Hasselblad vs RED Epic for stills.

[Patrick Miller]

Hasselblad is a lot sharper full size as you can see from the pictures posted in this thread and on the website. And this was only 22mp Hasseblad. This is like comparing 5D video to EPIC video. EPIC still frame might be good enough for small pictures and internet, but it's not good enough for larger pictures and obviously you want to future proof your shots so Hasselblad is the only choise for pro's with its monster sensors like the 60mp model. It's pretty funny that now it somehow doesn't matter that Hasseblad has a lot sharper stills and some of you are saying you can easily use inferior EPIC stills for photography work, but then anything else than EPIC for video SUCKS because you must have the best quality possible. Seriously. Slow down with the fanboyism a little. It eats your credibility badly.

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Hasselblad is a lot sharper full size as you can see from the pictures posted in this thread and on the website. And this was only 22mp Hasseblad. This is like comparing 5D video to EPIC video. EPIC still frame might be good enough for small pictures and internet, but it's not good enough for larger pictures and obviously you want to future proof your shots so Hasselblad is the only choise for pro's with its monster sensors like the 60mp model. It's pretty funny that now it somehow doesn't matter that Hasseblad has a lot sharper stills and some of you are saying you can easily use inferior EPIC stills for photography work, but then anything else than EPIC for video SUCKS because you must have the best quality possible. Seriously. Slow down with the fanboyism a little. It eats your credibility badly.

Nice first post!


Of course you are right, if pixels were all that counted.

Which you obviousy agree with me that isn't the case...

 

[Christopher Barrett]

I would agree that some things are more important than pixel count... a little test of my own posted a while back. Eyes on the hilights, please...

Phase One P65+

Epic

 

[Rob Ruffo]

I would agree that some things are more important than pixel count... a little test of my own posted a while back. Eyes on the hilights, please...

Phase One P65+

Epic

yes, near-clip skin renders a lot creamier on Epic. in the same manner. Red One MX was also good, better than a 5D.

 

[Iain Philpott]

Hasselblad is a lot sharper full size as you can see from the pictures posted in this thread and on the website. And this was only 22mp Hasseblad. This is like comparing 5D video to EPIC video. EPIC still frame might be good enough for small pictures and internet, but it's not good enough for larger pictures and obviously you want to future proof your shots so Hasselblad is the only choise for pro's with its monster sensors like the 60mp model. It's pretty funny that now it somehow doesn't matter that Hasseblad has a lot sharper stills and some of you are saying you can easily use inferior EPIC stills for photography work, but then anything else than EPIC for video SUCKS because you must have the best quality possible. Seriously. Slow down with the fanboyism a little. It eats your credibility badly.

Under normal circumstances I would agree with you. However my 14 year old son's world revolves around instantaneous communication and, sadly, lo res. 'Stills' as we know it are dead in the water. Whatever way you call it - it's his generation we will cater for - he does not even watch telly - he watches it 'on demand') Middle aged people and art students are hanging onto print & hi-res by their fingernails. I shoot a film next week (I'm sorry but I can't say who it's for - UK major department store) that is the start of their TOTAL removal of 'stills' from their national store chain. It will take two years (I think it will be five) but the line in the sand has been drawn. There will always be room for stills but - motion on plasma screens will be the new 'Box Brownie'

 

[Rob Ruffo]

Under normal circumstances I would agree with you. However my 14 year old son's world revolves around instantaneous communication and, sadly, lo res. 'Stills' as we know it are dead in the water. Whatever way you call it - it's his generation we will cater for - he does not even watch telly - he watches it 'on demand') Middle aged people and art students are hanging onto print & hi-res by their fingernails. I shoot a film next week (I'm sorry but I can't say who it's for - UK major department store) that is the start of their TOTAL removal of 'stills' from their national store chain. It will take two years (I think it will be five) but the line in the sand has been drawn. There will always be room for stills but - motion on plasma screens will be the new 'Box Brownie'

But an Ipad is 2K... Surely your son expects more from pro photography than the snappys he takes of his mates. People have always taken snappys.

 

[Ketch Rossi]

I would agree that some things are more important than pixel count... a little test of my own posted a while back. Eyes on the hilights, please...

Phase One P65+

Epic

Good one, and this was the exact same reason why I sacrificed Pixel count when I stopped using the 1Ds III, and also sold both my Hasselblad and Mamiya MF bodies in favor of the EPIC...

