DRAGON vs EPIC MX Noise - NOT GOOD

[David Battistella]

To me, the shot at f4.0 should have no noise at all, none... Nothing is crushed, the noise bar is empty, yet there is noise... This is not right at all...

Youre re talking from the r3d yeah? Not those stills in the post.

Battistella

 

[Neil Dearman]

this scares me cause right now people are having issues with just working with the footage!!!! Now the MX is doing better too man i hope RED fixes this issue

 

[Martin Stevens]

Whatever the RED Engineers do to address this problem, I for one love having lots of highlight latitude above middle gray
when the Dragon is set and exposed at 800 ISO.

So whatever the fix is, please do not take away the highlight latitude
that has been gained with the new OLPF and new color science etc.

I need a film replacement and film has fantastic highlight latitude and not the best shadow detail if you get my meaning.

 

[Matt Ryan]

Youre re talking from the r3d yeah? Not those stills in the post.

Battistella

yup

I know how to process footage lol. Switch to Redgamma 4 and tell me you don't see noise...

Look at the R3D yourself and you will see...

Even dropping ISO to 250 still shows some noise (although much less for obvious reasons..)

 

[Brian Boyer]

Whatever the RED Engineers do to address this problem, I for one love having lots of highlight latitude above middle gray
when the Dragon is set and exposed at 800 ISO.

So whatever the fix is, please do not take away the highlight latitude
that has been gained with the new OLPF and new color science etc.

I need a film replacement and film has fantastic highlight latitude and not the best shadow detail if you get my meaning.

Word.

 

[David Battistella]

yup

The second one is what my eye actually saw. That one is exactly representative of how the room was lit. It's probably how the shot wouldbe graded.

Battistella

 

[David Battistella]

What hat about split the difference? I doubt that would be a compromise. The hard clipping seems to be totally gone anyway.

Battistella

Whatever the RED Engineers do to address this problem, I for one love having lots of highlight latitude above middle gray
when the Dragon is set and exposed at 800 ISO.

So whatever the fix is, please do not take away the highlight latitude
that has been gained with the new OLPF and new color science etc.

I need a film replacement and film has fantastic highlight latitude and not the best shadow detail if you get my meaning.

 

[Phil Holland]

I will have a post this week about certain concepts and this one is something I've been working on for a few months now. Lots of testing going on behind the scenes.


Long and the short, Red has targeted a similar logic in regards to image noise in relationship to how it is handled with film grain and texture. Though it is cleaner at comparable sensitivities.

 

[Isaac Marchionna]

The dynamic range so far has been awesome, I hope they can resolve the noise issue without forcing a recall.

Either way, looks like we've identified an issue, at this point I'm glad to hear RED has identified and agreed with said issue, and now we're just waiting on a solution.

 

[Matt Ryan]

The second one is what my eye actually saw. That one is exactly representative of how the room was lit. It's probably how the shot wouldbe graded.

Battistella

Still some noise though right? It's been a while since I shot MX but I don't remember it being noisy in similar conditions.

 

[Logan Smith 2]

Been having the same issue with my dragon. This is a 150% crop from a test shot. Turned up the brightness and contrast so you can see the noise better otherwise it's Dragoncolor and RedLogFilm straight out of camera. I don't think there was that much actual clipping. It's the latest firmware, ISO 800, 5:1 6k 1/48 23.98FPS having just blackshaded. Even without me tweaking the brightness and contrast the noise was very noticeable with a distinct red coloration that seems to appear not just in clipped blacks but anything dark.

Here's the same still straight out of camera, DragonColor, RedLogFilm, no tweaking.

 

[Adrian Weinbrecht]

This thread is very interesting and at first very disconcerting. It's reassuring that Red have acknowledged what's going on.

Here's an interesting look at the Red Dragon posted recently, Dale McCready mentions how clean the image is. They are looking at Raw on a 5DIII, 35mm film and the Dragon. This appears to be a test for Atlantis Season 2. The dragon is rated at 800iso and look beautiful across all the tones.

http://www.redsharknews.com/product...i-with-magic-lantern-raw,-red-dragon-and-film

Could this be the old OLPF ? The candle looks great.......

 

[Matt Ryan]

This thread is very interesting and at first very disconcerting. It's reassuring that Red have acknowledged what's going on.

Here's an interesting look at the Red Dragon posted recently, Dale McCready mentions how clean the image is. They are looking at Raw on a 5DIII, 35mm film and the Dragon. This appears to be a test for Atlantis Season 2. The dragon is rated at 800iso and look beautiful across all the tones.

http://www.redsharknews.com/product...i-with-magic-lantern-raw,-red-dragon-and-film

Could this be the old OLPF ? The candle looks great.......

That is with the old olpf...

Everyone talked about how clean Dragon was with old olpf, not so much anymore...

 

[David Battistella]

Still some noise though right? It's been a while since I shot MX but I don't remember it being noisy in similar conditions.

Hard to say. Yes, but a different quality. For example, when zooming in at full to an MX r3d you could zoom and zoom and it would never "break", you'd never see compression or pixel noise, whereas on dragon (this version) you do. You can start to see jaggies, green and red pixels, or "clumpy" noise but you'd never see that on an MX r3d. I don't think I saw it on any previously posted dragon stuff except at extremes, real extremes.

So, I'm confused as well and the closest MX or dragon to me is most likely many miles away.

Battistella

i beg toia to post a few r3d's to see if its all that different or if we are just pixel peeping geeks.

 

[Eric Haase]

Just to reiterate- I'm looking at the noise in the 0-13 IRE range at ISO 800. I am NOT looking at lifted blacks or digging information out where there is none. I am not interested in cranking the ISO to 6400 or noise in black areas of the frame. I see more noise in Dragon at ISO 800 than MX at 800 in this tonal range which I hoped would be cleaner on Dragon. I would even settle for MX identical noise in this tonal range.

 

[Charles Bergquist]

As a feature of the upgrade the Dragon at 2000ISO should look the same as Epic at 800ISO, correct?

 

[David Battistella]

As a feature of the upgrade the Dragon at 2000ISO should look the same as Epic at 800ISO, correct?

it does. You have to have enough light in the first place. Once things are initially properly exposed it's amazing how much you can push things around. Underexposed images push the noise the same way. Just like film.

Battistella

 

[Ivan McCullough]

I shot some night exteriors at 4k ana on a redone MX at 2000iso. It was dark, night scene, but there was 'enough' light for the scene. One of my favorite scenes, (look wise),in the movie.

What I have seen so far of Dragon in terms of 2000iso being the new 800iso.... ummm, for me thats a stretch....and thats being kind.

 

[HD Hildebrand]

Wow, this thread is kind of freaking me out. I'm scheduled to ship my Epic in tomorrow for the upgrade. Part of me really wants to wait this out a bit.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

just to add, getting similar noise here. Recently upgraded to Dragon, did a test of Dragon and an MX epic, I upgraded both to current firmware and blackshaded both. Below is a side by side blow-up of a detail- Dragon shot 6KHD with 50mm RPP and Epic-x shot with 35mm 5KHD and physically closer to match frame sizes. Blow up shows more detail in Dragon, but also more noise.....

That left image looks SUPER compressed. Like 15:1 vs the Dragon's more lightly compressed image.