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  • 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 :)

Gratuitous Epic Worship

I echo Ian - very surprised.

In strobe photography 'shutter exposure' is not from the camera - its from the strobe itself. When I'm shooting still life I'm shooting s1/200 and my strobe heads are firing off at approx s1/2000.

So long as my camera shutter time envelopes the start and stop time of the strobe head there's no rolling shutter. The strobe itself is the shutter and the modeling light is such low wattage it doesn't come into play. In this respect shooting strobes is like shooting motion - you only work with iso and aperture.

edit: in the above I'm not referring to TTL strobe metering with speedlites. Just straight up strobe heads, camera on manual and wireless triggers.
 
I Bloom said:
Really surprised by this... Is there really no way to shoot Epic with strobes?

IBloom
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The answer is, probably... in studio... sort of. I kind of doubt that you could have consistent and reliable enough results to go this route on high pressure work AND it totally precludes you from capturing motion on the same shoot. This was fun to do, but ...

I will continue to experiment.
 
Actually I think I understand Jim. Its the lack of a physical shutter.
 
Christopher Barrett said:
The answer is, probably... in studio... sort of. I kind of doubt that you could have consistent and reliable enough results to go this route on high pressure work AND it totally precludes you from capturing motion on the same shoot. This was fun to do, but ...

I will continue to experiment.
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This is the biggest deal breaker for me, being I shoot fashion on a day to day, I was excited for scarlet and shooting with my strobes... but now that jim has said no sync I have some serious thinking to do...
 
Perry Wilson said:
This is the biggest deal breaker for me, being I shoot fashion on a day to day, I was excited for scarlet and shooting with my strobes... but now that jim has said no sync I have some serious thinking to do...
Click to expand...

Well, if EPIC can shoot 120FPS that means a read out speed of at least 1/120sec if not quite alot faster - my Broncolor Grafit strobes can output nearly 1600J over 1/80sec T0.1 and 1/240sec T0.5. I know that other older strobes can go down to 1/50sec burn time. All we need is a proper sync signal to avoid lighting up two consecutive half frames. I really would be surprised if it would be technically unfeasible to design the EPIC to work with powerfull studio strobes in some way - problem is with really low output settings as that equals to really low flash durations 1/6000sec on the grafit and 1/20.000 on some light portable flashes. If anyone with an EPIC wishes to try remember to go full output on the flash heads to get the longest flash durations, then work your way down in power to see what is achievable.
The practical "sync" speed of the EPIC will be just longer than the fastest time the full sensor can be read out and if 120fps and 180deg shutter yields 1/240sec it should be achievable with some studio strobes almost out of the box. And there probably is something RED could do to optimize further to give more leeway into flash durations. If scarlet can do 180fps 180deg shutter that is a readout on only 1/360sec - I will find out more when a Scarlet is in my hands.
 
I'm sure RED will get round to it after the urgent stuff is done. And there is a lot of urgent stuff.
After all Christopher Barret proved it can be done and there is a market for it.
 
Jannard said:
Traditional flash sync is not possible with EPIC due to the rolling shutter (doesn't matter how fast the read-reset is). Long duration flashes will be necessary. Since you will be extracting stills from a motion stream, that will require continuous lighting.

DSMC is a change to conventional still photography.

Jim
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That statement is in complete opposition to all that has been said about the Mysterium X sensor : I agree, it is not possible to do a flash sync reasonable with an existing VDSLR, like the 5D II with its rolling shutter taking 1/40s and limiting shutter sync to more than 1/30s.

However, if you can read out 120 images per second, a shutter sync at 1/100s at least is obviously possible ... and quite reasonable for studio work. And with respect to filming with typical exposure times of 1/48s, it is obviously possible to generate a sync signal that allows to force strobes to light full frames.

I thought it was obvious that the Epic and Red One for that matter produce such a sync signal?
 
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