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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 :)

NEW TO RED? A few things to think about

David Battistella

David Battistella

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First, welcome to REDUSER!I just thought I would create this post to let people know a few things to understand if you are brand new to RED or using RED cameras to capture images for the first time. There are some technical things and there are some things to understand about the RED culture, the company and the attitude.

Now, I am just a customer. I was in the first 1000 with number 758 way back with the first original RED camera the RED ONE with the M Sensor. I’m just sharing a bit about what I have observed and experienced over the years and I hope many other REDusers with a lot of experience can help you out as well.

RAW
The RED CAMERA captures a RAW stream to a format called R3D. It also now captures Quicktime prores and AVID dnxHD files as well.

RAW MEANS RAW
With RAW R3D files none of the following is burned into the file with QT files these things ARE burned into the Prores or AVID dnxHD files.

- ISO
- WHITE BALANCE
-LUT or LOOK file

This means that you can shoot at 500ISO and process your files at 2000ISO, or you vice versa. In terms of white balance, if you forgot to white balance, no problem, you can always white balance after the fact with no penalty. What do I mean by that, well, if you shot something Tungsten on another camera and really wanted Daylight, you have to move the whole color matrix of colors in a burned in file. With RED you can select the white balance as the last phase of post if you like.

FRAME RATE - TIME BASE and SHUTTER ANGLE and EXPOSURE TIME are burned in to the R3D
These parameters are always a part of the file, so don’t hink you can just shoot 48FPS and make it 24FPS without artifacts or shutter issues, you can’t.

TRUE SLOW MOTION
The camera is capable of capturing slow motion video. It captures progressive frames and no interpolation is needed to playback slow motion
SEE THIS THREAD ABOUT SLOW MOTION WITH RED

LOTS OF LENS OPTIONS
The Camera is capable of using Canon, Nikon, PL and Leica M lenses with their mounts and it is important to note that you can put just about any type of glass in front of a RED camera.

RED DOCUMENTATION
THE DSMC camera guide is your friend. Use it, read it, it covers everything!
DOWNLOAD DSMC GUIDE

SHARPENING
RED does no in camera sharpening and lets the sharpening be done as a post process. This can freak people out a bit at first, but its much better to sharpen shot per shot.

NOISE REDUCTION
There is no in camera noise reduction with RED, so when you move to Higher ISO's etc, the camera does not compensate in any way to remove this noise. It's part of the RAW philosophy and letting the user decide things like ISO, WB, sharpening and noise according to the images they want to create. Bottom line, when getting into the higher ISO's and depending on your taste, plan to do some noise reduction in post.

FLEXIBILITY & CHOICES
Each DP has a lot of leeway to create the images they want because of this attitude of Flexibility and choice. FOr example, you can interchange many different OLPF's with lens combinations to get the look you want to create. It's all about choice when it comes to building up your rig, it can be basic or complicated according to your shooting style or to any particular shoot.

FRAME SIZES
Just a word about framesize/frame rates. When you select a framesize SMALLER that the maximum frame size then it means you are actually cropping the sensor. In other words, you are not scalling the larger image to the smaller image but you are literally cutting it out of the whole Sensor. So 6K is 6K 4K is 4K cut out of that 6K not scaled from 6K to 4K, 3K, 2K ETCThis means your field of view changes as you drop down in resolution. Handy, because it lets you shoot higher frame rates, but be aware that croping does occur and just like if you crop a file in Photoshop, the resolution can take a hit.

RAW VIEW AND HISTOGRAM ARE YOUR FRIEND
To me, the second most important thing after looking at your monitor for exposure and composition are the:

HISTOGRAM
RAW VIEW
GOALPOST
STOPLIGHT TOOLS
These three tools used together will take you a long long way toward excellent exposure:
HISTOGRAM - Learn how to read one based on your scene,
RAW VIEW - Understand that with RED this represents whiat the sensor sees at ISO 800 with a DragonColor 2 and REDlogfilm look profile. Swithcing between this and your settings will tell you a lot. Know where the RAW VIEW key is mapped and use it often
GOAL POSTS above a certain noise. The one on the right tells you how many pixels are clipping
STOPLIGHTS - This tell you when an R G OR B CHANNEL IS CLIPPING

histogram.jpg


Memorize this page of the DSMC manual first.

