Dragon uncaged...

[Nick Morrison]

Never been one to join cults.

"I'm just tired of hearing the RED nay sayers. But I never get tired of embarrassing them when they say something ignorant of RED. I have patience for Dragon footage..."


It's 7:17pm, and "Dragon footage" still doesn't exist.

I guess I'm a Red "nay sayer" as the MX sensor is substandard in my view (Alexa looks better, as does BMC). I thought it nearly ruined Gatsby, and a few others. Skin tones were crap. When they try pushing it around, it shows its limitations, especially when exposed brightly. The higher end doesn't hold up from my theater seat, and since I paid good money to see these things, my opinion is as valid as anyone else's, be they labeled "nay sayer" or whatever.

But if Red can come up with a decent sensor that looks filmic, I have no problem with Red. Apparently I'm not alone, as everyone here is salivating about this upcoming Dragon sensor. Any guess as to why that is? Couldn't have anything whatsoever to do with the current version. It must be something completely different, like an urge to be "cutting edge" or something. Don't compare to current reality. That would go against dogma.

It appears you're looking for problems. We are all "salivating" for Dragon because it's THE NEW CAMERA we've been waiting over a year for. As many Redusers are OWNER-OPERATORS, this next phase in RED's tech has become...understandably...quite personal. For many, buying a RED has been a defining and significant purchase (like buying a car, or a house), and the future of this investment is extremely important (and anxiety provoking).

You're entitled to your opinions about skintones, but I personally disagree. At Astronaut, we grade all our footage after we shoot it, and it's always looked fantastic and clients love it (and are happy to pay for it). Having COMPRESSED 4K raw files has personally changed our business in ways I never expected and I'm eternally appreciative of. We could never afford an Alexa, but we could afford a Scarlet, and that helped launch our business (fyi the RAW file sizes are way too large on a BMCC to make that system manageable for us).

Anyway. We're focused on the past (not sure why). I'm much more interested in the future...in DRAGON. Toia will be releasing some footage soon. I'm looking forward to that, not to these slightly draining (and familiar) complaints...that I honestly never understand. We're shooting RAW. You can make skintones look however YOU WANT. Why critics never understand that baffles me. At Astronaut, we do one-lights on all our footage, and its AMAZING the latitude we have in RCX or Davinci with Skintones. We literally got to decide last month how much "color" to add to Alyssa Milano's face. We could make her look HOWEVER WE WANTED, and it was exhilarating.

 

[Rick Darge]

Red is Raw, sure. But that doesn't mean you don't have a baked in look because its RAW. I can spot Red footage a mile away. Same with Alexa I can tell right away. Skin on Red has a very specific look that you can't avoid. That's what industry peeps talk about when they complain about skin.

 

[Eryc Tramonn]

This is what my model looks like in person. There was no correction added to this frame, hence the low contrast. And this was literally plucked from a timeline because I'm not sure why there are so many gripes surrounding skin.

I was simply playing around with an MX to yield this, so I can only image where DRAGON will take us.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/99601873@N05/9404813545/

Not everyone will like everything, I suppose. However, what purpose does it serve to be rude in the process of lodging distaste?



BTW, that is the very first time I am actually posting a frame within the forum. Hope you guys like it, and that it does the MX justice. I promise I will do my best to keep them coming in the years ahead. Thank you Jim, Jarred, Brent, et al...for everything. You have already created a masterpiece.



EDIT: Holy crap...I just remembered....this was actually shot on a pre-MX RED One. You have got to be kidding me. It's been so long, I had completely forgotten.

 

[James Sielaff]

This is what my model looks like in person. There was no correction added to this frame, hence the low contrast. And this was literally plucked from a timeline because I'm not sure why there are so many gripes surrounding skin.

I was simply playing around with an MX to yield this, so I can only image where DRAGON will take us.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/99601873@N05/9404813545/

Not everyone will like everything, I suppose. However, what purpose does it serve to be rude in the process of lodging distaste?



BTW, that is the very first time I am actually posting a frame within the forum. Hope you guys like it, and that it does the MX justice. I promise I will do my best to keep them coming in the years ahead. Thank you Jim, Jarred, Brent, et al...for everything. You have already created a masterpiece.



EDIT: Holy crap...I just remembered....this was actually shot on a pre-MX RED One. You have got to be kidding me. It's been so long, I had completely forgotten.

