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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-or-HELIUM

Jarred Land said:
Even when you shoot Helium with the "dragon" color science you still will end up with more dynamic range, it is just shifted from the left to the right. You can easily correct for this by just shooting at a higher ISO as that will compensate for the shift since the shadows on Helium are so much better.
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Because ISO is just metadata, this means just to lower you exposure (close the aperture, put an ND) until there is no clipping and then increase the ISO just for viewing purposes? Or does the chosen ISO affect latitude in a more direct way?
 
Andrei Goaga said:
Because ISO is just metadata, this means just to lower you exposure (close the aperture, put an ND) until there is no clipping and then increase the ISO just for viewing purposes? Or does the chosen ISO affect latitude in a more direct way?
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Doing just a little bit of googling, you will find that sensors operating with linear light have inherently higher noise in the darkest few stops of exposure, no matter what. It's math. Helium may well have cleaner shadows than Dragon, but there is absolutely no way that the bottom 10 stops of its DR will be as clean as the top 10 stops of its DR. Again, the bottom 10 stops of Helium may be better than the bottom 10 of Dragon. But I seriously doubt they will compete with the top 10 stops of Dragon. And definitely not to the top 10 stops of Helium.

The moral of the story is: don't abuse the 16 stops of DR that RED cameras offer. Expose properly whenever you can.
 
I think for many kinds of shoots there's a few stops of range to play in (say iso 320 to iso 1280) where I'd rather stop down or ND to make sure none of the clipping stoplights light up, if that makes sense.

Exposing properly is a somewhat relative term, depending on your taste and what is needed by those receiving your footage, and dragon usually affords you enough room find space between clipped highlights and noisy shadows.

Obviously better to control your lighting, but in a daylight exterior etc that might not always be possible.
 
Expose a balanced image for RAW and you will have everything you need. Slightly higher ISO might be good in that when exposing for them, you tend to have highlights protected, due to increasing the metadata (ISO) sensitivity and slightly underexposing the RAW image.
 
here are some RD3 files that may help answer some of these questions in another tread. I have the motion also avail once I figure out how to trim them I will upload.
 
I was thinking, since Helium does a lot better in the low end of the picture and can be rated higher, couldn't there be an OLPF even stronger than the current STH to shift Helium's range more in the highlights? With the kind of information it already has in the shadows, sacrificing a few stops from there to redistribute them to the high end would be a good trade-off, wouldn't it?
 
Aris_Gavriilidis said:
I was thinking, since Helium does a lot better in the low end of the picture and can be rated higher, couldn't there be an OLPF even stronger than the current STH to shift Helium's range more in the highlights? With the kind of information it already has in the shadows, sacrificing a few stops from there to redistribute them to the high end would be a good trade-off, wouldn't it?
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That would be a very good idea, an extremely better roll off that almost mimic 35mm film would beat even Alexas good rolloff.
 
Aris_Gavriilidis said:
I was thinking, since Helium does a lot better in the low end of the picture and can be rated higher, couldn't there be an OLPF even stronger than the current STH to shift Helium's range more in the highlights? With the kind of information it already has in the shadows, sacrificing a few stops from there to redistribute them to the high end would be a good trade-off, wouldn't it?
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Or you could just underexpose...
 
Christoffer Glans said:
That would be a very good idea, an extremely better roll off that almost mimic 35mm film would beat even Alexas good rolloff.
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It this is what I wanted from Helium ... Holy shit!
For me Weapon is already too clean, means specially if you use low light OLPF.
 
2000% agree.
I was thinking that a base ISO of 1280 or so would be super tough to deal with for daylight situations where highlight DR is king, coming from a Dragon with STH OLPF at 320 - 500 ISO.
We'd wind up having to throw on way more ND in daylight situations and the 4 clean stops of the Motion Mount wouldn't be enough, whereas now it works great.
 
Dominik Bauch said:
2000% agree.
I was thinking that a base ISO of 1280 or so would be super tough to deal with for daylight situations where highlight DR is king, coming from a Dragon with STH OLPF at 320 - 500 ISO.
We'd wind up having to throw on way more ND in daylight situations and the 4 clean stops of the Motion Mount wouldn't be enough, whereas now it works great.
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It's going to be rather important for people to actually shoot with Helium before things like this start entering the mind. Some feel any light loss, even with the Motion Mount prohibit certain exposure conditions. If you're shooting in the sun all day, likely not.

In most situations you'd be looking at an ND .3 or .6 to compensate directly with this mindset. 1 or 2 stops. Which might be exactly what gains Helium nets you in comparison. Dragon and Helium are two different flavors of ice cream really. Both taste good, but you'll end up liking one or the other more depending on your taste.
 
Stopping down light on high sensitivity cameras is far easier than trying to shoot with low sensitivity cameras in low light. You can just buy really strong ND's and be fine, but it's impossible to shoot low light without a high sensitive camera. I just hope the DR, rolloff and so on is as good on Helium as on Dragon, the charts I've seen feels a bit off, but as we know, we don't have the final color science ready yet.
 
Christoffer Glans said:
Stopping down light on high sensitivity cameras is far easier than trying to shoot with low sensitivity cameras in low light. You can just buy really strong ND's and be fine, but it's impossible to shoot low light without a high sensitive camera. I just hope the DR, rolloff and so on is as good on Helium as on Dragon, the charts I've seen feels a bit off, but as we know, we don't have the final color science ready yet.
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Yes but ND's present their own headaches - color shifts, etc.

I personally like shooting at 800. Or lower.
 
Helium + the motion mount might make a revolutionary camera system though, thanks to that native sensitivity
 
Christoffer Glans said:
Stopping down light on high sensitivity cameras is far easier than trying to shoot with low sensitivity cameras in low light. You can just buy really strong ND's and be fine, but it's impossible to shoot low light without a high sensitive camera. I just hope the DR, rolloff and so on is as good on Helium as on Dragon, the charts I've seen feels a bit off, but as we know, we don't have the final color science ready yet.
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This is totally true. I have the SW and also an FS7 (2000 base ISO) and low light on the FS7 is better by 1 to 1.5 stops. I'd be very happy to have a Red that does low light as well as the FS7 as it's quite convenient and can make lighting a scene a bit easier.

In daylight, the FS7 doesn't pose that much trouble, just pop a stronger ND on the front.
 
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