BLACK SHADING CALIBRATION
It is important to understand what black shading calibration is. If you ever upgrade your firmware, one of the instructions is that you MUST blackshade the camera after a Firmware upgrade. Black shading optimizes the sensor for best performance at a specific temperatures and exposure times. The DSMC2 system does this automatically now, but it's still important to understand it and how to understand when you are filming in a no optimal way.
READ THIS THREAD


cal_te_03.jpg
cal_te_02.jpg



THE RED DOT PATTERN

If you shoot with the lens stopped down past F11, like F16, F22 etc, and you capture the sun in your frame, at certain angles you will see a red dot pattern in your footage. READ THIS THREAD ABOUT THE RED DOT PATTERN

THE RED DIGITAL CINEMA COMPANY
As a company, RED are privately owned and they engage in a direct relationship with their customers through this website and through their excellent customer service with their bomb squad reps. You would expect to see the president of RED, the founder of RED, some key engineering people and general anyone from the RED team interacting with people here on the forum.

REDuser is filled with industry professionals who will answer questions and interact and even help in emergencies.The discussions here can get heated, check out this thread as a general understanding of what constitutes being a good member of this community.
SEE THIS THREAD

REDUSER is a great community where a lot of great knowledge is shared and has been shared over the years.
With Raven, I look forward to the next phase of RED's exciting future.

David
 
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To that I would add: RED cameras are great tools for doing the job, but no tools do the job for you. Lots of resolution and lots of dynamic range doesn't mean one can ignore the fundamentals of cinematography. There are many, many people who have been disappointed to buy a camera 4x-10x more expensive than what they'd ever spent before, only to find that they still need to light their scenes. And yet more who mistakenly believed that because ISO could be changed so easily in post that initial exposure is therefore not of great importance.

The good news is that the DSMC2 platform is more tolerant of exposure errors and illumination errors than its previous platforms. But without a basic understanding of highlight and shadow exposure values, contrast ratios, hard and soft sources, CRI, etc., one can easily pull defeat from the jaws of visual victory. With such an understanding, however, then even adverse conditions pose little challenge to the incredible capabilities of these amazing cameras.
 
+1 Michael,

i look at the iso and WB as emergency measures rather that big problem solvers (although they can be)

david

thanks guys. I just remebered to add the bit about sharpening.
 
I wish this would have been up when I bought my first RED a year and a half ago! Great work.....
 
Also, RED cameras have no in-camera noise reduction as well (same philosophy to no sharpening, as mentioned). If you raise ISO to 5000, it may look a bit noisy, compared to say, a Sony A7s, but the A7s has a load of built in noise reduction going on.

Need noise reduction in a single shot of footage? Run a 3rd party Noise reduction software in post, such as Neat Image.


(I like this thread. Making it a "tips" thread now :)
 
Great idea David, thumbs up for this one. Especially because there are a lot of unexperienced soon-to-be Red Camera users coming to this forum.

Also something to add to this thread:

Native-/ Base ISO with different OLPFs... LLOLPF for example has to be shot on ISO800 while the skin-tone has to be shot at 320. This also depends on DSMC and DSMC2.

Black shading is also something which should be mentioned in this thread.
 
I will admit that I am one of the many people that is new to RED and red files so I am reading and figuring things out as much as possible before my Raven comes in.

I can't say that I am totally inexperienced, I have interacted with it for a weekend, when we rented it for a shoot.
But, that was just the camera, not the files. As we had another guy on as the main editor.

I learned Blackshading and T/E is important... there is another thread for that.... you do it to reduce Fixed pattern noise (if you don't want banding, you might want to do this every once in a while - this will give you those crystal clear images). T/E shows you red, yellow and green - you want perfection, you stay in the green, you can get away with it when you are in the yellow (some people don't care enough to do blackshading all the time and will tolerate yellow), but dont' ever shoot when your T/E is red, unless you want to go home and be unhappy with your shots. There are 2 types, one is about 1 hour long to do, another is 10-20 min. to do. (Just find those blackshading threads and read up). Just saying, if you are on a tight schedule and your DSMC2 is in the red, or is giving your error messages, you could save an hours worth by doing blackshading overnight.

Question: Is Redcode, the same as RAW? Because those shoot out r3d files too, no?
 
Very nice. I think one of the biggest hurdles/misunderstanding is in camera ordering since its unique in the industry. It's like a custom queue directly connected to the manufacturing process, where people get in line as RED works/researches with industry leaders(Fincher/Cameron/Scott/Jackson/etc ...). Also with this approach there is a slow ramping with early adopters/industry_leaders, where the first cameras come out in the queue slowly but there is normally a production volume bump about 6 months after that(i.e. When RED says something is available, for most people general availability is about 6 months after that).
 
Kabilen Mullaithilaga said:
I will admit that I am one of the many people that is new to RED and red files so I am reading and figuring things out as much as possible before my Raven comes in.

I can't say that I am totally inexperienced, I have interacted with it for a weekend, when we rented it for a shoot.
But, that was just the camera, not the files. As we had another guy on as the main editor.

