Issues

[Fergus Meiklejohn]

Sorry... been busy building lens mounts. What are you guys doing here?

1st off- Offhollywood is shooting ISO 320-400 and says he has NO NOISE. A few others have the same results. Some of you have a LOT of noise. Let's see here. What could be the cause?

I posted long ago that if you were getting a lot of noise, you were doing something wrong. What could those things be?

1- old firmware
2- under exposure
3- non-optimal processing (the most common error)
4- bad sensor (unlikely)

Mark has #6 & #7. He has been keeping up with all the firmware upgrades. He also seems to have shot the most footage (maybe with the exception of Soderbergh). Neither Mark or Soderbergh is complaining of too much noise (just the opposite). This should give us some place to start. It is possible to get clean footage.

Now, on RED's side. We are making a clean image cleaner. We had one customer preview the new stuff and comment "what the hell have you guys done?"! (in a good way).

I think instead of deciding that the camera is too noisy (or not), we should start out by asking the guys who are getting clean results exactly what they are doing to get good results.

We are improving things everyday. So keeping current with firmware upgrades is mandatory. If you are getting noise, it would be helpful to know what build and what you shot. The "chicken scratch" in the blue channel happened under certain circumstances with early builds but was fixed over a month ago. Tungsten will be more noisy than daylight. Big under exposure is not good for noise levels. Processing is critical. It is very easy to add noise depending on your workflow settings.

I stand on RED being a VERY low noise level camera. And getting better everyday. If you are getting a lot of noise, something is wrong somewhere.

Jim

Well done Jim. Let's get it sorted! All this talk is getting people like me worried.. :biggrin:

 

[Rainer Fritz]

. If it is not the camera, it is something.

Jim

jim is right when he says there happens much at post. there are a lot of ways to bring the footage to finishing, but how, thats a extra discussion what will be fine to have. because in my opinion, specially the apple workflow which is on a good way has to become more on quality. for example in color you can go only through 10bit log with dpx to get the highest bit depth and have to get the cineon plugin... there should be a tiff import/export or in minimum REDCODE !
when you color correct with the 3way cc from fcp you getting these horrible stripes in the shadows and look like online quality.
the same when you set a dissolve from black...
low light situations are critical for the cam... when you push the midtones and darken the shadows you will get noise... specially you see it when you compress it the again and also these stripes... look to our material, you can see it often...
yes, at shooting setting light is a key action... but it would be fine to have good results in hard light situations as well...

http://www.redcamservice.eu/redcamservice/herbstrock.html

regards
rainer

 

[zak forrest]

are people striving for noiseless images? or is the noise produced by the camera just really undesirable? i love grainy film images. i am planning on underexposing a lot of red footage, noise doesnt really bother me. if its part of the aesthetic etc and works then why not. but again, my question is, is the noise produced by red different than grain (of course it is, but i mean is it different meaning just undesirable and ugly/never good.. etc? i realize this question is really subjective....

i dont have my cam yet and havent seen many tests or footage at low light levels or corrected from slight underexposure. is there anything like this available? has anyone shot through a car windshield at night down a dark road Fargo style? i took some shots like that last night with a Canon Digital Rebel XTi at ASA 800 at f1.4 and the images were just what I wanted.. I assume the new motherboard Red will be way cleaner and better than an XTi right?

 

[Álex Montoya]

I don't mind noise either as long as it is grain like. The only thing that bothers me is that, when you push the camera footage in post you get some fixed pattern noise that isn't that nice to look at.

I believe they are working on it, though.

 

[zak forrest]

when you push the midtones and darken the shadows you will get noise... specially you see it when you compress it the again and also these stripes... look to our material, you can see it often...
yes, at shooting setting light is a key action... but it would be fine to have good results in hard light situations as well...

http://www.redcamservice.eu/redcamservice/herbstrock.html

what shots are you referring to? it all looks great to me, but its hard to tell in all these internet compressed movies.. the only shot that looked like it might have noise was the close up of her in the windtunnel, and that looked just fine to me. in fact i kind of liked it better than the superclean stuff... totally subjective i know.. but again it was internet compressed, id love to see some high quality short movies with noise examples, because at this point i dont know if the noise is totally undesirable to everyone that comes across it, or if its a subtle thing that bothers some people because they are trying to get everything noiseless..

im just trying to figure out if the camera, at its noisiest, would even bother me then..

my noise tastes in a nutshell lets see: i love full frontal and harris savides. on the opposite end, miami vice was too noisy for my tastes..

