How to get Scarlet 4K HDRX at 24 fps ... my proposed method

[Zach Gray]

What happens when you transition from a dark room to full exterior. The X track would essentially become fully populated, and you would be back to the data rate problem again. As cool as the concept is, I fear that real world shooting would present situations that would break it.

 

[Les Dittert]

I mentioned this condition in my intro post, the possible way to handle the X track becoming 'fully lit up' is to apply the inverse compression skipping to the A track. When you put the result HDR image together, you really only need to pull pixels from one OR the other in the majority of the image area. By overlapping the thresholds used a bit, you will always have some areas with image data from both A and X, as you need to blend in those areas.
This would fully commit you to HDR, there would be no falling back to A track as it has holes as well. But the user would never see these holes, they can be hidden 'under the covers'.

There are other pathological cases that may cause issues, but I would only turn this mode on for the more typical shots needing HDR, such as that blown out window, or other extreme localized contrast scene, as my example video used.

What happens when you transition from a dark room to full exterior. The X track would essentially become fully populated, and you would be back to the data rate problem again. As cool as the concept is, I fear that real world shooting would present situations that would break it.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

I didn't have time to read through the entire thread, but I think you've posted a similar proposal in the past...

With that in mind, the only problem I see is that you're assuming it's computationally easier to 'delete' those bits/pixels below a specific IRE than it is to just record them. In actuality, with the way RAW capture works, this method could potentially require MORE horsepower to do (even though all you're doing is telling the camera "below 50ire = null"). Again, bare in mind I'm looking at it as simplistically as possible, but the Scarlet would have to read/check each and every one of it's 4k pixels to make sure they're below the given IRE before discarding it... With the way RAW works, it'd probably be as easy (maybe easier) to just record it, without having to do said IRE check of each pixel.

Also, the CPU may not be geared for this kind of stuff; RAW is actually easier to process/record than a compressed format like h264 (which actually requires CPU cycles for the compression process.)

Lastly, I think it's safer to assume that RED engineers are fairly smart and have already considered every option (including this one, if it is indeed easier on the camera). At this point, 4k HDRx on the Scarlet is still in-the-works, but RED obviously has bigger fish to fry (like Dragon, getting out of back-order, RCX updates, enabling phantom-power, etc.)

That is sort of what I was getting at, but this sort of pixel deleting is in itself not very processor intensive. There is a mess of processing power in there, they should easily have the capability to change processing style (asci based processing can be set though).

I can definitely say that the Smart Engineer considering every option is not realistic here. The more I find out the more it explains things. I use a piece of widespread best in world software here that has been upgraded maybe hundreds of times with improvements that I suggested, it is a piece of buggy ..... I might like peooke, but I give up suggesting improvements, I could write and manage a team to write something better myself. A lot of top software is poorly designed or buggy rubbish over the years. Real engineers are much better, competent, and thorough, but there is a lot of rubbish there too. You are talking about real people, not usually geniuses, they take their blankness of mind to the job like normal people, and insight is not necessarily perfect or thorough. The volume of work means that Red is great, not necessarily the level of enginuity. I can guess what some of the breakthroughs that Red is up to, and I directly know what the direct competition is up to, because I worked out many of the same things before, and have been around digital cinema camera development, and invited to consult on a few cameras, longer than Red has existed. As the saying goes: You haven't seen anything yet.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Forgot, Les (and others), keep up the good work, it is these little suggestions that can help engineers to think better, and enhance the work.

 

[Pablo Moreno]

By assuming that Red Engineers covered all the possibilities in a red camera is a complete bull@#$% statement.

 

[Vincent Larsson]

Hi!

This is from
http://www.red.com/faqs/scarlet/recording

Any news regarding this:

[h=3]WHY CAN'T I SHOOT 24FPS 4K HDRX?[/h]Data rates and processing power. We are working on a future version of HDRx with modified compression to enable this possibility. It will be a firmware upgrade and free

 

[Mike P.]

I think they aborted this immediately after announcing they were looking into it. Personally, I'd rather 4.5k WS (8.85mp per frame) or a 3240x2700 resolution "full vertical-frame"ANA mode (which would equal 8.8mp per frame), but now that there will be no sensor-only upgrade to Dragon, I get the feeling the writing is on the wall for Scarlet MX development.

 

[Vincent Larsson]

Got this mail today:

"Thank you for contacting RED SUPPORT. RED is constantly working on
improving its products in any way possible. Our engineers are working
around the clock to add extended capabilities to our camera's such as the
SCARLET. Unfortunately we do not have a specific timeline for when this
feature will be added to the SCARLET'S firmware. I'll forward your
feedback to our engineers for further review. Hopefully we can implement
this performance boost very soon. Thank you for supporting RED!"

 

[Andrey B]

Your initial idea is good enough but not for all suitable situations. When you shoot inside the room with windows - it works. When you try to shoot through forest's trees to the sky or through branches or another fullscreen HDRX stuff - your method fails. I think that engineers must be shure that any of the situations can be reprocessed with software without any compromises.

 

[Leland Haushalter]

This sounds very interesting!