I learned Blackshading and T/E is important... there is another thread for that.... you do it to reduce Fixed pattern noise (if you don't want banding, you might want to do this every once in a while - this will give you those crystal clear images). T/E shows you red, yellow and green - you want perfection, you stay in the green, you can get away with it when you are in the yellow (some people don't care enough to do blackshading all the time and will tolerate yellow), but dont' ever shoot when your T/E is red, unless you want to go home and be unhappy with your shots. There are 2 types, one is about 1 hour long to do, another is 10-20 min. to do. (Just find those blackshading threads and read up). Just saying, if you are on a tight schedule and your DSMC2 is in the red, or is giving your error messages, you could save an hours worth by doing blackshading overnight.

Question: Is Redcode, the same as RAW? Because those shoot out r3d files too, no?
Click to expand...

In the world of RED, REDcode does indeed equal raw.

Sometimes people will say "REDcode can't be raw because it is compressed." This is simply a misunderstanding of the fact that raw has nothing to do with compression; at least the kind of compression employed by RED in it's REDcode. RED records the unaltered signal coming on to the sensor without processing - they have simply designed a proprietary process of compressing that signal which allows the recorded signal to be smaller with no or minimal loss to it's fidelity. RED is mathematically lossless at about 2.5:1 compression and "visually lossless," which is, of course, somewhat subjective, at (if I remember correctly) somewhere around 5 or 6:1. That number is subject to variation both over time, as the science is tweaked, and based on what kind of footage you might be shooting.

As an aside, I see the word "RAW" written in all uppercase letter a lot as if it were an acronym. It's not, it's just a word - no mysterious underlying meaning - and can be spelled "raw." :-)
 
Great idea David. For those of us who've been on since the beginning it can be easy to forget that getting into the world of RAW can be a bit of a leap.

I think the biggest jump for those coming into this world is a change in psychology. You have to treat the RAW image more like a film neg. You want a rich, thick negative capturing as much as possible, with the intent to tweak it later. So even if you want you shadows to be crushed or highlights to blow to white, it's better to capture those details during image capture and adjust later. The nice thing about the higher-end DSMC2 bodies (and the RAW workflow in general) is you can apply a LUT (Weapon+) or an RMD look (all Red's) to tweak the image, while retaining the maximum amount of detail in the RAW.

Another thing worth mentioning is the difference in resolution between a Bayer sensor and other formats. Raven at 4.5K will garner about 3.6-3.8K of total resolution—less than the total pixel count but higher than many other Bayer sensors thanks to Graeme's debayer magic. This has to do with individual pixels only sampling one of Red, Green (2x) or Blue and then being combined via bayesian transform to full RGB values for each pixel.
 
As someone who comes from years of shooting on DSLRs, I’m a touch confused when it comes to ISO and shooting RAW. With DSLR filming, ISO is another tool to correctly expose a shot and control noise, so, am I understanding this right that I could shoot a scene on RED at an ISO of 5000 and there would no more noise in the shot, if dropped in post to ISO 400, then if the shot was natively captured on-set at ISO 400?!
 
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Any recommendations (books, articles, videos...etc) that gives a complete baseline on RAW r3d workflow? Coming from FS100 and a7s, I want to understand how to maximize RAW files. Thanks.
 
This of ISO with RED as a way of rating a scene and moving middle grey of that scene up and down. You can stick with ISO XXX when you process or you can move it in post. If you did have the camera at 6400ISO while you were shooting, you are not committed to that ISO when you post process.

David




Brent G Miller Jr said:
As someone who comes from years of shooting on DSLRs, I’m a touch confused when it comes to ISO and shooting RAW. With DSLR filming, ISO is another tool to correctly expose a shot and control noise, so, am I understanding this right that I could shoot a scene on RED at an ISO of 5000 and there would no more noise in the shot, if dropped in post to ISO 400, then if the shot was natively captured on-set at ISO 400?!
Click to expand...
 
RAW VIEW AND HISTOGRAM ARE YOUR FRIEND


To me, the second most important thing after looking at your monitor for exposure and composition are the:

HISTOGRAM, RAW VIEW, GOALPOST and STOPLIGHT TOOLS

These three tools used together will take you a long long way toward excellent exposure

HISTOGRAM - Learn how to read one based on your scene,

RAW VIEW - Understand that with RED this represents whiat the sensor sees at ISO 800 with a DragonColor 2 and REDlogfilm look profile. Swithcing between this and your settings will tell you a lot. Know where the RAW VIEW key is mapped and use it often
GOAL POSTS above a certain noise. The one on the right tells you how many pixels are clipping

STOPLIGHTS - This tells you when an R G OR B CHANNEL IS CLIPPING
histogram.jpg


Memorize this page of the DSMC manual first.

David
 
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