 

[Mark Toia]

Very interesting comparison that Peter Hurley did over at Lee Morris's F Stoppers. Obviously there is a native resolution difference, ( 14.4 vs 22mpix ) but the results are worth watching.

http://fstoppers.com/hasselblad-vs-red

Hate to say it Jarred....

But you guys need a heap of these floating around the web....

Cheap, amazing testimonials from guys at the top of there game.... shot and edited well... and those will beat any form of print or TV advertising campaigns.

I thought this was a good watch... Re-edit it to about 60seconds long and post it ! )))

PS.. Just sent this to a hi level photography mate of mine... and he's just text me back, saying he's coming over to test one of mine.. and I dare say, 5 minutes of him playing with it, he will order one.

The power of web videos, Can't beat it.

 

[Hywel Phillips]

I use a Hasselblad (H3Dii-31) for stills and now a Scarlet for motion. Both are excellent tools, but the workflow and ergonomics of each are targeted at their specialities. Being able to pull decent stills from a video stream is fine, but it doesn't mean it is the right way to do it for everything. I can well see that if you are shooting motorsport it might be a godsend but for narrative stills like I shoot, it isn't ideal as I need to pick the exact moment to tell the story best. You can make 31 megapixel stop motion movies with the Hasselblad, too, but that doesn't mean it is the best workflow for your project.

As others have said, strobes are still the gold standard for many stills lighting application. I can carry enough light to overpower direct sunlight and do full softbox three point lighting on location... out of a back-pack. And shoot from batteries for hours. Try doing that with HMI!

But it puzzles me that no-one has mentioned the fact that what goes in FRONT of the camera should be different if you shooting stills or moving pictures.

In a single still frame, for example, one often wants to remove visual clutter. The viewer is likely to examine this single image in considerable depth, and their eye is going to have time to complete a journey around the frame. If there's an extraneous plant pot in the foreground partially obscuring the subject, you'd probably remove it.

If you are shooting a dolly shot that plant pot in the foreground should be PLACED be there for a very specific reason- to key the viewer's eye in to the parallax created by the dolly move. What would count as distracting clutter in the still becomes an integral, necessary part of the technique for shooting a moving picture. Instead of having time to rove around the frame, the viewer gets 1/25th of a second, and it is the movement and differences between frames that now catch the eye.

That's a basic example to show that stills and moving pictures have a different visual vocabulary. They are constructed differently.

Also, models are not actors and actors are not models. Although many people can do both with some aplomb, the skills set and performance requirements are simply different.

For stills, my models move from pose to pose as a series of staccato images each designed to capture an elegant moment, and tell the relevant part of the story in a single instant. If you film that on video, it doesn't look like an actor performing a scene from a movie, it looks like a model posing. Likewise, if you get your model to perform as if she was in a movie, you lack the necessary ability to control her pose as you compose shots- you often need to shift position, get down on the floor, climb a ladder, or do any number of similar things to get a good composition for a still, by which time an actor would have finished peforming the scene entirely.

I tell stories with single frame stills and stories with stills sequences (50-ish shots) and stories with moving pictures. The decision as to which of those I'm shooting is the very first one we make, because it informs every production decision thereafter.

Cheers, Hywel

 

[Ketch Rossi]

I use a Hasselblad (H3Dii-31) for stills and now a Scarlet for motion. Both are excellent tools, but the workflow and ergonomics of each are targeted at their specialities. Being able to pull decent stills from a video stream is fine, but it doesn't mean it is the right way to do it for everything. I can well see that if you are shooting motorsport it might be a godsend but for narrative stills like I shoot, it isn't ideal as I need to pick the exact moment to tell the story best. You can make 31 megapixel stop motion movies with the Hasselblad, too, but that doesn't mean it is the best workflow for your project.

As others have said, strobes are still the gold standard for many stills lighting application. I can carry enough light to overpower direct sunlight and do full softbox three point lighting on location... out of a back-pack. And shoot from batteries for hours. Try doing that with HMI!

But it puzzles me that no-one has mentioned the fact that what goes in FRONT of the camera should be different if you shooting stills or moving pictures.

In a single still frame, for example, one often wants to remove visual clutter. The viewer is likely to examine this single image in considerable depth, and their eye is going to have time to complete a journey around the frame. If there's an extraneous plant pot in the foreground partially obscuring the subject, you'd probably remove it.