Colorific lens flare... looks crossed processed. no measure of good skin tone from a camera. Too stylized. Explains a lot from your comments. A better example might be Social Network, for a starting point, or that video of Kate Beckinsale on vimeo. And even better any of the many raw frames posted on this forum. Nice pic though.

 

[Erich Ocean]

We're shooting RAW. You can make skintones look however YOU WANT.

Although it's true that Red cameras shoot RAW, they're encrypted RAW files that can only be processed by proprietary RED software.

We're all the mercy of Graham for the debayering.

Also, all RAW is not created equal—the color filter array placed over the sensor matters a lot, and that affects the actual image recorded on the Bayer sensor itself.

It's easy to see this in the ACES workflow, where RED's CFA produces bad results (according to Jim Jannard—and everyone else) with the default Reference Rendering Transform. That's because "red", "green", and "blue" vary from camera to camera, and thus RAW file to RAW file. (Note: this does not mean RED has a bad CFA; it just means that the RRT in ACES isn't optimized for what RED is recording...).

In principle, the input transform is supposed to neutralize things, but that's not the way it happens. This, too, is easy to test: set up a color chart with an F65 and output to ACES; set up the same color chart and lens with the Epic MX; compare results. Hint: they're not the same, despite supposedly being transformed into the same 'neutral' color space.

I strongly suspect, given how hard Sony is pushing the ACES workflow, that the RRT was developed from their own footage, and that's why RED footage fares poorly.

I personally wish RED would just give us the RAW data, as a CinemaDNG; I see no reason for it to be encrypted and inaccessible. It's our footage. In the meantime, I'm doing the ACES linear output and then re-bayering it so that I can run my own de-bayer code. It's a hack, but a workable one (I only have to bake in the color balance and ISO when I do this).

 

[Eric Z]

Erich,

Could you describe the process of doing ACES linear output -> re-bayering -> select de-bayering algorithm?
What software and options do you use to do that?

Since the RAW material is compressed (minimum 3:1), how do you get around that? Can you un-compress it?

 

[Erich Ocean]

Eric,

I'm currently doing all my experiments with Matlab. I use http://www.mit.edu/~kimo/software/matlabexr/ to read in the OpenEXR file.

The workflow goes like this:

1. Export ACES from RedCine X at the same resolution as capture.
2. Open image in Matlab using matlabexr.
3. For each pixel in the image, copy either the red, green, or blue channel to a new, single channel image. This becomes the "re-bayered" image.
4. Run my Matlab de-bayering code on the re-bayered image to produce the final output image.

I do this for only single frames right now, or sometimes very short sequences (e.g. 3 seconds). Matlab isn't that fast, but it's a great playground to mess around with complex image operations.

My main goal is to get out-of-the-box results that match what the eye sees, not what the camera sees. The eye does a ton of processing on the "image" before it hits your mind, and I'm trying to replicate some of that. It works best with HDR images, so I'm super excited about the 16+ stops on the Dragon sensor...

 

[Eric Z]

Thanks, Erich.

Do you see a tangible difference between your de-bayering and RED's de-bayering output?

 

[Erich Ocean]

Do you see a tangible difference between your de-bayering and RED's de-bayering output?

Yeah, it's huge, but that's because I'm treating the footage as HDR footage and doing tone mapping, so that's a very different process to what RED's debayering does. They're not really comparable, and you wouldn't want RedCine X to be doing what I'm doing.

The footage I'm testing with isn't lit for 'film'; it's lit based on what looks correct to the people standing there on set, looking at it with their own eyes. Without the tone mapping I'm doing, the footage just looks bad, period, and if you applied my debayering code to something that was lit for film, it also produces very unnatural footage.

What I'm trying to do is get to What You See Is What You Get exposure, where you're looking at the set with your eyes and judging that, not looking at the LCD and trying to monkey with the lighting until the camera "sees" what you want it to see. It's just a different way of working.

What's nice with my approach is the only lighting you need to do falls under the category of 'production design': you add lights/flags/gels to make the set and people look cool, not to balance things out for the camera so you can get the exposure right. That's really only possible with HDR imaging, and the MX actually doesn't really have enough range, but the Dragon will if it really is 16+ stops, especially with the extra stop(s) in the blacks.

I suspect your real question was: can you get better/different de-bayering with other software, and the answer is "yes", but I doubt it'd be all that useful to most people. It's mainly just "different", and RedCine X has enough knobs to do virtually anything you'd want to do inside it anyway, as far as traditional de-bayering goes.

