLET up against the HD DSLRS and that means great news for filmmakers everywhere ... more competition means more choices to make the movies you want at the budget you want .... the digital filmmaking revolution really will commence at NAB 2010.

In the meantime, continue to shoot on the RED ONE - its a great camera ... we have David Fincher, 50 yards away from our DI theater about to shoot 'The Social Network' on three Mysterium-X kitted out RED ONEs .... as soon as we can we'll put Tattoo through its paces.

And will we ever do an Arri/RED/Canon Intercut demo showing the Arri A-EV intercut with Epic intercut with 1D Mk IV? .... you bet! ... and will most people have trouble telling the difference? .... what do you think?

May the games commence.

Neil
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Thank you for the insightful post, Neil. Interesting, looking up from the bottom, the options blend together, but it makes sense what you say about the Sonys, Panavisions, and Arris. I guess I thought on this forum, anyhow, it's considered a given that the RED competes with those brands, but I forget just how 'rebel' the RED is in the wider world.

I definitely agree that it's going to be Scarlett that's going to face more potential competition from the HDSLRS than the RED proper.
 
Neil_Hdi said:
....And will we ever do an Arri/RED/Canon Intercut demo showing the Arri A-EV intercut with Epic intercut with 1D Mk IV? .... you bet! ... and will most people have trouble telling the difference? .... what do you think?

May the games commence.

Neil
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What a great post Neil, thanks. I liked the movies on your website, and the interview at the Collision conference:thumbup1:
The blog might need a few more posts though.. ehno.. :w00t:
I'm surprised the interviewer at Collision didn't ask you about grading the HDSLR footage. (I'm also surprised they didn't take 10 seconds to trail the mic cable inside your shirt, but I guess I'm old fashioned.. :anti-old:)
RED's big thing is that their image is RAW, I'm inclined to agree with them, but what's your experience? Is the Canon footage a lot less flexible than RED Raw?
Also, I guess you'll have seen the idea of making the HDSLR image deliberately flat in camera: http://www.vimeo.com/7256322
to make the grade easier. I'm sure lot's of people would be interested to hear your opinion on that..:coolgleamA:
 
Barry Green did some testing from that video and has been unable to replicate the radical results or prove that any actual latitude is gained with the picture styles, but was interested in seeing if someone could.
 
Benjamin Carthel said:
Thanks for the advice, I actually did my own comparison and guess what? I do feel disturbed with your video. Cause it IS a hack!
Alright, lemme put it this way. If you're gonna compare apple an oranges, don't run one of them through a blender first. If you're gonna criticize the quality of one camera over the other and show a fair demonstration of it, don't doctor the demonstration in favor of your argument.

I had no problem replicating the SAME EXACT demonstration, and the Canon 7d footage looked FAR better than what you posted! Take a look and see for yourself.

CLICK HERE to see what the actual demonstration SHOULD HAVE looked like!

Now to be fair, I would agree that the Red One is an overall superior cinema camera. Cinema is exactly what it's made for. But you're talking about a $28,000 camera against a $2000 camera. I suppose if you had a new Jaguar, you'd want to race against Geo Metros. :shocked:
I give credit where credit is due. I think the Canon 7d is the perfect solution to some starving filmmaker who may be looking for an alternative to a $28,000 camera. Of course it's gonna be the cheaper fix.
Your RED footage looks beautiful BTW... I'm sure that CANON FD 50mm lens you were using had nothing to do with it!

"Game Over Canon"?!?
More like game over Sanjin Jukic's credibility. :jacked:

Have a nice day! :)
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Questioning sanjin's credibility is the funniest thing iv read all year and i haven't even looked at the tests.
 
I've been following this thread but I'm amazed by how it's developed over the weekend. Thank you Sanjin for posting those pics, really interesting and informative.
 
