Image scaling in weapon?

[Michael Dalton]

I was wondering with the addition of proress are we going to see scaling of the sensor image in Weapon. I'd love the option to be able to record none essential in a reduced size in weapon. As excited as I am about 8k, I do a lot of things with hosts etc that I'd love to shoot 4 or 5 k without worrying about crop factors.

 

[Eric Haase]

I was wondering with the addition of proress are we going to see scaling of the sensor image in Weapon. I'd love the option to be able to record none essential in a reduced size in weapon. As excited as I am about 8k, I do a lot of things with hosts etc that I'd love to shoot 4 or 5 k without worrying about crop factors.

When Epic was first announced, RED had published a spec for being able to record downscaled R3D. That is, you could shoot 5K downscaled to 1080 but it would record an R3D file. Obviously it never happened but I thought it would be a great option for productions who normally just downscale to 1080 anyway and don't need to resize or recompose but still want the great advantages of RAW. I'd still love to see this happen. A 6K downscaled to 2K R3D in camera would be fantastic for commercial production. A lot less data but still great image quality and DR from the raw file.

 

[Michael Dalton]

exactly. We can window into a sensor, but theres no point, as you can do it in post. A down converted image would be higher quality. I often am away from power for a week or so, and so copying data is an issue. It would be nice to save where I need too. I realize this is probably a processing issue in epic, but hopefully we'll have it in Weapon.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

RED cut scaling because Graeme correctly pointed out something to the effect of "There are better ways to compress an image than a bayer pattern." If you want a smaller image it's theoretically better to just shoot at a higher compression ratio and let a codec intelligently throw away detail than to scale down an image.

In practice though I find that a lightly compressed ProRes can look way better and have less artifacts than an equivalent file size high resolution RAW bayer image because of the motion artifacts that can emerge in the highly compressed RAW image. But that just tells me that there needs to be alternative REDCode modes for those of us who would prefer a drop in resolved detail in exchange for fewer artifacts.

 

[Eric Haase]

I'm willing to bet the majority of RED footage ends up getting scaled down to 1080 for delivery. REDCINE scales, Davinci Resolve scales. Is the camera not capable of doing scaling to the same quality as these applications?

It's great to have 6K and we take advantage of the ability to crop and resize on so many projects. But there are some where the data becomes an unnecessary beast. Would be great to have a 2KHD scaled RED RAW mode. Still a little wiggle room for cropping with all the other benefits of RED RAW and less the drawback of the large file size. Not every project needs to finish at 4K or be future proof.

 

[Phil Holland]

Scaling is also not part of the "raw" mentality. Additionally, there are "many ways" to scale footage. Many of the methods you can explore now through the Export Tab in REDCINE-X Pro upon export.

Image scaling is obviously coming to Weapon in the form of ProRes 2K from whatever your capture resolution is. That's what we know today. Makes me wonder which algorithm(s) Weapon will use for that process actually.