If you are shooting a dolly shot that plant pot in the foreground should be PLACED be there for a very specific reason- to key the viewer's eye in to the parallax created by the dolly move. What would count as distracting clutter in the still becomes an integral, necessary part of the technique for shooting a moving picture. Instead of having time to rove around the frame, the viewer gets 1/25th of a second, and it is the movement and differences between frames that now catch the eye.

That's a basic example to show that stills and moving pictures have a different visual vocabulary. They are constructed differently.

Also, models are not actors and actors are not models. Although many people can do both with some aplomb, the skills set and performance requirements are simply different.

For stills, my models move from pose to pose as a series of staccato images each designed to capture an elegant moment, and tell the relevant part of the story in a single instant. If you film that on video, it doesn't look like an actor performing a scene from a movie, it looks like a model posing. Likewise, if you get your model to perform as if she was in a movie, you lack the necessary ability to control her pose as you compose shots- you often need to shift position, get down on the floor, climb a ladder, or do any number of similar things to get a good composition for a still, by which time an actor would have finished peforming the scene entirely.

I tell stories with single frame stills and stories with stills sequences (50-ish shots) and stories with moving pictures. The decision as to which of those I'm shooting is the very first one we make, because it informs every production decision thereafter.

Cheers, Hywel

Need to agree while disagreeing strongly with you Hywel,

I prefer much more Continuos lighting then I ever did Strobes, and even before selling my Hassy HD3-40 and Mamiya, I had already but dropped al together flashes.

As far as making my models become actresses, its all in the direction, and fortunately so far I have been able to pul amazing poses, in fact way more then ever before with stills, the flexibility and choices I get are so overwhelmingly great, that I will never go back to Still Photography, but I do want the EPIC 645...

Only thing that I do really dislike is my post workflow, so much footage to go thru, that it becomes really hard to do it alone, and need an assistant, a good one, to go thru the images and get the very best and sharpest images for each set of poses.

Other then that, I much prefer and love and appreciate the higher quality of the Cinema Glass vs. what even the best still glass has to offer.

Obviously been able to shoot 96/120 frames per second instead of 1 frame every second and a half, has lots of advantages, only disadvantages?


Time to post process the massive amount of frames been the first.

SORAGE been the second, as cost doesn't mean much to me.


Each wil place this two by preference and economics either first or second.


This is me, to each its own...

 

[Lee Saxon]

Under normal circumstances I would agree with you. However my 14 year old son's world revolves around instantaneous communication and, sadly, lo res. 'Stills' as we know it are dead in the water. Whatever way you call it - it's his generation we will cater for - he does not even watch telly - he watches it 'on demand').

I don't think anyone disagrees with you, I think they're saying "we're not there yet."

To compare it to the digital revolution in stills that happened about a decade earlier :

I think of the big bulky Red One like the Kodak-modified-Nikon-film-SLR frankenrigs of the late 90s.

I think of Epic/Scarlet as the Nikon D1, the first legitimate, integrated, useful package that makes it practical. But it was very much an experiment ahead of its time. The sensor technology wasn't really ready for what Nikon wanted it to do, the workflow-related companies hadn't caught up to what Nikon wanted to do, etc.

I pre-ordered a D1x the instant it was announced, and then the D2x the instant it was announced, and the same with the D700. It wasn't until the D700 that technology matured to the point that I didn't feel the need to replace it the instant I had that option.

I'm waiting for Red's "D700."

 

[Rob Ruffo]

I use a Hasselblad (H3Dii-31) for stills and now a Scarlet for motion. Both are excellent tools, but the workflow and ergonomics of each are targeted at their specialities. Being able to pull decent stills from a video stream is fine, but it doesn't mean it is the right way to do it for everything. I can well see that if you are shooting motorsport it might be a godsend but for narrative stills like I shoot, it isn't ideal as I need to pick the exact moment to tell the story best. You can make 31 megapixel stop motion movies with the Hasselblad, too, but that doesn't mean it is the best workflow for your project.

As others have said, strobes are still the gold standard for many stills lighting application. I can carry enough light to overpower direct sunlight and do full softbox three point lighting on location... out of a back-pack. And shoot from batteries for hours. Try doing that with HMI!

