Full Sensor 2K?

[Arnold F.]

I'm sure this reveals some fundamental sensor ignorance on my part and has probably been discussed before (although I wouldn't know where to look!), but would it, in theory, be possible for a future firmware upgrade to allow one to use the whole sensor for a 2K image and, if so, would it be higher quality than the current 2K and, perhaps, even allow for higher frame rates? That might be three questions.

A related, but different question I have is whether it is possible for an upgrade to allow one to shoot in some flavor of ProRes?

Thank you!

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Well, technically you can use the whole sensor for a 2K image by recording in 4K and making a 2K downsample later.

The other two options would have to be either for the camera to generate a live-debayered 2K RGB signal that could be recorded in-camera (even now, you could record a 1080P RGB image onto an external recorder), or to create a 2K raw file that could be recorded (that doesn't involve sensor cropping) -- the second probably involving pixel binning, which may create certain artifacts. Keep in mind that 2K RGB is more data to record than 4K raw.

 

[Jett He]

Best solution I can think of is the Hyperdeck. You get the full 5k FOV scaled to 1920x1080 in PRO RES!!! Another two pluses are slightly cleaner images and it's quite cheap at under $400.

 

[Roger Valdes]

Scarlet & Epic can't downsample incamera, to save cost on a CPU.
The only option would be lineskipping... i doubt anyone wants that.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

The Scarlet and Epic do debayer and downsample in-camera to 1080P RGB or else you wouldn't have a color picture to view in the eyepiece, it's just that this is not a full debayer (1/2 or 1/4 quality?) as far as I know, and you can't record it to the SSD in some HD codec, you'd have to go to an external device. They could implement what Canon does for sRAW stills I guess, which I think is a simple pixel binning solution, every group of four photosites is combined into one pixel as far as I know... if you started out with 4096 pixels across, you could create 2048 pixels for recording in raw, there is just probably some penalty in increase of chroma moire or something.

 

[Andre W.]

I believe if not mistaken that the proxy module does do ProRes, however I don't know the quality, but if it did like the RED1 with their Proxy files, it could be a solution to your ProRes question.

And I believe that because of the windowing in on the sensor, that's actually what does allow for those higher frame rates, I'm sure that if you used the full sensor, the algorithms that the CPU would have to go through to make your 2K image would put a little tax on the CPU.... just my thoughts

 

[Matthew Scott]

The Scarlet and Epic do debayer and downsample in-camera to 1080P RGB or else you wouldn't have a color picture to view in the eyepiece, it's just that this is not a full debayer (1/2 or 1/4 quality?) as far as I know, and you can't record it to the SSD in some HD codec, you'd have to go to an external device. They could implement what Canon does for sRAW stills I guess, which I think is a simple pixel binning solution, every group of four photosites is combined into one pixel as far as I know... if you started out with 4096 pixels across, you could create 2048 pixels for recording in raw, there is just probably some penalty in increase of chroma moire or something.

I'm pretty sure the output via HDSDI is FULL res debayer.....my side by side comparisons tell me that....in fact, at high ISO's the 422 10-bit output is cleaner than what I can get if I downsampled in post later (no R3D compression).

 

[Tom.Wong]

RED has claimed full debayer, but i would put my money on that it is not as high quality of a debayer than you would get via software or red rocket. I've side by sided the output on my red rocket and switched it back and forth between the camera and the rocket on the same setup and identical shot. the rocket definitely produces a much sharper cleaner image. the camera itself is doing a million processes at once, makes sense that they'd have to use a lesser quality method to get it on the fly like that. i mean, it's doing the downscale faster than rocket can, there's gotta be something going on causing a loss.

and typically, to me all cameras do that in a since. even with an alexa, the image is way different between the 1080 onboard and arriraw downsampled to 1080. in camera scaling just isn't as good as doing it with a computer. which is kind of what the methodology for RED has been from the get go. you can always do it better later, which is why you have a raw, digital negative.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Good to know that the in-camera debayer is full resolution.