Tom L said:
:emote_popcorn: :thumbsup:

5 stars! Now this is what a camera should be used for, my friends.
Click to expand...
that's right.. who wants to know about aliasing and all that usual :icon_bs:? :cheers2:

JJ when you'll get pics like those w/ your escarlets then we'll talk.. till then.. sorry man.. but there's no red fans or hot cold packs to beat such wet :Angel_anim:

http://vimeo.com/7575718
 
:jacked:
Hey Roberto, did the BBC really say that nonsense about the 5D not being acceptable for SD Production?

they're so funny..:laugh:
 
In another year or two when a better looking crop of DSLR imagery takes over we will all look back on these discussions and ask ourselves “what the heck was I thinking?”
 
I recently tried grading footage shot on the 5D and it broke up immediately. Isn't one of the greatest benefits of the RED and of higher end cameras their elasticity in post? I think it's pretty easy to argue that Canon is making a good camera with a nice picture for internet use, but H.264 is just WAY too compressed to be of any real use in a professional market, isn't it? I don't care how good the image looks coming out of the camera.
 
Implications of Moore' Law ....

Implications of Moore' Law ....

Ian G. Thompson said:
In another year or two when a better looking crop of DSLR imagery takes over we will all look back on these discussions and ask ourselves “what the heck was I thinking?”
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Prophetic insight, Ian ..... presume you know about the implications of Moore's Law ... every 18 months the power of a computer doubles, every 18 months, the price of a computer halves.

If you consider digital cameras and HD DSLRs to be essentially computers with a sensor at one end and a piece of glass at the other, then Moore's Law has some possible implications:

1) current image processing capacity of all digital cameras will continue to improve at a rapid rate.
2) image processing R&D becomes competitive advantage.
3) the real value of any digital camera migrates from hardware to software to wetware .... meaning that at first the hardware is the most important aspect of value add for consumers .... then the quality of the software that drives the image processing chain .... then finally the power of the minds in the R&D lab becomes the differentiating factor.

Being able to support a high quality R&D budget and the time period in which to recoup the ROI is fundamental in a Moore's Law driven competitive business environment .... think about how Apple originally bet on the PowerPC CPU from IBM then had to switch to its arch enemy Intel's Xeon chips in order to keep up with Wintel world.

Moore's Law also dictates a volume driven business model ... stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap .... the high end digital cinema camera makers have to sell their cameras at $200k to $300k each because there's such a small market for cinema quality cameras (probably less than a thousand world-wide for all the manufacturers) .... on the other hand, Canon is shipping 5000 (five thousand units) EOS 5D Mk II PER WEEK .... not sure of the shipment rate of the EOS 7Ds but at $1700 each, they've got to be selling like hot cakes.

Moore's Law will continue to drive the price/performance curve of the HD DSLRs for the next few years .... like computers, a volume based camera company will continue to deliver "faster, better, cheaper" cameras .... just as long as they can sustain the R&D costs associated with complex chip fabrication processes.

We jokingly position RAWworks as the 'Dell of the DI business' precisely because the business model for post-houses is also being driven by Moore's Law .... any post-house that invests in old fashioned, expensive HEAVYIRON technology is going to have a hard time making it in this business ... for example, Plaster City Digital Post which initially was a leader in file-based workflows had to recently fire some if its leading "stars" because of the financial mess they got into through investing in HEAVYIRON technology without a decent ROI ... PCDP recruited their new CEO and Chief Knowledge Officer from Apple, so let's hope they can get back on track.

Moore's Law is great news for consumers ... every 18 months or so, you'll be able to buy an HD DSLR that's twice as powerful as the last one and half the cost ... and then take your 1080p/2k imagery to a post-house that's utilizes modern Apple/PC based software and have your footage color corrected and finished for a lot less than you'd pay at an old-fashioned HEAVYIRON Lie based company.

Ian, any other insightful predictions you'd care to make?

Neil
 
Neil_Hdi said:
Arri positions their camera against other high-end vendors such as Sony and Panavision .... and precisely because of the low price of the RED and the Epic, Arri doesn't take them seriously and would be really annoyed if you ran a comparison test between the RED cameras and their new digital sensors, which are truly amazing by the way ...
Click to expand...

