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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 has more DR than film?????

Les Dittert said:
I posted a thread here a while ago comparing the MX sensor against vision 5201 ISO 50 film. It clearly shows that the film has less resolution and in my opinion the digital has more dynamic range and that's with the old sensor.
I included direct comparison pictures from the same subject at the same time shot both digital and film. I don't think anybody else has done this test.
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I am very aware of your test Les, I remember that you used the latest stock from Kodak. Can you post the link again? it was sometime ago, and I haven't been able to find it again..
 
Pablo Moreno said:
Is that sarcasm??, here we go..

No test. Everybody knows that film has better rollof to the highlights than digital.

Digital clips highlights faster than film, that doesn't mean that film has more DR than digital, but film shows better the entire range (whichever it is) in the same image.

But read carefully, because I said that with proper grading Dragon beats film big time.

Now, if what you want is a test, try shooting a person inside a room with clear windows opened in the background, in a sunny day. Do both, film and digital, and see what happens..
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I did'nt get your point clearly Mr. Pablo, dragon is a new technology and is different from previous digital sensors, and how are you exactly supposed to know that it does not have a rolloff like film or better????? How are you in a position to make that call....
 
G,

Lowlight sensitivity, how many stops are we gaining with Dragon?
 
Tom Lowe said:
It's at least a match for film, so any reasons for continuing to use film are quickly going out the window. The resolution of Dragon likely beats 65mm 5-perf film, especially with glass like Leica Summilux C. Dragon and Arri's 4K camera will spell the end for film.
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In the same way as water-colour made people stop using oil paint. Of course all painting stopped the day the camera was invented :D
 
Pablo Moreno said:
Digital cameras on the other hand, clip the highlights faster than film, that is a fact, and the only way to fix this on digital (as far as I know), is with two images, (over-under exposed) and some kind of tone mapping or HDR, or shoot underexposed and try to recover information in the darks without too much noise.
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No need for multiple exposures. If you have the same dynamic range you just adjust the LUT's response curve. The reason traditionally digital has a harsher response is just because the camera was at the bleeding edge of the exposure range already so you would lose a stop on both ends by smoothing out the transition. This is true of digital rendering too. Renders are generally in perfectly linear space. But we just tweak the curve to match film and voila same nice over/under roll-off.

Now the one area that film still blows digital out of the water is color rendition in blown out highlights. Film goes to white Digital tends to go to primary colors. Again though that's not a double exposure fix, that's just some clever 3DLUT work that needs to be done by the camera manufacturers.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
Now the one area that film still blows digital out of the water is color rendition in blown out highlights. Film goes to white Digital tends to go to primary colors. Again though that's not a double exposure fix, that's just some clever 3DLUT work that needs to be done by the camera manufacturers.
Click to expand...

The other area film blows digital away is holding color with in-focus colored light sources like auto tail and brake lights, traffic lights, neon lights, LEDs, Christmas lights, fireworks, etc.

Digital usually renders these as white with a colored halo. Film usually saturates the color with those sources. When digital nails that there probably won't be anything left it can't do that film does.
 
Will Keir said:
G,

Lowlight sensitivity, how many stops are we gaining with Dragon?
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This question is not as easy as it might seem Will. Since the Dragon gains range in both the shadow and the highlights it depends on your priorities. For general shooting I feel anywhere from 1000-2000 EI is spectacular with 2000 being roughly the texture you get out of the MX sensor at 800 ISO but with 1.5 more clean stops in the shadows and 1.5+ in the highlights. That said 4000 is beautiful but textured and 6400 looks better than any DSLR (Video) at that speed, the only thing I've seen cleaner at higher ISO is a C300.
 
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Pablo Moreno said:
I am very aware of your test Les, I remember that you used the latest stock from Kodak. Can you post the link again? it was sometime ago, and I haven't been able to find it again..
Click to expand...

Pablo, it was 5203 I tested against :
the subject was something like ' red compared against film '. Or red compared with film.
It wasn't the perfect test, but I posted images that are real of the same subject on those cameras and it's worthy of some inspection.
Posting the scanned images and the red images help alleviate the emotional aspect of such comparisons. People seem to get strange ideas about what Film can really do until you really look at some images. I know with some people my comments would stir up a hornets nest but I'm used to it :-)
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
This is true of digital rendering too. Renders are generally in perfectly linear space.
Click to expand...
I've done plenty of renders that went out to LOG space, particularly for archival storage and for film-outs. Not everything is linear.

