Dragon vs Alexa

[Tommaso Alvisi]

the "highlight roll off" mentioned here has not only to do with the sensor but also with the debayer and the CS used in it... which Arri has the cleanest, resulting in a pretty neutral starting point... when it comes to highlight rendition some say it reminds them of film (of the available digital sensors)...

Dragon is great, but u can get (selective) contamination and fringing if u look closely and start bending the image quite a bit... this is more apparent under artificial, non-high quality lighting...

Helium is advertising better, cleaner color... we shall see now ! ALL HAIL RED !!!! ;-)))))

Great summary Mike, I agree.

 

[Brad Grimm]

Since the debayer process is done after shooting Red, couldn't Red improve the processing algorithms of R3Ds for the SDK?

They are, going to be released in a few weeks.

 

[Mike Nagel]

Since the debayer process is done after shooting Red, couldn't Red improve the processing algorithms of R3Ds for the SDK?

I can only imagine, this is what Graeme is working on every single day...... and has improved many times over the years, just look at the latest approach with RWG...

the sensor capture itself will ultimately put a limit on what is doable, but debayer and CS are major factors... this is why it's also so interesting what PV is doing, cooking up their own spin on it...

Cioni and crew at Light Iron/PV know RED footage inside out, they're very good... they've been one of the few post houses who have output stellar images from RED footage... will be interesting to see if they can squeeze a substantial difference out of the same sensor, hopefully this was not just a marketing thingy

just from a POV... it's one thing being the chief engineer at RED (Graeme)... and I'm sure he has a lot of test footage... but he's NOT a colorist and he does not go through the full post pipeline with real world, real production RED footage... Cioni and crew do this every day and have for years... they see patterns and repeating problems/issues in RED footage day in/out shot by some of the best DP's on the planet... and they know what the bar is to match it to, as they grade film and Alexa also every day... so them cooking up some tailored medicine is interesting...

they have stated (at Cinegear) that u could get there with grading, this will just make it easier better right off the get go - so faster turnaround and the DP sees more likely what he's expecting... and the custom OLPF may add additional magic.... we'll see.

with Arri though - credit where credit is due - they've put out stellar images from day one. Not in the xth iteration of CS x years later. This to me, is the major difference for the majority of professionals.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

They are, going to be released in a few weeks.

I'm just hoping it's not specifically tailored for Helium though. Right now I'm using RWG for grading, but there's no output LUT ready. A new color science doesn't really matter much if we're gonna use the RWG method, as long as the output LUT isn't mapping to something new.

 

[Tommaso Alvisi]

They are, going to be released in a few weeks.

I think that when they got the first batch of Helium sensors, they met the new animal so they had to tune the CS.

While at it, they just took the chance to further tune the signal processing, especially related to DR.

 

[konrad grant]

The thing is though, once the camera manufacturer measures the absolute DR of the sensor they will arrive at a factual contrast/DR number: full well capacity vs noise floor. That is the fence around your playground. Let's say absolute max contrast is 20 stops.

From here, you can design a image profile where you spread the available DR "as thin as possible" in order to make every stop discernible, i.e. going for max. Or, you can target a more modest DR, let's say 14 stops, and create a image profile that uses the "left over" stops as "roll off" or noise guard.

I can imagine an image profile that hits the whites so gently, that 3 technical stops blend into 1 discernible stop when doing visual tests. Yet, the image going into that last stop might come across as 'creamy'.

I feel personally, that's a little of what's going on here. Had Sony, ARRI, RED, Panasonic, Canon or BMD been given the same sensor, I wouldn't be surprised if we'd see a delta of 2-3 stops in their respective color sciences' depending on the target customer they are developing against. Some aggressive, some more conservative.

And if you want a color science that's more balanced overall, you're surely going to end up with less contrast compared to someone who is fine with allowing one of the color channels peak higher and using that extra luminance to boost DR.

Obviously, these are just my own thoughts on the topic.

and don't forget , the compression system used to record the sensor data is a major factor in what comes out, and to some extend .. what needs/can to be done, technically speaking, to arrive at a robust output image