Neil_Hdi said:
We've been a RED post-house for three years now - the very first images of the first RED prototype were graded in our place for IBC 2006 ... we had Jim on the phone to Graeme for days, fine-tuning the debayeriing algorithms to get rid of the horrific banding issues in the shots of Jim's two 959 Porches ... the original RED 4k images were 76mgb TIFFs each .... I still have a few of them on our SAN .... we've graded a ton of RED material since then and were the first to show the ASC well shot RED imagery and also argue with them on the ridiculous methodology they employed on the ASC Camera Assessment Test .... we graded the first movie shot on RED and out put to ProRes444 (GIAI screened at Toronto this year) .... we had Jim in our theater demoing the RED ONE to David Fincher when he was prepping for 'Benjamin Buttons' two years ago ... we still recommend RED file-based workflow to anyone coming to us for advise ... and our RAWworks colorist Jeremy is a creative genius in getting RED footage to look brilliant .... the point being we know RED, we love RED, we recommend RED to most of our customers.

So, be careful about arguing for comparing Apples to Apples .... Arri engineers would not put the RED ONE in the same basket as other true high-end digital cinema cameras such as the D21, F35 and Genesis.
Click to expand...

Is there any particular reason for which in those three years of being a RED post house you didn't find RED One you love interesting enough to do a comparison with "other true high end digital cameras", besides the fact that Arri engineers would not put it in the same basket?

You mention comparing apples to apples, while doing a comparison of RED and DSLR, the comparison which clearly causes a lot of confusion and misconceptions in motion imaging world. People mostly see downscaled footage on Vimeo and instantly think it looks the same 1:1. People wanting 1080p video camera are bedazzled by aesthetics of 35mm lens and are not aware they are being lied to by advertised 1080p resolution. All the shoots are done with as much attention as possible to avoid showing the flaws of DSLR video. Now there is a famous DP using a DSLR to shoot video and the effect on the market can be guessed quite easily.

I've been working with RED and footage from our RED One for about year and a half now and I have a pretty good feeling what that camera can or cannot do. I find it pretty odd that someone would put current quality DSLR footage in the same basket as RED One footage, especially if the same criteria was used to avoid comparing RED One with D21, F35 and Genesis.

The argument is that it is very interesting to compare both cameras keeping in mind the difference in price. It sure is interesting and we all love watching technology we use evolve, and thank you for the footage. How come doing the same when RED came out was not interesting enough ?
 
Neil_Hdi said:
we're working with Arri on the three new digital cameras coming out next year and they never make comparisons with the current RED ONEs ... they think that R1 is far too slow, has not enough DR and has too much noise in the blue channel for serious movie making .... they're not even worried about the Epic, quite frankly. Arri positions their camera against other high-end vendors such as Sony and Panavision .... and precisely because of the low price of the RED and the Epic, Arri doesn't take them seriously and would be really annoyed if you ran a comparison test between the RED cameras and their new digital sensors, which are truly amazing by the way ...
Neil
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You should tell the Arri Engineers to prepare to be annoyed, Neil, since you are part of their development team. May I add that your posts seemed tinged with the slightest wisp of contempt for Red, why is that?
 
Darwin and digital filmmaking ...

Darwin and digital filmmaking ...

Hrvoje Simic said:
Is there any particular reason for which in those three years of being a RED post house you didn't find RED One you love interesting enough to do a comparison with "other true high end digital cameras", besides the fact that Arri engineers would not put it in the same basket?

How come doing the same when RED came out was not interesting enough ?
Click to expand...

Fair question, Hrvoje .... I understand your concerns entirely - we love the RED ONE and everything that Jim and his team are doing to push the envelop in the Digital Filmmaking Revolution and totally support their efforts.

We have in fact, done several comparative tests between the RED ONE and other high-end digital cinema cameras ... unfortunately, the results do not always come out in favor of the RED ONE and out of respect to JJ we do not publish the results on RedUser.net ... this site is after all, owned by one of RED's senior employees and is a key part of their marketing efforts.

