Noise update coming soon?

[Brian Merlen]

my friend shot it on 2000 ISO on a real spot the other day and no one complained, I think everything was so lit no shadows were to be seen... no one had heard of the issue yet either...which is why I think if we stopped talking about it, maybe no film school won't put it on blast all over the net... the only presence of the issue is on RU in select threads/ and those who see it by shooting dark shadows below the 20 or so IRE threshold...

 

[Kevin Marshall]

my friend shot it on 2000 ISO on a real spot the other day and no one complained, I think everything was so lit no shadows were to be seen... no one had heard of the issue yet either...which is why I think if we stopped talking about it, maybe no film school won't put it on blast all over the net... the only presence of the issue is on RU in select threads/ and those who see it by shooting dark shadows below the 20 or so IRE threshold...

My experiences (at least) were also before the big threads here. I've seen very noticeable noise on the shadow side of fairly evenly-lit faces. I can't recall the exact ISO for those particular shots, but I know they were less than 800. I've just been applying chroma NR to all Dragon shots I get, which helps a lot.

 

[Bohdan Klos]

which is why I think if we stopped talking about it, maybe no film school won't put it on blast all over the net... the only presence of the issue is on RU in select threads/ and those who see it by shooting dark shadows below the 20 or so IRE threshold...

Censorship? You could call that Camera Sensorship? My word play is as terrible as your idea of silencing peoples discussion on this problem.

 

[paul schefz]

If it stopped you from shooting a test, well okay.

What I'm saying is where this lands and how it presents itself is outside of where "anybody" typically works. I see the desire for improvement in the deepest shadows at higher ISO ratings and heck I want it too, but if this is for some reason stopping you from exploiting what Dragon has to offer you're missing the other 99% of what it can currently do.

Perhaps that's my opinion on the matter. Perhaps it's because I'm getting good images out of my camera. Dunno.

maybe the issue is more that epic can do 99% of what dragon can do but people are more familiar with it....right now....even if that number is 95%, in reality it does not matter....and perception both positive and negative is a funny, funny, ugly thing.....

i appreciate the test, i don't necessarily agree with all findings since i tend to shoot differently with my epic and probably will with dragon....but all in all it seems right on....

 

[Phil Holland]

It's not a one gear device and more people having more time with it will produce the results they desire. Nearly everybody I've ran into or worked with thus far has been happy with the image quality. Especially the color. That said I'm not delivering underexposed material. I'm also working mostly in the 250-1280 ISO range. 500-800 being where I like it the most, but that's just a personal preference. 800-1280 gives me all the feels I need from my image to provide a film-like experience, though cleaner. This is more to due with texture and tonal placement. Super clean, ISO 250.

I seem to be mostly working at 6K 2:1 and 6K HD overall. 6K WS here and there. 5.5K HD is a special resolution and format that people should explore more with all S35 lenses.

 

[Matthew Scott]

maybe the issue is more that epic can do 99% of what dragon can do but people are more familiar with it....right now....even if that number is 95%, in reality it does not matter....and perception both positive and negative is a funny, funny, ugly thing.....

You're right on the money. I think the ugliness comes from a place where that 5% doesn't seem to be worth the price/hype associated with Dragon, not yet anyway.

 

[Nick Morrison]

You're right on the money. I think the ugliness comes from a place where that 5% doesn't seem to be worth the price/hype associated with Dragon, not yet anyway.

I actually disagree. I have a couple of friends shooting on Dragon right now, and they will never go back to MX. They are completely converted. For them, the additional DR, highlights, and color are such a vast improvement, they wouldn't dream of going back to MX...even with this small noise issue (one of my friends adds a tiny amount of NR in Resolve and gets rid of it instantly).

I can't imagine how good Dragon will be once new calibration arrives.

The leap from MX to Dragon is much more subtle than M to MX. A lot of the basic "math" hasn't changed (you still shoot at 320-800 for example), but the texture, range, and richness of the negative has markedly improved.

That said, MX is a great sensor, and certainly nothing to be sneezed at...

