Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Register Log in
  • 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 vs Alexa ACES Color Space

M

Mark Linthicum

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 21, 2007
Messages
204
Reaction score
0
Points
16
Age
60
Location
Rancho Mirage and Los Angeles
Doing some test comparing the Dragon and the new Open gate Alexa (raw format) and i have to say the Alexa output with ACES Color Space is a very nice look. I found a very old post where i think Jared said Red was looking into ACES but there is still no ACES option in RedCine. This is such a interesting look i believe ACES is the only reason people like the Alexa Look over the Red. My impressions comparing Arri Rec 709 to the Dragon, the Arri looks better out of the box, hi ASA the blacks are neutral, skin tones nice under many lighting conditions. The Dragon needs tweaking to get it as nice and then better then the Alexa. Alexa has sharpening when shooting with Raw, i always thought the camera did a little sharpening and with their ArriRaw Convert software the sharpening is set to 100 as a default, i wonder if the camera adds this same amount of sharpening when shooting to QT format.

Also with the ArriRaw Convert software the renders are so much faster. I do not have a rocket and of course the resolution (3.5K vs 6K) will play into it but about 30 Seconds of material takes 2 days to render on my new MacPro!

Mark
 
If 30 secs of Dragon footage takes 2 days on a nMP, you are likely doing something wrong... Is ADD enabled?

As for ACES, last I heard, RED was saying it was everyone else's problem and that their math was correct. Cop out if you ask me, because it's still unusable (you gotta go to EXR or something as a workaround to get proper output... who would want to deal with that?)

Conversely, the "plug and play" & "it just works" ability of the Alexa is precisely what has allowed it to continually dominate the market, even though its "only 3k." It's a no-fuss-no-muss-maximum-results camera that, for the most part, reacts to light the way DoPs expect (which is a *huge* boon for the platform). RED, not so much (Dragon included). Alas, Alexa costs 2x-3x, so you get what you pay for and that puts it out of Owner/Op territory (it's a rental camera).
 
Last edited:
I would love to see some sort of direct comparisons between the two cameras. No "subjective" shoot outs that lead you to "its not the camera, its the DP" comparisons, but more like flat out quarter mile race on a straight line to get simple and clear results. 2 cameras, two tripods, same lighting. Some one please take me out of my misery or just shoot me already!
We all know Dragon is king of resolution and speed, by a mile, so no need to go there. I would love to see skin tones, colors and mixed textures under different lighting conditions.
People keep saying the Alexa looks better. I dont know. Does it?
 
@Mark. Make sure you are using GPU acceleration if you don't have access to a Rocket-X. You will find processing is much faster with Redcine-X Pro + GPU acceleration.
 
Jonathan Yonkers said:
I would love to see some sort of direct comparisons between the two cameras. No "subjective" shoot outs that lead you to "its not the camera, its the DP" comparisons, but more like flat out quarter mile race on a straight line to get simple and clear results. 2 cameras, two tripods, same lighting. Some one please take me out of my misery or just shoot me already!
We all know Dragon is king of resolution and speed, by a mile, so no need to go there. I would love to see skin tones, colors and mixed textures under different lighting conditions.
People keep saying the Alexa looks better. I dont know. Does it?
Click to expand...

This is what i am working on now, hope to post some footage in the future as time allows.
 
Mark Linthicum said:
Yes ADD is enabled, going to start rendering without to se if i notice a difference.
Click to expand...

Well the first thing you'll notice is a drastic decrease in render times!

ADD, Advance Dragon Debayer, is a complicated algorithm that is looking at previous and future frames to calculate the best possible image. It takes time for it to work. Also, ADD isn't optimized for GPU and is a CPU only process at the moment.
 
Mark Linthicum said:
Yes ADD is enabled, going to start rendering without to se if i notice a difference.
Click to expand...

Bingo. Yeah, ADD is really only for still pictures at the moment. Basically takes a few frames proceeding and succeeding each frame to make a "super-frame" that is extra clean/sharp/pretty...

Also note that the Alchemy Group also slows down renders substantially... Not 'two days for 30secs' slow, but by quite a bit.

And, yes, this is the kind of non-intuitive stuff that makes Alexa footage so much easier to deal with and use... I can't even imagine what a DoP, Colourist, Data Manager would think if they were rendering dragon footage with ADD enabled, thinking it was the only way? They'd likely *never* work on a RED Dragon shoot ever.

Edit: Beaten by Phil.
 
Last edited:
Mike P. said:
Bingo. Yeah, ADD is really only for still pictures at the moment. Basically takes a few frames proceeding and succeeding each frame to make a "super-frame" that is extra clean/sharp/pretty...

Edit: Beaten by Phil.
Click to expand...

Heh. While chomping on evening food things my fingers are indeed fast.

ADD can be used for motion, but it's more about where you choose to use it. I personally wouldn't mass convert/proxy everything with ADD. However, if you were say.... Making selects and trimming well that's a bit more reasonable and it does look damn nice. A bigger robot is helpful of course.
 
ADD is the 5stars luxury suite wellness day/night spa for your work. ADD Motion and stills from Dragon RAW are superior to other motion cameras too, but it takes time, so Phil is more than right to say this is not for dailies / proxies ;-)

btw - any idea whether ADD will be part of Da Vinci and the others someday ?
 
