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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 :)

Dragon dynamic range, profiling for Sekonic

John Marchant

John Marchant

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Broke out my Sekonic exposure chart and calibration software to get my meter dialed in for Dragon. Nice to see the DR validated another way :) This is the most pessimistic I could get the software to read... I could have posted the version where the software announced 17.1 stops DR... mid 16s was most common with the various methods I checked.

I've actually found I'm active much more with the meter on Dragon. The broad exposure latitude (broader than many typical scenes), and the friendly noise floor and clipping mean that I no longer live in mortal fear of the goalposts... and the meter is a nicer way to work all told.

sekonic%20dragon%20800%20iso.jpg


( Hey, look, its Dragon info that isn't sexy girls ;) Normal service will resume shortly... )
 
haha .. John I have very little before, I was going to post my ..
identical .. Dragon is a beast;)
 
Oh Clark, I've to hang my head in shame until Rob Ruffo tells me I can point the camera at anything but my shoes... sorry about that.

I'm not sure whether posting my actual Sekonic profile is helpful or not, as its specific to my meter... never tried sharing them.
 
eh...missed the other thread. Oh well.

As to Dragon range - the best 'chart' is and will always be the hands on for each individual - to see that they get vs what they expect. I know that I've been very happy with the Dragon both in the larger sensor/resolution and especially in the DR and Color rendition.
 
jacob.schwarz said:
John,

Could you post the Sekonic profile eventually for the dragon?

Thanks,

Jacob
Click to expand...

Hi Jacob,

I had enquired, as regards this concept a bit ago. Although Sekonic has great QC, there is no way to be certain that one meter can enjoy, with impunity, the same profile as another meter, as they leave the factory, within a tolerance of 0.3 or approx. 1/2 stop. However, any two or more meters may be spot/stop on;-)...

Thank you very much

Fury
 
That is great to see! What would such a curve look for the MX sensor? Landing around 13.5 stops?
/Andreas
 
Heh. I'm sticking with my 16.3 stops of Dynamic Range I made "back in the early days" of Dragon.
 
John Marchant said:
16.3 is where it lands :)
Click to expand...

Heh. I know. This more or less confirms my "jelly bean jar guess" (not entirely a guess!), which I am more than happy to see!

16.3 stops. It's so cool to think that we have something that technically out performs motion picture film in most image quality categories.

I feel I need to stress this again. This has never, ever been done before in a digital cinema camera.

Epic Dragon right now outperforms every digital cinema camera currently available in this dynamic range category.

And if you want to go nuts with Dynamic Range, there's HDRx.

This DR effects everything too. Workable latitude, color response, where and how the highlights roll-off, etc.....
 
Two things people have often treated separately arguably aren't that divided. Skintone and DR. DR comes from a clean accurate sensor, so does skintone. Blotchy yellow skintone is often directly attributable to over compressed under exposed blue data. A clean and better compressed image has a stronger blue channel, and falls prey to colour noise and false skin colour less easily. Pile on top the improvements in colour filtration on-sensor and colour processing in the chain and we're good to go. Clean underlies the whole lot IMHO.
 
Awesome John. Thanks!
 
You have your meter set to ISO 800 - would you get more range if the ISO was set to 2000??
 
Fits with my "more than 16" findings...

and, Phil: Yup...

I have not seen anything else measured in this range.
 
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Tomorrow I'll upload the image for the 1600 I tested. Essentially the short answer is not really at a stop different... I will try some extremes though if I get time. 800 makes sense to me practically when shooting, but knowing exactly what happens at 250 and 3200 for example will be useful for the meter.
 
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