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Highest usable ISO on RED Scarlet

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Devon Music

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I was talking to a friend who has the Scarlet and I know it mainly comes down to personal preference, but whats the absolute highest usable ISO setting?

I've gotten barely usable shots at 1250 on a Canon 7D type body camera.

Does anyone have any test footage graded, ungraded, denoised, downscaled to 2k etc...?


Thanks
 
I don't go above 1250 unless I'm prepared to de-noise in post.

That's my personal limit.
 
I know it's epic, but I don't don't mind pushing it a stop to 1600. I used to try and avoid anything over 1280, but I did a months shoot with a c300 and sort of forgot and shot a bunch of stuff at 1600 and it looked great. That doesn't mean you can shot at 1600 and underexpose and get decent results. Light it right and make it look good and it will be fine.

Nick
 
I like shooting at 1280, noise starts getting noticeable at 1600.
 
There is no set number.

The acceptance varies from person to person, dp to dp, VFX guy to VFX guy.

I have seen ISO 2000 be plenty acceptable, and even give the image a pleasing texture.
I have used ISO 2500 before and been fine with it. I can see someone using 3200 in certain situations.
There have also been times where ISO 1250 was not working for the image.
So it can change on a per shot basis.

In doors, out doors, Daylight , Tungsten so on and so on.

Your very best bet is to test, try, view and test again to see how you feel about it.

Luis
 
In this excellent article about exposure, from the RED web site, they state they following:

"For most scenes and uses, exposing with an ISO of 640-2000 strikes the best balance between highlight protection and low image noise. If one ventures outside this range, exposure needs to be much more precisely controlled, and has much less margin for error."

Here's the article in full:

http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/exposure-with-red-cameras
 
I find that you can push the ISO fairly high if your image isn't massively underexposed before the ISO boost. So, for example, if your shadow goalpost is registering only a 1/4 of the way up, I find that you can push the ISO up to 2000 and still get acceptable results. That said, if you're shadow goalpost is 3/4 full, boosting the ISO to even 1280 will be too noisy (it basically just amplifies the noise in the massively under exposed areas). Makes sense too.

A few weeks ago I did a naturally lit night-time bonfire test shot while the full moon was out. What I found was the amount of light being thrown on the background landscape by the moon was just enough to keep the shadow noise at bay and I could really push the ISO without it killing my image. I pushed it to ISO2500 and it was perceptibly cleaner than "more underexposed" stuff I've shot that only needed ISO1600. If I had recorded to an SDI/HDMI off board recorder, I would be comfortable going to ISO3200.
 
Seems to work fine at higher ISO's with lighter skin subjects, but I have a really hard time with dark skin subjects and higher ISO's. The noise really seems apparent then.
 
The noise also depends on color temperature. With daylight you get more signal in the blue channel and can go to higher ISOs than with tungsten.
 
Noel R. said:
Seems to work fine at higher ISO's with lighter skin subjects, but I have a really hard time with dark skin subjects and higher ISO's. The noise really seems apparent then.
Click to expand...

Absolutely. In the example i posted earlier, i had her use practically white makeup. It really helps in low light.
 
800

I usually stick to 320 or 640

I have worked with old school DP who treat it like film never really trust the monitor but a meter and he used 250 EXT and 500 INT all amazing results
 
320 looks cleaner. 800 if you want to protect the highlights. 800 pretty much forces you to stop down a bit in bright light situations which keeps you from clipping RAW data, but seems to have a little more noise, still clean, but not as clean as 320.
 
Keeping it at 320 also means you are allocating far more of the exposure range to the shadow half of the frame. At 800, it means you are seeing your grey point lower, and making the exposure above and below grey equal.
 
This info is good and what I've been looking for. So given the consensus is anywhere from 320-500ISO for a clean image, and 800ISO ok too and even as high up as 1600... how would one go about shooting with streetlight lamp lighting in the neighbourhood of 6400ISO @ f2.8?
 
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