Now the one area that film still blows digital out of the water is color rendition in blown out highlights. Film goes to white Digital tends to go to primary colors. Again though that's not a double exposure fix, that's just some clever 3DLUT work that needs to be done by the camera manufacturers.
Click to expand...
Actually, you overdrive film and it does not always clip equally in all color channels, depending on how the scanner is set up. Some of it is due to the emulsion layer characteristics, and some due to scanner characteristics; real contact printing is so rare nowadays, it's hard to say exactly what is on the film itself. I can tell you that the blue dye layer tends to overload first, and I've seen film images clip towards yellow (the opposite of blue) in some circumstances.

In almost all cases, we can balance and trim the settings so that, whether with film or digital, blown-out highlights will still go white and look reasonably natural. There is no "one size fits all" setting where we can guarantee this will happen every time, and a lot depends on the camera's white/black balance, color temperature, and overload characteristics. Desaturating highlights is a trick we've used for many years in post to fix problems like this. I'm not a fan of bright car headlights (as one example) that go green or some other weird color; pure white or pale yellow makes much more sense. All bets are off with mixed lighting.
 
Evin Grant said:
That said 4000 is beautiful but textured and 6400 looks better than any DSL at that speed, the only thing I've seen cleaner at higher ISO is a C300.
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You are saying Dragon looks better at ISO 6400 than DSLRs?? In low light?
 
Les Dittert said:
Pablo, it was 5203 I tested against :
the subject was something like ' red compared against film '. Or red compared with film.
It wasn't the perfect test, but I posted images that are real of the same subject on those cameras and it's worthy of some inspection.
Posting the scanned images and the red images help alleviate the emotional aspect of such comparisons. People seem to get strange ideas about what Film can really do until you really look at some images. I know with some people my comments would stir up a hornets nest but I'm used to it :-)
Click to expand...

Found it, Thanks Les.. http://www.reduser.net/forum/showth...o-Red-Tests-and-Example-images&highlight=5203
 
Tom Lowe said:
You are saying Dragon looks better at ISO 6400 than DSLRs?? In low light?
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Better yes. Which is not to say necessarily cleaner, but that the image holds detail and isn't plagued by the blotchy "video" noise we all hate so much but is instead a quite organic grain like quality.

Here is a 6400 ISO frame from my testing...
(Open in new window to view at 2K Res.)
Sophia.jpg


And another under tungsten...
A_Dragon.jpg
 
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Awesome Evin! Thanks for the ISO 6400 images.
 
That must be still RedColor3, they probably were right not to show off until Dragoncolor is finalized. I wouldn't judge the grain yet, even though I like what I see.
 
Dragon, to me, is all about gentleness and fidelity. It does not lose either, even when pressed. It just looks pleasing.

As long as there is a bit of image info there to hang on to, it "just makes it right"

Now, this can translate into DR and bits. But film does not have a "fixed" DR, so saying that dragon has more than film... Does not really make any sense.

Comparing just dr (which the dragon has tons of) directlywith other cameras is also a bit irrelevant - even when the Dragon "wins" to me it is more important that it is functioning images all the way up to clip and all the way down to black.

It does not get ugly in any of the regions as far as i have seen.

By ugly i meandigitally artifacty.

THAT is what makes Dragon comparable to film. Not DR alone, which arguably the Epic M could have compared to some stocks.
 
Vadim Bobkovsky said:
That must be still RedColor3, they probably were right not to show off until Dragoncolor is finalized. I wouldn't judge the grain yet, even though I like what I see.
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Correct, RC3/RG3.
 
Brian Boyer said:
The other area film blows digital away is holding color with in-focus colored light sources like auto tail and brake lights, traffic lights, neon lights, LEDs, Christmas lights, fireworks, etc.

Digital usually renders these as white with a colored halo. Film usually saturates the color with those sources. When digital nails that there probably won't be anything left it can't do that film does.
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This is so true. This is actually the last frontier, I really hope the RED team is working hard on this one because this is a major issue.
Maybe the new color science will improve on this, so far the problem seems to still be there with Dragon.
 
Evin Grant said:
Brian and Emmanuel, this is much less of an issue with the Dragon because of the truly extended highlight range, especially at higher ISOs.
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Thanks, Evin. That's good to know. I thought that should be the case but I haven't really seen a good example of it yet. To be fair, I don't think anyone has shot with that in mind yet.

Like Emmanuel stated, perhaps DRAGONCOLOR will improve upon it even further.
 
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