Compression Rates

[Jeffrey Walther]

Hi!

Just to all Dragon users:

Which is the highest compression rate you would still accept in case of
4K source, downscaled to 1080 (maybe compared to DSLR footage)?

7:1?
8:1?
11:1?

Thank you for your opinions.

Jeff

 

[Jeffrey Walther]

Anybody?

 

[Phil Holland]

Hi!

Just to all Dragon users:

Which is the highest compression rate you would still accept in case of
4K source, downscaled to 1080 (maybe compared to DSLR footage)?

7:1?
8:1?
11:1?

Simple answer, all of those are "acceptable". Longer answer, if you have the ability to shoot at a lower REDCODE RAW Compression Ratio it will benefit the finer details in the shot and general image quality as well.

Comparing general levels of detail to the broad spectrum of DSLR cameras is difficult as they are all very different. For instance, the well known 5D Mark II's 1080p video barely resolves 720p. A A7RII at 4K is a much sharper beast than that.

The additional thing to pay attention to is that you are shooting in a Compressed RAW Format with REDCODE RAW .R3Ds and there's no additional image processing or sharpening applied to the footage. If you desire to do so, slight levels of sharpening will make things pop a bit more.

 

[Lassiter Holmes]

Phil what are the sharpening steps you recommend in PP CS6? or can you direct me to another thread

Thank you Sir

 

[Phil Holland]

Phil what are the sharpening steps you recommend in PP CS6? or can you direct me to another thread

Thank you Sir

If exploring sharpening it's far from "one setting to rule them all" when it comes to techniques. There's a litany of plugins and methods. I haven't been on CS6 in about 3 or 4 years now, but Lumetri found in CC has a GPU accelerated sharpen that's pretty decent. CS6 didn't have acceleration, but unsharp mask was in there. Resolve has a nice tool set for this as well. Expanding to plugins Genarts and Revision have some decent things. Bigger than that, it's much more expensive.

The key thing is to use a gentle hand. Very quickly you can make footage look insanely bad if you're not careful.

 

[Shaun Khan]

stick to 8:1

______________
FD Productions
https://www.fd1.com

 

[Jeffrey Walther]

Thx so far.

 

[Andreas Mendritzki]

You have to do your own tests as it depends on your finished product. We just supplied Dragon cameras to two different productions, one feature doc and one fiction feature. Both were very interested/concerned with the quality/compression/disk usage equation, but both had very different equations as to what gave them a 'sweet spot.' The fiction production ended up at 6:1 and the Doc at 14:1.