 

[zak forrest]

I don't mind noise either as long as it is grain like. The only thing that bothers me is that, when you push the camera footage in post you get some fixed pattern noise that isn't that nice to look at.

I believe they are working on it, though.

thanks concrete that helps a bit..

 

[Rainer Fritz]

@zak forrest:
look to the dissolve at TC 00:21:00 and look to the background in these shots under the highway bridge... in the uncompressed material it looks in the good area but could be definitely better...
the shots from the beginning when she is sitting with the highlight from top, look on the ground where it goes from light to black... there you will get these stripes, which are better also in the uncompressed version...
then at TC 02:40:00 where she is acting on the ground look to the same thing when it goes from high light to black....
the shots with the backlight (closeup beauty shots) are looking amazing... but there are standing 2x30k dinos in the back and 5k in the front....

 

[Álex Montoya]

I don't know what you mean: I just see banding from compression.

I wanted to ask you... I don't really get the CC in the vid: are the heavy orange borders in the highlights intended or just a color space thing? I didn't see them in the first ungraded footage that you posted.

 

[Rainer Fritz]

the banding can be seen also in the uncompressed material but not that hard... ossible it is also because of the lcd monitors.... at the tiff sequences with 16 bit it is away, but i can't process it in color...
when i look to the ungraded material the orange borders are there...

 

[Álex Montoya]

The banding is most probably a thing of the LCD.

The output from a 16 bit TIFF sequence to a 8 bit video introduces banding sometimes though a good software introduces dithers the image to avoid precisely this.

Funnily, the way to get rid of all the banding is putting some grain in the final render.

And yeah, there is orange in the ungraded footage, but very natural; it is the color correction that converts it to big flat colored blotches.

 

[Álex Montoya]

I've been playing with the TIFF's Igor Martinovic uploaded, bumping levels and so on, and the truth is that it is one of the cleanest of the RED and it doesn't show FPN.

 

[Miguel "Macgregor" De Olaso]

Ok, lets get ready for some stills. I am not some one who likes to judge motion images just by looking at stills but i think this time we can illustrate this post by bringing in some light.

I would encourage anyone to download the videos from my site, even if they are in QT h264, in order to have a better judgement. Also, my apologies for those without large enough screens, since all the photos are displayed at HD1080 size.

This footage has been captured with 2 different cameras, but both seem to work the same. The latest firmware used was 10.

All photos have been converted from 4K to 2K in Redcine or redalert with camera RGB colorspace and a REC709 gamma curve and then resized to HD1080 JPGs unless other color correction is indicated. No other controls (contrast, brightness, sharpening, or saturation) have been touched.

Medium contrast scenes. One shot in the shadows, the other one in hard light. No color correction. Good exposure at 320ISO 5600ºK. No noise. Good!

Nike ad. This is a finished/corrected image. Very good quality. Well exposed. No noise at all. 320ISO and fast shutter speed were set.

Ipod shot.This is also a finished image. Taken exactly 10 seconds after the sunset at 320ISO. Therefore we were in a low light situation but well exposed. Great image, no noise at all. I am very happy but...

 

[Miguel "Macgregor" De Olaso]

This was taken 5 minutes later. In this case the image was about 1 stop underexposed (or taken at 500ISO). What you see is the finished shot. Check for the blaks on the ipod screen. There is grain, nothing that we could consider too much, but there is grain/noise.

Good light. Good exposure. No color correction (except erasing my license plate). Camera RGB color space and rec709 gamma curve. No grain. Great!

High contrast scene. Very bright building and dark shadows. Very good response for a video camera. 250ISO. no grain. Good!

Same as before BUT shot 1 stop underexposed, which means ISO should be around 500ISO. Grain. Check his coat. It´s not horrible but the noise is there.