If you look through my postings on REDuser.net you will see that I have always been a staunch supporter of RED based filmmaking and have promoted them on many occasions.

The challenge for us as a small boutique post-house that specializes in digital file-based workflows is that we have to keep an open mind about where acquisition technology is going ... it really is a simple matter of Darwinian survival ... we do not own a RED camera but we grade and finish many RED based movies but we also have to keep up with the technology race or we'll get swallowed up by the old fashioned HEAVYIRON post-houses.

If you're had said to me nine months ago that I'd be seriously considering an HD DSLR as viable tool for HD Filmmaking, I'd have said you were crazy ... but by keeping an open mind and evaluating all kinds of technology on an empirical basis I've changed my mind .... and the reason I'm happy to post the RED/Canon Intercut reel on REDuser is that the RED footage looks great (and better in my mind) than the Canon H.264 footage .... I've said on numerous posts that the RED has much 'thicker neg' than the Canon files and that there is much more color information to play with in post .... but for many jobs, well shot RED and well shot Canon EOS footage can and does intercut pretty well ... and for low-light situations and tight spaces, the Canon 1D Mk IV, 5D Mk II and 7D are by far the best choice.

Because we're not tied closely to RED like other HEAVYIRON Lie based post-houses we can afford to maintain our neutrality and provide filmmakers with optimal solutions and recommendations for their projects.

If you concerned about our credibility as a supporter of RED based filmmaking you should check out our posts on the ASC Camera Assessment Test both here and on the CML .... I assume you know who the ASC are and what the CML is - Jim is a financial sponsor of the CML .... well, the ASC ran an "objective" assessment test on 8 high-end digital cinema cameras earlier this year and screened them for both the PGA and the ASC ... Ted and I attended the ASC screening and were both appalled by way the tests were shot and how the results were presented ... unfortunately the RED ONE came off worse in virtually every test the ASC performed .... who was the only post-house who argued with the ASC about the workflow employed and the way the results were presented? ... not PCDP or Lie .... only us.

When was the last time you took on the Hollywood establishment in defending the RED ONE?

Will we continue to recommend and grade RED ONE to filmmakers? ... you bet! ... will we continue to work with ARRI and CANON on developing better workflows for filmmakers? .... you bet!

Will we continue to be at the fore-front of the digital filmmaking revolution and continue to provide cost-effective finishing solutions to digital filmakers .... absofuckinglutely!

Neil
 
Fair enough, Neil. I understand and respect your standpoint.
 
Neil_Hdi said:
We have in fact, done several comparative tests between the RED ONE and other high-end digital cinema cameras ... unfortunately, the results do not always come out in favor of the RED ONE and out of respect to JJ we do not publish the results on RedUser.net ... this site is after all, owned by one of RED's senior employees and is a key part of their marketing efforts.

If you concerned about our credibility as a supporter of RED based filmmaking you should check out our posts on the ASC Camera Assessment Test both here and on the CML .... I assume you know who the ASC are and what the CML is - Jim is a financial sponsor of the CML .... well, the ASC ran an "objective" assessment test on 8 high-end digital cinema cameras earlier this year and screened them for both the PGA and the ASC ... Ted and I attended the ASC screening and were both appalled by way the tests were shot and how the results were presented ... unfortunately the RED ONE came off worse in virtually every test the ASC performed .... who was the only post-house who argued with the ASC about the workflow employed and the way the results were presented? ... not PCDP or Lie .... only us.

When was the last time you took on the Hollywood establishment in defending the RED ONE?

Neil
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Thanks for clearing that up, Neil.
 
maybe I am a little bit late to the party, but I shot this on the 7d and I kinda like it. It has been a great tool and I have used DSLR's to get me by while I saved enough money to purchased the RED (which I am about to put my order)

Every camera has it's limitations. The key for me was to surround myself with people that understand their craft and could make the 7d shine as much as possible without internally combust.

http://vimeo.com/7349028
 
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