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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 :)

Monstro Low Light - Playing with Fire.

To be mo clear about Flame Detail:

Flame exposed for Detail:

NDqy21.jpg


Flame blown-out by a couple stops:

EknpNW.jpg


The Monstro shots look to be overexposed to capture Flame Detail by a couple stops:

vVW83K.png


This shot is about a stop overexposed to get the Flame Detail:

K0jyGE.png
 
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Zeb B said:
Love the above frame but . . . thing is with fire spinning is that, to me, it's one of the most challenging and universally reproducible tests of DR. With a commercial set shot, I have no idea how it was lit or the contrast ratio between brightest and darkest areas. The standard 'man lighting a cigar' shot that everyone likes to post is also not that challenging. The light coming off a burning Poi ball is 10x brighter than a match light. Expose for Poi ball flame detail - then check the background for detail and noise. Same test in Paris as can be done in Peru.

Some shots done with smart phones - the flames are mostly overexposed by a couple stops so you can't see the flame detail. That's auto exposure for ya

Click to expand...



A welding tortch in a pitch black room with no other light sources is even more difficult than a flame at night. Simply there is just so and so many stops in a camera and if the bright light is too far apart from your dark areas then there is just a few things you can do. Blow out the highlights or not capture whats in the dark.

Or if you got a red camera you can go HDRx and get both. Then there is a question how many stops you want to push the hdrx and thats depending on how much motion there is. With flames you can push it quite far as they are so iregularly shaped and change from frame to frame.

So if you got hdrx going you use the a track to lift your lowlight and x track to cover your highlights.

If shooting flame jugglers proffesionally you would probably bring your helium balloon lamp and or shoot at magic hour to have enough fill so you can expose with coverage in the flames without loosing to much details in the nearby darks.

Now the footage in this thread clearly had some overexpo or was atleast graded until the flames goes white. I have not checked the r3d’s so i dont know. But I think you will find that monstro goes to clipping point far nicer than both dragon and helium and burn out with far less colorfinging and odd offsets in the brights. And also I think the noise in the black will be more clean than normal even though its pretty far from daylight colored light. Flames pretty much has no blue so its like looking at two chanels instead of three. A bit the same with the guy on the sofa, that warm light brings way much noise to the sensor as the blue channel is starved if it was the same amount of light but balanced at k5600 it would be way cleaner in terms of noise.
 
Björn Benckert said:
A welding tortch in a pitch black room with no other light sources is even more difficult than a flame at night. Simply there is just so and so many stops in a camera and if the bright light is too far apart from your dark areas then there is just a few things you can do. Blow out the highlights or not capture whats in the dark.

Or if you got a red camera you can go HDRx and get both. Then there is a question how many stops you want to push the hdrx and thats depending on how much motion there is. With flames you can push it quite far as they are so iregularly shaped and change from frame to frame.

So if you got hdrx going you use the a track to lift your lowlight and x track to cover your highlights.

Now the footage in this thread clearly had some overexpo or was atleast graded until the flames goes white. I have not checked the r3d’s so i dont know. But I think you will find that monstro goes to clipping point far nicer than both dragon and helium and burn out with far less colorfinging and odd offsets in the brights. And also I think the noise in the black will be more clean than normal even though its pretty far from daylight colored light. Flames pretty much has no blue so its like looking at two chanels instead of three. A bit the same with the guy on the sofa, that warm light brings way much noise to the sensor as the blue channel is starved if it was the same amount of light but balanced at k5600 it would be way cleaner in terms of noise.
Click to expand...

A welder light is beyond any sensor to capture without major ND filtering so would not make a good test subject. Kerosene Torch / Poi flames are withing the realm of reality to expose and are, to me, very revealing as to what the background, skin tones and colors look like once the flame exposure is set to capture detail.
On Location: Expose for the Flames
In Post: dig out the Shadow Detail and try to balance colors

HDRX has difficulty with motion so not so good with spinning Poi or Torch Sticks
 
For sure, using HDRx would had been a good option, but I liked the idea of using slow motion without having a crop factor at the moment, also I had a 80mm so a crop factor would had been really hard for me to try to get some wider angels with just 1 lens. Again I was just fooling around and came with that footage.
 