 

[Elsie N]

Colorific lens flare... looks crossed processed. no measure of good skin tone from a camera. Too stylized. Explains a lot from your comments. A better example might be Social Network, for a starting point, or that video of Kate Beckinsale on vimeo. And even better any of the many raw frames posted on this forum. Nice pic though.

So, Social Network and all the other movies that a few people think do not look great had industry professionals doing the finish. If it is true that these highly trained professionals cannot get a look out of RAW footage from a camera that the producers and directors of these movies concluded were acceptable, then what does that say about those great post people?

I've known people in the past who continually found fault with any and everything in order to appear to have powers that the rest of us do not possess. That would leave us scratching our heads trying to find that discrepancy so we too could be in the same class as the fault finder. Not saying there may not actually be faults sometimes, but many times the fault exists only in the eyes of the beholder... plus anyone they can convince to "see" what they see.

Not saying this applies to you James... just using your post to make a point.

 

[PatC]

How has the epic been out for so long and people are still arguing about this! It looks amazing- go shoot something!

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

I find this argument about skin tones to be academic. Most of the time people have no idea what they are looking at unless they were present on set when it was shot. There have been many times where RED was inter-cut with 35mm film and it was not mentioned.

Seems to be for every "industry professional" that has a problem with RED, there are other "industry professionals" who seem to love it.

To each his own.

Jay

 

[Jason Diamond]

How has the epic been out for so long and people are still arguing about this! It looks amazing- go shoot something!

Agreed 1000000000000000000000000000000%

 

[Christian Jadot]

Can we change the subject of skin tones please. I enjoy hearing about the Dragon, and I don't want this thread to be locked.

 

[Meryem Ersoz]

There are 2013 reels from RED and from Alexa which you can access online - I believe both are on Vimeo. Watch them side by side and see for yourself how negligible the differences are at 1080p - at 1080, this conversation is over. (At 4K, it's a different story entirely...)

RED skintones have a slightly earthier, organic feel to them. Alexa has a bit more of a fairy dust feel, a bit more "aliveness" to their skintones. That's about as far as I've been able to perceive any difference at all. It's purely a matter of taste. Personally, I like that earthier RED feel. I think it is more accurately human - more representational, less artificial. I think the Alexa was the perfect choice for a film like "Life of Pi" for capturing that sense of non-representational, magical realism. I think RED skintones can be matched to Alexa quite easily (happens all the time) but I think it doesn't go the other way, quite as easily. That earthy, organic feel which is natural to RED straight out of the camera is something I prefer, for telling more deeply realistic, down and dirty, humanistic tales.

(Which is kind of ironic, since all that resolution makes RED the go-to for SFX shooting).

But it's really a matter of taste. Apples and oranges. The rest is just a relentlessly dull story, told by people with an axe to grind.

 

[Harcharan Singh]

DRAGON....

DRAGON....

Hi guys,

LET GET UNDER THE 'SKIN" of the DRAGON...............

Harcharan

 

[Timothy Eaton]

So, Social Network and all the other movies that a few people think do not look great had industry professionals doing the finish. If it is true that these highly trained professionals cannot get a look out of RAW footage from a camera that the producers and directors of these movies concluded were acceptable, then what does that say about those great post people?

I've known people in the past who continually found fault with any and everything in order to appear to have powers that the rest of us do not possess. That would leave us scratching our heads trying to find that discrepancy so we too could be in the same class as the fault finder. Not saying there may not actually be faults sometimes, but many times the fault exists only in the eyes of the beholder... plus anyone they can convince to "see" what they see.

Not saying this applies to you James... just using your post to make a point.

Great post Elsie. Some of this skin tone conversation has the same feel as wine snobbery, the idea that oenophiles are possessed of a higher sensibility that the rest of us simply don't have access to, especially as it pertains to the cost of the wine. Blind taste testing, however, has put to rest most of the wine nonsense, "experts" having been fooled in test after test after test. This is not to say that enjoying a nice glass of wine is not a fine experience with a complex array of sensations, only to note that those who claim to be experts are often greatly influenced by what they already know about a given wine.

I am fully prepared to listen to the Red skin tone naysayers if they can demonstrate their "expertise" in a blind test. So far, in the very limited experiments here on Reduser, the detractors have been a colossal failure. Even if, however, those detractors were able to distinguish Red originated material every time, I would still argue that we are well into the realm of taste and that accuracy and fidelity to the original subject is a much, much trickier zone.