But it puzzles me that no-one has mentioned the fact that what goes in FRONT of the camera should be different if you shooting stills or moving pictures.

In a single still frame, for example, one often wants to remove visual clutter. The viewer is likely to examine this single image in considerable depth, and their eye is going to have time to complete a journey around the frame. If there's an extraneous plant pot in the foreground partially obscuring the subject, you'd probably remove it.

If you are shooting a dolly shot that plant pot in the foreground should be PLACED be there for a very specific reason- to key the viewer's eye in to the parallax created by the dolly move. What would count as distracting clutter in the still becomes an integral, necessary part of the technique for shooting a moving picture. Instead of having time to rove around the frame, the viewer gets 1/25th of a second, and it is the movement and differences between frames that now catch the eye.

That's a basic example to show that stills and moving pictures have a different visual vocabulary. They are constructed differently.

Also, models are not actors and actors are not models. Although many people can do both with some aplomb, the skills set and performance requirements are simply different.

For stills, my models move from pose to pose as a series of staccato images each designed to capture an elegant moment, and tell the relevant part of the story in a single instant. If you film that on video, it doesn't look like an actor performing a scene from a movie, it looks like a model posing. Likewise, if you get your model to perform as if she was in a movie, you lack the necessary ability to control her pose as you compose shots- you often need to shift position, get down on the floor, climb a ladder, or do any number of similar things to get a good composition for a still, by which time an actor would have finished peforming the scene entirely.

I tell stories with single frame stills and stories with stills sequences (50-ish shots) and stories with moving pictures. The decision as to which of those I'm shooting is the very first one we make, because it informs every production decision thereafter.

Cheers, Hywel

Your post was a great read. Thank you. Good points.

 

[Antony M]

A half press of the shutter marking a still will go a long way towards addressing his concern of not knowing where the perfect still is. All you would be doing is looking at your marked stills in REDcine-X and moving a few frames to the right or left if it is slightly off.

Great idea Justin. But maybe a user key instead of the record button, so you don't accidentally stop.

Or even better, take advantage of the pre-roll (when it arrives), so that AFTER the model was in the perfect pose, you click the button and get 30 frames of shot.

 

[Ryan Browne]

Fascinating.

I actually had a client ask me AFTER our shoot if they could get some still images for magazine print. It was really nice to be able to go back and give them some relatively high-quality images. When the client was really happy with how they came out, I was extremely happy I had shot everything on the Epic.

 

[Felix K.]

Just watched the video. Interesting. In terms of finding the right frames later... why not record audio on the epic and use something like a clapper board to mark points in time. when you then go through the footage you look at 10 frames around the peak in the audio file and find the magic frames that you wanted... just my 2c...

 

[Alexandros Tsoupras]

Great point, and he didn't need to use that lens either.. Any canon glass would have done well.

+1 on that.

 

[Will Keir]

I tend to agree with Mark on the "word of mouth" advertizing" as opposed to TV/Print media. I'll feel a little less special when a TV commercial for the EPIC comes out.

Hate to say it Jarred....

But you guys need a heap of these floating around the web....

Cheap, amazing testimonials from guys at the top of there game.... shot and edited well... and those will beat any form of print or TV advertising campaigns.

I thought this was a good watch... Re-edit it to about 60seconds long and post it ! )))

PS.. Just sent this to a hi level photography mate of mine... and he's just text me back, saying he's coming over to test one of mine.. and I dare say, 5 minutes of him playing with it, he will order one.

The power of web videos, Can't beat it.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Just watched the video. Interesting. In terms of finding the right frames later... why not record audio on the epic and use something like a clapper board to mark points in time. when you then go through the footage you look at 10 frames around the peak in the audio file and find the magic frames that you wanted... just my 2c...

There is a solution already...

Connect video to a computer or any kind of capture device. Give a "clicker" to the Photographer. Every time he clicks a frame is saved on the device. Later the frames captured can easily be turned into a XML and brought into red cine x pro with any wanted head / tails. Then export Trimmed r3d and let the photographer view his shots with a second of head tail from his snaps.... viola.

 

[Zeb B]

I would agree that some things are more important than pixel count... a little test of my own posted a while back. Eyes on the hilights, please...

Phase One P65+

Epic

HDRx on the Epic shot?

 

[Christopher Barrett]

HDRx on the Epic shot?

Nope.