My guess on your Grade is that you flat topped a Curve which can cause weird posterization. Did you use Contrast or Color Curves in the Grade? BTW: thanks for sharing your files!
 
The posterasation comes when you try to balance the colors as green and even more so blue channels are lacking exposure. So when those are pushed up you see banding.
 
Björn Benckert said:
The posterasation comes when you try to balance the colors as green and even more so blue channels are lacking exposure. So when those are pushed up you see banding.
Click to expand...

Odd since some of the fire light sources are brighter than a 60w incandescent bulb and it's the same 3000ish Kelvin temp if not whiter in some cases. Like the above pic (Post #28) has a real bright and white light source that should satisfy a sensor without crazy results in post. Still think it a grading issue - not a R3D image issue. If you look closely at the OP's video you'll see that even the faces next to the flame light source are funked up.

When trying to grade this super wide DR range like this I'm not sure a straight LGG approach is gonna do it. Marc would know . . . Jake would tell me I'm an ignorant moron who just doesn't get it ;-)
 
Just an expo-blendo and a small bump in the LG:

S7i1Ze.jpg


Goal was to retain flame detail while lifting talent luma while controlling noise and other digital poopoo. Looks fine to me
 
Again, I just did a grade to a certain look, that I liked with my eyes, not that I wanted to lift it up, but can you share either way the R3D just to see what you did?
 
Rodrigo Violante said:
Again, I just did a grade to a certain look, that I liked with my eyes, not that I wanted to lift it up, but can you share either way the R3D just to see what you did?
Click to expand...

What program do you do your color work in? I did the above edit in PS since I only had a single frame. Upload a couple seconds of that same scene . . . perhaps some of the serious ColorBoyz on RU will give it a go
 
Zeb,

I use Resolve. The only way I could think of was to qualify the flame and the guy separately. However, I'm always looking for better approaches of how to do things differently ever day in Resolve. So today it was separate qualifiers, tomorrow it will be another way altogether.


39468060874_e54986000c_o.jpg
[/url]Screenshot (144)2 by rand thompson, on Flickr[/IMG]


39468060824_c09de28b4a_o.jpg
[/url]Screenshot (145)2 by rand thompson, on Flickr[/IMG]
 
rand thompson said:
Zeb,

I use Resolve. The only way I could think of was to qualify the flame and the guy separately. However, I'm always looking for better approaches of how to do things differently ever day in Resolve. So today it was separate qualifiers, tomorrow it will be another way altogether.


39468060874_e54986000c_o.jpg
[/url]Screenshot (144)2 by rand thompson, on Flickr[/IMG]


39468060824_c09de28b4a_o.jpg
[/url]Screenshot (145)2 by rand thompson, on Flickr[/IMG]
Click to expand...

Coolio! I'm away from my DVR station but I would try a two clip exposure (one dark for flame detail / one light for talent exposure) Soft Light blend to avoid the ghosting a qualifier might introduce. Basically a manual HDR type of process. Put the dark exposure on the bottom and apply the Soft Light to the top layer and screw with opacity to get density right

Like my DVR Babe Daria says . . .

 
Zeb B said:
Coolio! I'm away from my DVR station but I would try a two clip exposure (one dark for flame detail / one light for talent exposure) Soft Light blend to avoid the ghosting a qualifier might introduce. Basically a manual HDR type of process. Put the dark exposure on the bottom and apply the Soft Light to the top layer and screw with opacity to get density right

Like my DVR Babe Daria says . . .

Click to expand...


Thanks Zeb! you just gave me a new of doing things!!
 
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