First up, I have not yet finished saying thank you to Jarred. It may go on a while and get embarrassingMy name doesn't fit next to those two… but whose does?
Dragon is exceptionally good. I know we all have high expectations… but even so.
A few little anecdotes… bearing in mind its been in our hands a very brief period so far.
First thing I did with it was a setup I knew the MX struggled a little with. Its a headshot under tungsten using bounced light from a couple of little 650w arri's. I like the setup for its look, convenience and simplicity, but it usually gives us noisy blues and grainy black at ISO800, so we're limited on T-stops a bit.
Dragon ate it up - it was really clean, had clearly superior skin tone... all the things I wanted.
The big shocker for day exteriors was the free gaffer, lighting truck, silks etc that comes magically inside the camera. Hard light and shade is just not an issue, its just how we see it in person. Perhaps better, as in some cases I could feel my own eyes adjust a little looking between light and shade where the Dragon had me covered.
We tried to break the image first chance we got of course… We shot our model friend walking a semi circle round camera from hard front-lit to silhouetted against the sun. It held the same f-stop, with a perfectly useable picture right the way around. Incredible.
We took a shot from inside our dark studio into the midday sun in our parking area - white and silver cars, bright skies... I could still grade to retrieve detail on our black furniture and walls, inside in the shade.
And skintone... Just exactly as your eye sees it.
Oh and then the compression. I was a sceptic… I'm pretty aware of the limits with Redcode on R1 and Epic and I'm kinda sensitive to it personally. We shot a mega-detail image at 6k 17:1 and really didn't have much to complain about.
I could, and will, go on and on. There's a lot to say. The overall feel is that it just sees what I see. Maybe more. Brilliant stuff
Copy that. I know you guys are gonna be able to rock it out. Best of luck. Your gonna make a lot of people happy.
Yes, that is, thank you.
Absolutely... The first 50 guys and Epic-Ms always get priority.. but there are of course always exceptions. Fair or not.. some guys just have such a great attitude we slip them in.
Jim's tag line for awhile has been the right to refuse service for people with a bad attitude, and I'd like to add to that that we have the right to reward people with a good attitude