Here's a link to a stills page on my website. I love my Epic for its ability to produce what I believe are lovely images, and render faces in a way that is pleasing... at least to me. http://www.veritestudios.com/stills.html

 

[Nick Morrison]

I find this argument about skin tones to be academic. Most of the time people have no idea what they are looking at unless they were present on set when it was shot. There have been many times where RED was inter-cut with 35mm film and it was not mentioned.

Seems to be for every "industry professional" that has a problem with RED, there are other "industry professionals" who seem to love it.

To each his own.

Jay

Exactly. Epic was intercut with 65mm in Star Trek Into Darkness, and you can't even tell.

 

[Eryc Tramonn]

Colorific lens flare... looks crossed processed. no measure of good skin tone from a camera. Too stylized. Explains a lot from your comments.

Yikes. Haha. I knew that was coming. Sorry, I did not have a frame with a gray card or chip handy. However, without knowledge or explanation of the lighting scheme, wouldn't it be a tad difficult to judge any image empirically? In the least, the lighting would need to be flat, probably daylight balanced for the CMOS, supply a range of notated values, and showcase items with known hue -- in the very least. It should be obvious that wasn't the point of my post.

As I mentioned, I just happened to see this exported frame on my desktop, and decided to share it (against my better judgment - haha). And again, this is a frame from the ORIGINAL RED One sensor from many years ago. At the time, I merely wanted to see a few TIFF exports rendered from REDcine-X. Cine glass was definitely used, and I believe it was a set of Super Speeds.

A better example might be Social Network, for a starting point, or that video of Kate Beckinsale on vimeo. And even better any of the many raw frames posted on this forum. Nice pic though.

While I realize the frame I posted does not stand as an objective record, I was not submitting it as such. This was the RESULT of little production effort from a first-gen camera, at least 4 years ago. Yet people are STILL fomenting the "skin tone" debate. The science of filmmaking is inherently at the service of producing an aesthetic. And aesthetics are subjective. To prove that point, I was willing to put my neck on the REDuser chopping block. There are as many workflows as there are people, and that seems to lead some to think their process has some inherent value over another. For example, I have used flat DPX sequences to awesome outcome on indie work, rather than using the RAW for the additional metadata latitude. Both tacts have produced great results -- to my eye -- granted, I don't have cone photoreceptors in my retinas. Kidding. It really just depends on the project and the pipeline, and every project seems to require its own unique approach. It seems the most important fact remains that we have that capability in the first place. As people have shown on other threads here, a single CC'd r3d will yield 5000 interpretations. Is any one of those more "correct" than any other?

The RED system is malleable enough to allow a creative individual to approach their art from a variety of angles. And in my apparently tremendously naive estimation, the system seems to grant a pliability that matches traditional, film-based workflow. And it accomplishes this at an unparalleled price point. It almost seems some people are shunning the flexibility the system supplies, and would rather a baked-in colorspace. Yet, when color correcting from a log gamma, an artist can emulate any process, skin tone or whatever they desire. It seems the real difference comes in thought: Are we debating the technical, video engineering side of the image, or the creative end result?

RED has delivered tremendous versatility in a mobile telecine roughly the size of my palm. In any case, I think that unnerves some because it becomes difficult to hide behind a vectorscope, and removes some of the mysticism surrounding the process. While others simply do not get it. But maybe I am missing something. Good thing I have been able to fool a few clients along the way.

Anyway, many of us will have shot five features, and there will still be individuals quibbling over the fidelity of skin tones while their unicorn-based sensor/film/whatever never meets their expectation. It was the same in school: there were always a handful of students so exceedingly concerned with technical aspects, or "limitations," that they routinely failed to witness the possibilities. They spent more time vacillating over an idiosyncrasy or engineering nuance than actually filming anything. Of course, there is an art to engineering and without that approach, we don't have the tool. So I am not discounting the importance of technical specification, and standards. However, there comes a time where all the data must be internalized and simply used to deliver a pleasing image. Pleasing to whom? Whomever is paying for the image, I guess. Haha.

At a certain point, all the engineering and attempts at quantitative analysis should put filmmakers in a place where they are able to arrive at "nice pics," while examining character through the function of story. IMHO, RED has achieved that and more. So, in a way, you validated my post after all.

Glad you like the frame okay.

 

[Eryc Tramonn]

How has the epic been out for so long and people are still arguing about this! It looks amazing- go shoot something!

Exactly the reason I finally posted an image. It is positively ludicrous. I'm with you 100%.