 

[Brian Merlen]

Censorship? You could call that Camera Sensorship? My word play is as terrible as your idea of silencing peoples discussion on this problem.

there is a difference between censorship and shooting yourself in the foot with producers...if people aren't noticing the problem us constantly talking about it sure doesn't help the perception. everyone i talk to likes dragon, who am i to bring up problems to them? i figure i'd let sleeping dogs lie and just hope the firmware is out shortly, rather then hype the problem to everyone i talk with... i don't think that its censorship at all, i just am choosing to not hype a problem, hopefully a short lived problem that will be rid of very quacky....in the other thread a producer on RU mentioned he never would of haggled on Epic day rates post price cut if fellow redusers hadn't hyped the issue immensely...that stuck with me...me running around like a headless chicken saying the sky is falling doesn't help me in this situation, me discreetly hoping the problem is resolved quickly and not mentioning it seems to work better then concerning people with it...

resolve noise reduction is an excellent solution, magic bullet, there are plenty of fixes if you want to reduce the issue... and i am sure we all hope the firmware fix is released soon... but in the meantime the last thing i personally want to do is hype this issue, especially if its very short lived...red myths take YEARS to get rid of, people still call the cameras unreliable and overheating from pre MX Red One days...the honest truth is the last thing any red shooter needs is to perpetuate more FUD when we are still stuck fighting red myths from 4, 5, 6 years ago...

 

[Christopher Probst]

I've got my Dragon and I'm never looking back...

/RANT ON... Everyone needs to realize that, back in the film days, you would need to test a new film stock under a variety of conditions and learn its behaviour... Why does this not apply to digital imagers? EVERY camera sensor is like a film stock -- even within a single manufacturer -- you need to LEARN each sensor you're shooting with. It's really that simple. All of the whining that the Dragon doesn't behave like an MX... well it's NOT an MX... It's a different beast and has its own characteristics.

I NEVER go into a production with a new camera blindly. Hell, I never go into a new FIRMWARE blindly. These boards are part of my daily routine of keeping abreadst of where each camera is evolving into. I don't always have time to share my personal methodologies and sometimes when I do, they seem to fall on deaf ears, so I'm fine with keeping them to myself as well.

I see a lot of keyboard warriors out there bitching about image specifications and not a lot of bonafide production useage being created by these malcontents. Honesty people, get out there and create. Actually DO something, even if its on spec with no money. I respect that. Just whining and not putting your money where your mouth is is downright tedious and boring. And if there's one thing we certainly don't need MORE of in this world is whiny tedious boring bitching... If you want that, get married!

OR take my advice and impress us all by actually SHOOTING something for the love of all that is holy!

/RANT OFF....

 

[Bohdan Klos]

there is a difference between censorship and shooting yourself in the foot with producers...if people aren't noticing the problem us constantly talking about it sure doesn't help the perception. everyone i talk to likes dragon, who am i to bring up problems to them? i figure i'd let sleeping dogs lie and just hope the firmware is out shortly, rather then hype the problem to everyone i talk with... i don't think that its censorship at all, i just am choosing to not hype a problem, hopefully a short lived problem that will be rid of very quacky....in the other thread a producer on RU mentioned he never would of haggled on Epic day rates post price cut if fellow reducers hadn't hyped the issue immensely...that stuck with me...me running around like a headless chicken saying the sky is falling doesn't help me, me discreetly hoping the problem is resolved quickly and not mentioning it seems to work better then concerning people with it...

I think if people stopped trying to downplay the problem (people who rent out Dragon and even moderators here) the people who think there is a problem wont feel the same need to keep "correcting" the conversation. Mostly the people shouting about the problem strongest is often in reply to someone saying they should not be bothered by it.

 

[Paul J Steinberg]

This honestly isn't stopping anybody from shooting.

Sorry but it has stopped me dead during the busiest production season in Toronto. I've been renting for over a month now which means I'm out of pocket about $10K in rentals due to a problem that was known before I sent the camera in for the upgrade.

