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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 Flare

Jarred Land said:
That said and to reinforce your point, it is why we are hard coding the cameras rather than just making it a switch in the camera firmware.
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Christopher Probst said:
I'm am often at the forefront of battling misconceptions about Epic cameras from someone's previous experience with a DP that didn't know the proper way to handle digital.
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Best foot forward is what I say.

I rarely get angry in life, but I am more than frustrated/confused by a great deal of misinformation both in the real world and the digital realm spread by random individuals, a good deal of which who have never worked with any cameras of this caliber. Heck, half of the reason I'm on Reduser is to combat that sort of misinformed chaos. Mostly because it makes me *hulk smash* mad.

Dragon has the power to change all of this. It is that good. It's hard to argue against pure image quality even with a healthy amount of crazy fueling those opinions.
 
So... for my next big shoot the 23rd of jan. Me guessing that I will be without camera. Or what happens to the cameras that are at RED right now being updated will they be waiting on the shelfs for the new stuff or how will it work? We sent ours in the 2nd of jan...
 
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The new OLPF does not make the image darker. It is clearly the difference between a loss of contrast from the added magenta flare. The mannequin face is the same exposure level, the old flare milks out the blacks and gives you a perceived brighter image, but only raises the black level and noise. This is great news for strong backlit shots. They are going to hold their contrast better and not need a separate color adjust to stay consistent. You'll also be able to push those shots more in post. I usually am the devil's advocate here, but this new OLPF seems like an amazing improvement. It cuts red channel noise down immensely. Is it going to be available for the Epic MX? I am also wondering if you were still making user-placable effects filters for the sensor. I remember Jim talking about that.
 
Phil Holland said:
I'm pretty sure. I've tested the lenses on "various" cameras now and seen them on a projector. I was initially worried something was crazy somewhere, but I've since tested them again and my results line up with that Magnanimous Media test.

Though I haven't seen this neon sign image.
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The reason why I ask is that I heard Xenon FF CA showed up more on Dragon sensor than it did with MX sensor or with other cameras. The reasoning at the time was that it was due to Dragon showing more detail. But I was crossing my fingers that the old OLPF might have something to do with it too.
 
Ryan Chapman said:
The reason why I ask is that I heard Xenon FF CA showed up more on Dragon sensor than it did with MX sensor or with other cameras. The reasoning at the time was that it was due to Dragon showing more detail. But I was crossing my fingers that the old OLPF might have something to do with it too.
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The short answer would be is that since the Dynamic Range is larger with Dragon more highlight information is being retained, which is why a side by side exposure tests doesn't exactly produce the same results over any given subject matter. Because of this what people are "used to seeing' is a bit different on those high contrast edges and sometimes Chromatic Aberrations are a bit more noticeable because there's information there that would normally overexpose and bloom out.

This is true for all lenses, especially and wider apertures.

I've been thinking about writing a document about certain lens things for a while now. This is one of those things that I really want to touch on.

A few things DPs do to battle CA in general are:

- light carefully
- use diffusion filters
- use low contrast filters
- use ND filters (effects contrast as well)
- stop down the lens

Top end lens design and coatings creates an extremely wrangled CA that has minimal coloration to it. Additionally for most digital cinema cameras that exist today, generally speaking, they prefer to have more telecentric glass to produce the highest quality image. This is one reason those Summilux-Cs have been designed with rather expensive multi-aspheric elements as well as the crazy voodoo they do with their coatings, which I have since learned much more about. It's actually really impressive stuff.

Interestingly enough over the years zooms have been getting better at correcting the chaos of CA in impressive ways, older zooms often revealed rather horrific CA. New more complicated, yet intelligent optical designs and again those coatings help.
 
My understanding is the OLPF removes Moire and undesirable colors at the cost of lower resolution. Is there some penalty to the 6k resolution of the Dragon with this new OLPF filter, maybe it is quite minimal? I only ask because no one has brought this up in the discussion thus far.
 
The higher the resolution, often the OLPF can be weaker because the pattern of pixels in the sensor is fine enough as a grid to interact less with on-screen detail. Yes, without an OPLF, there is a bit more fine detail captured but there is even more false detail from aliasing captured.
 
Jon Dishler said:
My understanding is the OLPF removes Moire and undesirable colors at the cost of lower resolution. Is there some penalty to the 6k resolution of the Dragon with this new OLPF filter, maybe it is quite minimal? I only ask because no one has brought this up in the discussion thus far.
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The OLPF serves several functions. As an Optical Low Pass Filter it is acting as an Anti-Aliasing filter to remove both chroma and luma aliasing (Moire and jagged edges). This does effect the "pure resolution" potential of the system, but solves the aliasing artifacts that could potentially plague every shot, which you really don't want for 99% of shooting conditions. Color Moire produces a false color that is particularly hard to deal with in post as you have to utilize a chroma blurring technique that can hurt the detail even more than having an optical fix in the imaging chain.

Additionally the OLPF has coatings and maybe other things sandwiched in there via optical cement, likely several layers optical quartz. The very visible advancement with Dragon's OLPF is some sort of IR Cut filter that blocks certain infrared wavelengths, which modern sensors are particularly sensitive to, and lets the visible light you want to capture pass through.

