NIOSE in Blacks and Shadows

[Donald G]

Good morning red users and happy holidays. We just recently upgraded to build 16, we're late I know, but 15 was working for us, what else can I say? Every since we upgraded to this build, we have been getting this absolutely annoying effect of noise appearing at even the slightest hint of darkness and in the blacks. It's becoming a hinderance to production. We shot a short film a couple of weeks ago and the client is super nervous about the unwanted grain. We're not going to upgrade to build 17 yet because according to red/support: the final cut installer supports cameras up to build 16, and final cut is what we use. My questions to anyone here who could help out is:

A) Could this be a black shading issue?
B) How do we get rid of it now in post?
C) How do we prevent it in the future?

Thank you and we anxiously await your responses.

 

[Joel Kaye]

I doubt the camera is actually producing noisier images than 15 since I've never seen anyone else report that.

Definitely try black shading again. I've had a couple times that gave me bad results for some unknown reason.

Verify you're really shooting and exposure the same way you did in the past. Are you testing new scenes that are lit differently?

Take the footage all the way through post. Don't just look at a proxy and call it bad. I recently tested the native redcode ingest into FCP through Color and it seems render good results. Make sure to read the white paper so you get the best quality out of it. Try RedCine and RedAlert and render all the way out.

Light with daylight balanced bulbs if possible. RED can look nice under tungsten but the shadows are always noisier than if the scene was lit by daylight. Very easy to color correct back to warm from a cool beginning. Going the other way is going to be noisy. If you're trying to make a tungsten scene look blue, or give it blue shadows you're asking for trouble.

Finally, use noise reduction software if nothing else seems to work for you. RED is about the cleanest camera out there in the price range so it's not like you've got another reasonable alternative.

Also, when I'm watching movies now I see a lot more noise than I used to becasue I've tuned into it. Viewers accept it in a lot of stuff so try not to hold yourself to a standard few other productions hit. That said, get some HMI's and daylight balanced practicals and you'll probably have noise free footage.

 

[Donald G]

Thanks for the advice Joel. I will definitely give that a shot.

 

[I Bloom]

Donald,

So what's happening is, I think, when you switched to build 16 the camera started showing you an image and false color that is processed with REDspace.

REDspace is great but it tends to brighten the image you see so that you naturally protect your highlights and also expose lower, leading to more noise.

You can switch the view mode back to Rec709 and likely get results similar to those you had before in Build 15... or... start exposing a little higher. I usually set one button on my camera to show me RAW, so that I can pop over and check my highlights, then I expose pretty bright in Redspace if I want a very clean image.

Cheers,
IBloom

 

[Chris Bell]

I had the same problem. Shot a job in Red Space and everything was noisy. Switched back to Rec709 and I get clean images. Red Space color is nice, but the gamma curve tricks you into underexposing.

 

[Robert Horwell]

I had the same problem. Shot a job in Red Space and everything was noisy. Switched back to Rec709 and I get clean images. Red Space color is nice, but the gamma curve tricks you into underexposing.

I'll second that, set your 1 button to RAW mode and use it to flick back and forth, use the histogram and the color bars and expose to the right on the histogram, you will be amazed how far under you can expose an image from using the redspace gamma.

Open one of your R3D files in redalert use the linear light setting to have a look at the histogram, see how much of the chips potential you are using.