 

[Miguel "Macgregor" De Olaso]

BMW commercial. Same camera. 320ISO. No retouch. Firmware 10. No noise.

Same camera. Same day. ISO 800, or RedCine exposure +1.32. 3500ºK. Look at the sky. Is it snowing?

Same camera, same day. Indoors. ISO 1000, or RedCine exposure +1.64. 3500ºK. Medium tones are ok. But shadows...
The still image might be not soooo bad, but the footage at 24fps has patter noise and blue dots.



And the most horrible one:

Shot at 2K ISO 1000, or RedCine exposure +1.64. 3500ºK. Sorry to say this, but we cannot use this image. Obviusly the 2K crop magnification makes things worse than in 4K mode. There´are blue noise dots everywhere...





So what have we learned with this?
Either Mac doesn´t know how to shoot in lowlight.
Or the camera right now, with the current firmware produces beautifull images in good light conditions but brings too much noise as soon as we underexpose.
The noise/grain is not a problem with me as long as it doesn´t look digital, with patterns and bringing different colors.

Of course, all this might be a personal taste. After all i am just giving my personal feelings. I am happy to have the opportunity to shoot with a camera that offers so many new possibilities.

 

[Dalibor Fencl]

Long and hot thread seems to be solved.

But there is still the question concerning the white balance. As the sensor is 5000K, is it a good idea to use light blueish conversion filter (80C) for tungsten light? Or it just cuts off the same amount of red and green that might be simply done in post as well?

Edit: Sorry Mac, I haven't seen the pictures. Especially the last one. The problem is still here.
But the one with Plaza oriente seems to be still acceptable, correctable.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Bring out the noise, bring out the funk

Bring out the noise, bring out the funk

During my time on Red Dirt Rising I spent hours twiddling with every control in Red Alert. I managed to make some of the footage look stupendous and other clips look pretty nasty. I concur with the Red Leader and others who cite post processing as a likely culprit in high noise images.

I cannot discuss specifics of the LART due to the NDA but it was very interesting to see what Lucas could do with the footage in Scratch. My point is that the results you see are likely based on a lot more than the tiny amount of inherent noise in the sensor.

On a best results note I am thinking about picking up more daylight balanced lighting instruments. I am also thinking about gelling fill lighting sources to moderate blue channel noise in the low end. Putting a filter in front of the lens might be the best choice in some instances but in most cases I think it will be counter-productive due to the light loss.

 

[Kevin Halverson]

I think what might be very helpful would be to post a .tif frame for each of the shots (same frame if possible) that you have the noise in. There are a number of possible causes for the results you are obtaining (like the RedCine settings, export codec used, etc). Personally, I would export with an exposure of -.4 no color correction and 16 bit color space. This won't yield a great looking image, but it would allow for proper analysis of the frame.

 

[RCFisher]

I used to do this years ago, add base light to the image sometimes colored with blue, so I could drop the black levels and retain detail but have good blacks and contrast. Doing this for transfer sometimes helped a lot to reduce noise and grain. Going to print was something else but most of my work 25 years ago was strait to tape via a Bosch scanner which was a huge improvement over the film chains that were used earlier. Also over exposing helped hide grain some but highlights went sooner.

Again testing and experimenting with the entire chain of the image to find the best recipe for what you are looking for.

Also what's up with the NDA thing for LART. That makes a mockery of open development, which Jim has championed since starting Red.

 

[Álex Montoya]

Evidently, shooting 2K makes the noise dots twice as big, but I find 4K at 1000 ASA quite usable under some circumstances and with a little post work. The guy's face is clearly underexposed in that pic as he is very dark skinned, and yet I believe that it could be used for a gritty film.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Shot at 2K ISO 1000, or RedCine exposure +1.64. 3500ºK. Sorry to say this, but we cannot use this image. Obviusly the 2K crop magnification makes things worse than in 4K mode. There´are blue noise dots everywhere...

[/QUOTE]

any chance you would be willing to FTP me the .r3d file for this shot??

love to take a fast Scratch crack at it and post you an H264 -

no promises, but I suspect I make it purty ....