I'm curious to hear what Red has to say about that ACES option, a lot of people ask for an improvement of the dragon color (by 3d Luts or anything else), i think that they can do something about that and close the mouth of every people (me included) who talk about a better color rendition from the Alexa sensor..Do something Red, i know you can ;)
 
Sorry if this sounds stupid to ask but I'm still waiting for my Dragon to come back, so I havent tried it yet.....Is it possible to work with ADD activated when exporting TIFF stills frames out of RedcineX from Dragon footage ?
 
Dominik Muench said:
Sorry if this sounds stupid to ask but I'm still waiting for my Dragon to come back, so I havent tried it yet.....Is it possible to work with ADD activated when exporting TIFF stills frames out of RedcineX from Dragon footage ?
Click to expand...

You can work with ADD one of two ways.

1. You can export an ADD still snapshot into the format you desire.
2. In the Export menu you can enable ADD and export to your preferred still sequence or movie file.
 
Red Raw is way more versatile than Arri Raw. You Can Actually use Arri Luts on R3D. There is so much resolution in a 6K image thatyou actually need a 4K monitor to favorably view an image. Its very important. The Red Dragon goes beyond realistic skin-tones the color rendering is superior to that of an Alexa. The Alexa is 10 times more post friendly than the Red is. Red Rocket X is a must have. I believe Red has really done it this time. Any one who asks me about buying a Red Dragon, I advice the to get a Scarlet Dragon and a Red Rocket X.
 
Mark Linthicum said:
Doing some test comparing the Dragon and the new Open gate Alexa (raw format) and i have to say the Alexa output with ACES Color Space is a very nice look. I found a very old post where i think Jared said Red was looking into ACES but there is still no ACES option in RedCine. This is such a interesting look i believe ACES is the only reason people like the Alexa Look over the Red. My impressions comparing Arri Rec 709 to the Dragon, the Arri looks better out of the box, hi ASA the blacks are neutral, skin tones nice under many lighting conditions. The Dragon needs tweaking to get it as nice and then better then the Alexa. Alexa has sharpening when shooting with Raw, i always thought the camera did a little sharpening and with their ArriRaw Convert software the sharpening is set to 100 as a default, i wonder if the camera adds this same amount of sharpening when shooting to QT format.

Also with the ArriRaw Convert software the renders are so much faster. I do not have a rocket and of course the resolution (3.5K vs 6K) will play into it but about 30 Seconds of material takes 2 days to render on my new MacPro!

Mark
Click to expand...

30 seconds is about 50 seconds of rendering with MacPro and 1 nvidia Titan, without Redrocket-x.
Maybe you're doing something wrong.
The colors Dragon also appears to be in much better color rendering means specially under mixed lighting or outdoor with many Nd, Dragon does not suffer from contamination compared to Alexa, this is what we are now seeing.
However, if you bring examples of your shot can take a look why be worse than Alexa.
 
"As for ACES, last I heard, RED was saying it was everyone else's problem and that their math was correct. Cop out if you ask me, because it's still unusable (you gotta go to EXR or something as a workaround to get proper output... who would want to deal with that?) "

Eh?? ACES is a specification and our duty is to adhere to that spec correctly. We do, and we get it checked and we give all SDK users access to that data (so no, you don't have to go out via EXR, but if you are outputting an a file with ACES colour space, that is the specified file format format for use with ACES files).

We had discovered that some 3rd parties were "rolling their own" ACES output from R3Ds and getting it wrong. So yes, their math was wrong. Ours which we check with the inventors of ACES at the Academy was right. This is always a problem for camera manufactures because as soon as the data leaves our camera and leaves our software, we have no control over it. All we can do, once informed of an issue as we were (thanks Geoff Boyle) is to act on it, and work with the 3rd parties (which we did and they did - thanks) to ensure that they properly use the SDK, which they now do.

Graeme
 
Thanks for the update Graeme.

So does that mean everything should be good to go as of today, or that the 3rd party software (Resolve?) hasn't updated to the new SDK so it's still funky? I feel like that's been the case for months now (years with MX).

Conversely, how come the 3rd party "roll-your-own" outputs were working perfectly with most other cameras? It's math, and I understand it can be difficult to get perfectly right, but it's also super easy to tell if it's wrong (visually), so why would they ship it? Regardless of it being "fixed" on RED's end, the fact that it hasn't been implemented yet (or rather, *may* have been implemented, but no one was made aware) is very frustrating from an end-user standpoint. And again, is it the same with MX or is only Dragon getting the fixes?
 
I checked the latest release of Resolve with their team and it's now to spec and at least the conversion of R3D to ACES is correct.

Why would a 3rd party not check with myself or the Academy? I have no idea. Had they done so they would have discovered their mistake. Maybe it's because the ACES RRT/ODT has been such a moving target that you don't know if what you're seeing is wrong because the RRT/ODT has a bug in it, or because the source file is created wrong? It's easy enough to think you're doing something right when you're not, and as a 3rd party has numerous cameras to support for ACES, all with different methods of working, I'm not surprised mistakes were made. The important thing is that when I'm made aware of the mistakes, we've actively worked with the 3rd parties to ensure they're working correctly.

The SDK supports all our cameras properly, MX, Dragon, original RED One. Any 3rd party app that supports the SDK (and uses it to get ACES data) will get it correctly for all our cameras.

Graeme
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top