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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 :)

Helium weird bokeh / clipped highlights (RED tech please look at this)

Tristan Houghton said:
I really do hope the responsiveness of the sensor to specular highlights is looked at or at least explained.

Are these shots on the standard OLPF? I'm ordering the STH in the hope that it settles it a bit.
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Great question about what OLPF...curious myself.
 
I'm intrigued for two reasons, first and foremost the dealings with highlights and secondly I feel like I don't need the extra sensitivity that Helium is providing so the reduction in that area for better highlight control and colour rendition that is a result of that OLPF would be the sweetspot for the majority of my shooting .

Standard never left my dragon and I have a feeling STH won't leave my Helium.
 
Hey Stefan, good to see you on here, you helped shoot the aerials for my IBM spot out on the North West shelf. Good to know you guys have a Helium on hand over that side of the country now!
 
jake blackstone said:
Actually with present set of tools at colorist's disposal it's not easy at all.
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Then use ACES. It's a standardized wide gamut workflow that's already supported with RED.
 
Tristan Houghton said:
Hey Stefan, good to see you on here, you helped shoot the aerials for my IBM spot out on the North West shelf. Good to know you guys have a Helium on hand over that side of the country now!
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Hey Tristan,

loved it and also really good feel in the finished ad and great shoots of yours, good on you! Yeah just replaced the Raven with a Epic-W, love the extra resolution and got some low light stuff coming up :).
I'm 500km offshore again shooting some more Oil and Gas stuff,good food here ;)
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
Then use ACES. It's a standardized wide gamut workflow that's already supported with RED.
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Controlling gamut has nothing to do with any particular workflow. Presently, there are no specific tools for gamut limiting, ACES or no ACES on any platform. As i already said, Baselight V5 specifically addresses this problem. Frankly, I'm not even sure why you had mentioned ACES, as somehow it is being a gamut panacea, because if you read my post, I already explained, that even using a standard ARRI WideGamut color space is still not enough to avoid gamut errors (and no, Log310 is not finalized yet), especially while going from wider color space to a more restrictive one. Some gamut errors are just unavoidable, regardless of the workflow...
 
There are people plenty more clued up than me on here, but from my personal experience. (so prefixed with a healthy IMHO)

ACES has plenty gamut issues, especially with HDR based CG work. In colour science the size of the primaries do make a difference to how the math works. Too large and things start falling apart. There's a good example of the extreme version of this if you google 'unbounded RGB'. The original ACES was an archiving colourspace, not working, hence AP1.

However the issue is less about having a native colourspace to represent a source image and more to do with how you massage that into a display space for your audience. Posting JPGs here immediately puts you in a narrow sRGB/709 space and this bugs me because i think some people miss that point. This is a perfectly valid way of looking at things but to map from one large colourspace to a smaller one means compromising the image. There's no such thing as a perfect gamut remap, unless you count desaturating the whole image universally (i.e looking at a wide colourspace on a narrow display space) but as soon as you saturate that to your liking i bet there are edge colours that push outside the gamut and therefore what do you do, clip them? remap the whole area of colour? It's a creative but difficult to control choice.

So comparing in this way is really comparing gamut mapping approaches, not necessarily the camera originals.

So AFAIK what Graeme is working on would be the best way to map the wide native space to 709. Is that correct?

As Jake mentioned, the native Sony Red has caused me personally more headaches then anything else with early RAW workflows. Creating negative green results in Resolve et al when working in 709. Most consumer/prosumer workflows fail dismally - adobe et al - because of this.

I will have to check out the film light remapping though!

cheers
Paul
 
Josiah Duncan said:
Some incredible shots there Jason. Which OLPF did you go with? If that's STH I might have to add to my order...
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Thanks Josiah, I used only standard OLPF. I have tried the STH, and it does indeed improve skin tones but I really like playing with standard overall
 
Jason, how are you handling your heighlights as I'm seeing a massive difference from dragon.

Even with widegamma and log310 I'm still getting oversaturated clipping in areas that Dragon would just eat up.

If I expose for protecting the highlights I'm pretty much rendering everything else severely underexposed in the frame. Is it just me or is the response to these highlights remind you of early digital?
 
Tristan, you are not alone...

That's why I choose to use Skintone Highlight OLPF, or Variants like the Kippertie with Helium.

This is a VERY sensitive sensor, as such, I think it's between 2000 and 3200 native sensitivity (using standard OLPF)
 
Highlights still looked clipped. Lets see what the new color science would do. DRAGON still looks better overall.

It might be sensitive, but pushing the ISO higher, clips the highlights badly not as gracefully as DRAGON or ALEXA.

New color science may help? I still think there is a reason a DRAGON sensor flavor is still available :)

So lets say if we don't want these practicals to clip, we have to use more lights on subject to make the highlights look better, or maybe underexpose subject by 2-3 stops to make the highlights look bearable. Need someone to test is more extensively and without bias!
 
Thanks for your feedback Dan, I have the STH on order so fingers crossed that helps handle the highlights better!

Was starting to think I lost my shit.
 
Tristan Houghton said:
Asif are you rocking the STH olpf on a Helium?
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I was there when Jason was testing (me...fly on the wall).

Again, someone needs to test this properly and extensively, Im prepping for a test start of Dec, with multiple cameras (including EPIC-W, Mini, Dragon, Weapon CF Dragon, SXT, F55 and maybe the new Canon C700) I will make a point of testing the REDs with different OLPFs as well on a modern and vintage lenses focusing mainly on roll offs as thats what I really care about myself. As for these highlights I am keenly waiting to see how much the color science helps or would we all be working with workarounds and different OLPFs...
 
I think you should not judge helium before the new color science is in place. Simply the camera creates a color pile that is larger than whats possible to fit within the current colorspaces. So when trying to transform that pile into the currents spaces you are most likely getting lot of errors. From what I have seen RWG and the luts that are in process looks very promising. Before those are completely finalised, out and available I would say you are basically shooting with a camera that is early beta in terms of color rendition.

How ever it´s easy to see that helium got better light sensitivity and a greater DR then any other red camera to date and it also stands rather tall next to any other camera in those regards. With that in mind I´m pretty sure that even if it takes some more time, the issues that you see are very much something that will be solved and result will, I have no doubt, be rather smashing good.

So the only thing, I think, could have been done a bit differently is the release of helium, possibly RED could communicated all this a bit better. Simply saying the camera is in a quite early phase and things will improve those that want to jump on it please do, those that want to wait until it´s ready don't.

I Remember when we bought our Epic M it was delivered with no screen or such. Only a brain, mags and AC adapter and the camera did not have playback or sound. Still it was huge for us to get our hands on such thing, even though the full functionality and accessories trickled in much later. Simply at that time there where nothing like it. Today things are a bit different, weapon 6k is a quite similar and quite capable camera. Sure the helium has the upper hand on resolution and light sensitivity and cleaner image and all that. But for the most part people will do fine with the weapon so now when getting helium the tolerance for early errors is much lower I guess.

The good thing about these color rendition glitches are that they are all related to post capture processing. So what you shoot today you atleast can go back to when the real sauce is cooked and ready and then it will most likely look very pleasing. So the only worry is if you shoot now and deliver sooner rather than later. Then in such case keep an eye on the highlights and make sure you can eak out a likeable picture before you move on to the next setup.

But if anyone of you guys that got your heliums have second thoughts don't hesitate to call... I can take it of your hands and you can have my weapon in return :)
 
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