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Dragon Compression Rates and Noise

Ryan Sheets

Ryan Sheets

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I know this has been discussed before...

Received my dragon yesterday and took it out today. Shot mostly in the sun with a lot of backlit wildlife...compression from 8:1 all the way to 15:1 (Older ssd cards made me shoot 5k at 96fps at 15:1)

To me it looks noisy...specially in the shadows.

What are you seeing? What rules can I stay by to make sure I don't go above a certain compression?

Is there something in post you do every time to help sharpen, then reduce the noise?

Shot at iso 800...should the dragon be shot at a lower native iso?

I came to this from shooting raw dng files that had little compression and were super sharp and crisp with very little noise.

Appreciate the feedback.

Ryan
 
It's good to see some examples when discussing noise. R3D snapshots are the best way.

Hard to judge without seeing the exposure and light
 
Hey Gunleik,

Thanks. I am having trouble uploading the R3D snapshots...keeps telling me the file is invalid. How do you upload them to here?
 
Which OLPF are you using? Scarlet or Epic? People's tolerance of noise is relative. What were you shooting on before? Sometimes it is about expectations. :)

A higher compression ratio will act as a noise filter. The lower the compression, the more noise it will retain.

How are you judging the noise? Pixel peeping on a still frame or watching it in motion from a normal viewing distance.
 
Hi!

Im on an Epic Dragon with the skin tone olpf.

I was in a Sony FS700 recording externally in 4k raw. I'm viewing it on my iMac...not zooming in.

Let me know what you think.

thanks!

Stacey Spears said:
Which OLPF are you using? Scarlet or Epic? People's tolerance of noise is relative. What were you shooting on before? Sometimes it is about expectations. :)

A higher compression ratio will act as a noise filter. The lower the compression, the more noise it will retain.

How are you judging the noise? Pixel peeping on a still frame or watching it in motion from a normal viewing distance.
Click to expand...
 
What i've found is if the lighting is off, the compression doesn't work on noise(which makes sense to me). So I have gotten fanatical on using the gioscope on the dragon, and not trusting my eye. Actually the gioscope is helping train me, back to the old days where I use to use a light meter on everything. So if the light is off my view is having the compression set high is way worse. Anything organic like bark or muddy looking fur, I always have the compression set to the lowest value possible value (anything above 5 is can get bad).
 
I wouldnt shoot Skintone at 800 at 15:1. If you plan to shoot 800, go lowlight. Its native 800. Skintone is 320. Also make sure to blackshade for every shutter angle.
 
Ryan, what bothered you about your image? I took a quick look at the jpeg and nothing stood out to me. One problem is I am viewing on a 32" 4k display, so its harder to see the noise. :) I did zoom in 400% in the browser.

One thing I recommend is to test the various compression ratios. You don't need to test everyone. Pick a few such as 5:1, 8:1, 12:1 an 15:1. Or 5, 10 and 15:1. Shoot high detailed scenes wide angle and then low detail scenes more telephoto to get an idea of what you might need to use under what scenarios. When shooting high speed, you don't have much of a choice.
 
Appreciate all the advice. Moving the image down to a native iso of 320 has really made a big difference in everything I have tested since then. Although, I am now a little afraid to go beyond 48 fps because of the compression.
 
Don't sweat compression too much. It softens your image more than magnifying noise. Noise (and details) are more crisp at lower compression rates, but I wouldn't say the strength of noise really changes much at higher ones. It becomes more blotchy and less detailed.

The image you posted did look noisy. It also didn't look particularly underexposed for 800. Make sure you've black shaded.

Honestly, I would really just recommend getting the LLO OLPF. The color is fine, and you don't have to worry about noise anymore (within reason). Want to shoot outdoors at 1/48? Just throw on a dang ND filter.
 
I just ordered the Low light as I'm sick of noisy images.. I mainly shoot around magic hour with natural lighting though
 
It´s simply impossible to tell whats going on from that jpg and not having the r3d. But from looking at the image my guess is exposure is good for the background and quite underexposed for the detailed fur... bring down you iso to about a third, then look at the fur, is then looking far better but dark? If so, well then you underexposed it and you details of the fur was simply shot too close to the sensors noise floor to come out all right, high compression bites on the noise and makes it worse. To shot the fur right with high detail no noise then that fur would need to land at the east side of the histogram, then pretty sure the background would start to clip, so HDRx or use a bouncer to even out the light of the cow and the background.

Then also your gamma levels looks rather high I think if the colors where pushed so they stretched between 10-90% on the rgb parade then the noise would not be much of an issue, or at least far less of an issue.
 
I will be first to admit that the blackshade, temperature, watch the stoplight, check the left of the histogram, breakfast in bed business coddling the sensor to achieve best results can - perhaps correctly - be a major pain for many. A DP should not have to be an OCD Reduser reading geek to shoot a camera:)

But. In my experience the STH OLPF is perfectly fine to 640 at say 5K at 5:1 or thereabouts. And the LLO is perfectly fine to 1200 or even a hair higher. With a modest lighting package and fast lenses I have very seldom had to push past these numbers so I think some good testing and finding what you are comfortable with is all that is needed. I really feel that the noise discussion has become more obsessive than necessary. If you start shooting up around 15:1 noise is the least of your problems IMO - one is just not using the camera for what it is and there are better options.

I think a lot of people really would like to not light at all and have the sensor see every light level from pitch black to blazing sun where the sun is not over exposed and the you can still see a little in the black without noise. Sort of a Lytro camera for light. So maybe someone should work on that. Meanwhile A7S if you want to have something in your pocket that sees everything in lowlight with minimal noise.
 
Björn Benckert said:
It´s simply impossible to tell whats going on from that jpg and not having the r3d. But from looking at the image my guess is exposure is good for the background and quite underexposed for the detailed fur... bring down you iso to about a third, then look at the fur, is then looking far better but dark? If so, well then you underexposed it and you details of the fur was simply shot too close to the sensors noise floor to come out all right, high compression bites on the noise and makes it worse. To shot the fur right with high detail no noise then that fur would need to land at the east side of the histogram, then pretty sure the background would start to clip, so HDRx or use a bouncer to even out the light of the cow and the background.

Then also your gamma levels looks rather high I think if the colors where pushed so they stretched between 10-90% on the rgb parade then the noise would not be much of an issue, or at least far less of an issue.
Click to expand...

I would argue that you shouldn't be seeing any sort of "close to the noise floor" effects on ISO 800 footage. Pushed beyond that, sure.

If that image posted was at ISO 800, the background looks pretty bright, meaning it should have been exposed fine. A camera not being able to see into shadows in sunlight is something to expect of cell phone cameras. There's no need to use HDRx when shooting a buffalo outdoors in sunlight.

That said, maybe we're looking at a 100% crop at RedLogFilm gamma. Who knows? Hard to make an educated guess from a jpeg.

We've been rocking the LLO on our Dragon, and have had none of these issues, for what it's worth.
 
Niko Pueringer said:
I would argue that you shouldn't be seeing any sort of "close to the noise floor" effects on ISO 800 footage. Pushed beyond that, sure.

If that image posted was at ISO 800, the background looks pretty bright, meaning it should have been exposed fine. A camera not being able to see into shadows in sunlight is something to expect of cell phone cameras. There's no need to use HDRx when shooting a buffalo outdoors in sunlight.

That said, maybe we're looking at a 100% crop at RedLogFilm gamma. Who knows? Hard to make an educated guess from a jpeg.

We've been rocking the LLO on our Dragon, and have had none of these issues, for what it's worth.
Click to expand...

Sorry for this - I couldn't help myself. (should start at 3:04)
 
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