It would appear that the new OLPF either through some formula in the filter mix or through a coating (likely a coating) process has a new anti-reflective effect which solves the Flare Orbs and various other stray IR reflections that could be seen at certain angles with strong light sources. It will be interesting to see if the "reflected red dots" completely go away with this new design actually.

In my observation with the current OLPF for Dragon is that it's effect on the pixels is more subtle than the OLPF found in Mysterium-X bodies, essentially resolves high frequency detail better. This could also be due to the smaller pixels, but likely due to advancements in both sensor and OLPF design/materials over the last few years Red has made some visible advancements.

Jim mentioned once about the importance of pixel design in future digital cinema cameras. This alludes to some of the many variables it takes to make something look good.

Whatever happens the whole system gets color calibrated and tuned with the OLPF performance in mind and that's what's producing the good color we are all after.
 
Phil Holland said:
The OLPF serves several functions. As an Optical Low Pass Filter it is acting as an Anti-Aliasing filter to remove both chroma and luma aliasing (Moire and jagged edges). This does effect the "pure resolution" potential of the system, but solves the aliasing artifacts that could potentially plague every shot, which you really don't want for 99% of shooting conditions. Color Moire produces a false color that is particularly hard to deal with in post as you have to utilize a chroma blurring technique that can hurt the detail even more than having an optical fix in the imaging chain.

Additionally the OLPF has coatings and maybe other things sandwiched in there via optical cement, likely several layers optical quartz. The very visible advancement with Dragon's OLPF is some sort of IR Cut filter that blocks certain infrared wavelengths, which modern sensors are particularly sensitive to, and lets the visible light you want to capture pass through.

It would appear that the new OLPF either through some formula in the filter mix or through a coating (likely a coating) process has a new anti-reflective effect which solves the Flare Orbs and various other stray IR reflections that could be seen at certain angles with strong light sources. It will be interesting to see if the "reflected red dots" completely go away with this new design actually.

In my observation with the current OLPF for Dragon is that it's effect on the pixels is more subtle than the OLPF found in Mysterium-X bodies, essentially resolves high frequency detail better. This could also be due to the smaller pixels, but likely due to advancements in both sensor and OLPF design/materials over the last few years Red has made some visible advancements.

Jim mentioned once about the importance of pixel design in future digital cinema cameras. This alludes to some of the many variables it takes to make something look good.

Whatever happens the whole system gets color calibrated and tuned with the OLPF performance in mind and that's what's producing the good color we are all after.
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WOW! This is a prized lesson to this student. Thanks Phil!
 
Jarred Land said:
(...) or send it back at a later time to get upgraded. Obviously if you are far away from a RED repair center, the first option might be best.
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Hey Jarred,

which Red repair center will be capable of programming the Dragon? In your post it sounds like possibly every RRC can do the programming. I tried to verify this with Red Germany and it seems that sending the Dragon back to Irvine is the only option since neither Berlin nor Pinewood might have the tools needed.

Can you confirm where the OLPF programming can be done?
 
Wouldn't this improve "regular old EPIC" image quality as well ?


battistella
 
Phil Holland said:
The OLPF serves several functions. As an Optical Low Pass Filter it is acting as an Anti-Aliasing filter to remove both chroma and luma aliasing (Moire and jagged edges). This does effect the "pure resolution" potential of the system, but solves the aliasing artifacts that could potentially plague every shot, which you really don't want for 99% of shooting conditions. Color Moire produces a false color that is particularly hard to deal with in post as you have to utilize a chroma blurring technique that can hurt the detail even more than having an optical fix in the imaging chain.

Additionally the OLPF has coatings and maybe other things sandwiched in there via optical cement, likely several layers optical quartz. The very visible advancement with Dragon's OLPF is some sort of IR Cut filter that blocks certain infrared wavelengths, which modern sensors are particularly sensitive to, and lets the visible light you want to capture pass through.

It would appear that the new OLPF either through some formula in the filter mix or through a coating (likely a coating) process has a new anti-reflective effect which solves the Flare Orbs and various other stray IR reflections that could be seen at certain angles with strong light sources. It will be interesting to see if the "reflected red dots" completely go away with this new design actually.

In my observation with the current OLPF for Dragon is that it's effect on the pixels is more subtle than the OLPF found in Mysterium-X bodies, essentially resolves high frequency detail better. This could also be due to the smaller pixels, but likely due to advancements in both sensor and OLPF design/materials over the last few years Red has made some visible advancements.

Jim mentioned once about the importance of pixel design in future digital cinema cameras. This alludes to some of the many variables it takes to make something look good.

Whatever happens the whole system gets color calibrated and tuned with the OLPF performance in mind and that's what's producing the good color we are all after.
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Agreed, but i would add that an OLPF hugely affects skin texture rendition as well. That's why I laughed so hard at all the clueless idiots shooting fashion videos with their DSLRs, that often ended up looking like 'Before' images for a dermatology cream ad.
 
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