Some people seem to be able to get good pictures out of their cameras, mine has red noise in anything below 15IRE (ish) and you REALLY see it in anything brown. I've posted the R3D's showing the noise and the magenta horizontal streaks from lights/windows.

This was shot on MX, there is no way José that I'd be able to capture that with my Dragon, and that's why I'm having to rent MX's or Alexa's while my Dragon sits in the basement.

 

[Rob Macey]

I'm shooting promos with my Dragon all week. New olpf. Ride a low ISO, know your lighting, moving forward. All good.

 

[paul schefz]

It all comes down to the claims that were made at announcement and first sightings....16.5 stops DR! 2000iso the new 800! 17:1 is comparable to 7:1!....well if anyone picked up a dragon a worked it like that they are probably in for a nasty surprise....
of course it is an overall improvement to epic.....
To halt or cancel production with dragon at this point still seems strange to me....I haven't seen anything that shows it is worse then epic?

 

[Isaac Marchionna]

I'm shooting promos with my Dragon all week. New olpf. Ride a low ISO, know your lighting, moving forward. All good.

Rating the camera lower and adding more light is a decided step back. Simple as that. I have trust that RED will solve the issue.

But the minute I have to do a song and a dance to calm producers down I've already lost that battle as they're renting another camera.

 

[Rob Macey]

Rating the camera and adding more light is a decided step back. Simple as that. I have trust that RED will solve the issue.

But the minute I have to do a song and a dance to calm producers down I've already lost that battle as they're renting another camera.

I always shoot at the lowest possible ISO on any camera for any given scene. Dragon is no exception. On Epic, I shot 250-800. Same for Dragon.
I also have had a ticket in with red regarding the low ISO noise before any of these threads began. It is not, however holding me back from
shooting at low iso's, as usual, and getting excellent results with Dragon, in the meantime.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

All cameras of the type commonly in use today have plenty of noise mixed in with signal at the micro voltage levels created in high sensitivity digital sensors. How each manufacturer choses to deal with it is a choice. There are several popular options with various advantages and disadvantages, etc.

Part of the RED ethos, at least the way I see it, is to make as clean a record of the actual sensor data as possible so that whatever improvements in processing the future holds will have the best original data set the device could create. Once you start re-characterizing the signal in the early stages of in camera digital signal processing you have thrown away some "real" data along with whatever undesirable noise/artifacts/etc the device is engineered to jettison. FWIW, I consider this early DSP influence to be the key factor in what some shooters call the "personality" of a particular camera, but I digress.

No matter how "pure" RED wants to keep the R3Ds, they still have the "knob" of the default RGB interpretation that we see on displays and I've always assumed at least a little bit of the noise dies there. Your first reaction to this note might be to wonder why they don't just quash the living crap out of the noise floor in the "default" viewing modes, but that would bite back real quick if people started getting unexpected surprises in post.

Bottom line, virtually every other camera on the market uses significantly more in camera NR than RED. The F55 is particularly heavy handed in handling noise, to the point that subtle textures tend to just disappear. I have faith in Graeme's approach to this area and my expectation is that a tiny amount of low end chroma fidelity will be rolled off to reduce the actual noise signature and the decode will be tweaked a bit to neutralize chroma noise artifacts.

RED takes risks, in this case they might have been a trifle too aggressive in getting everything they could out of the Dragon sensor. Once they tiptoe back just a little, we should have an even more insanely great camera than if they'd stayed conservative… Just sayin"

Cheers - #19

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

/RANT ON... Everyone needs to realize that, back in the film days, you would need to test a new film stock under a variety of conditions and learn its behaviour... Why does this not apply to digital imagers? EVERY camera sensor is like a film stock -- even within a single manufacturer -- you need to LEARN each sensor you're shooting with. It's really that simple. All of the whining that the Dragon doesn't behave like an MX... well it's NOT an MX... It's a different beast and has its own characteristics.

/Rant mode on

The big difference these days is if you buy a camera you're locked into that camera. Even owner/operators with film could look at Kodak and say "I don't like it for this project, so I'm going to shoot Fuji." The ugly downside to democratization of tools is that everyone is trying to recoup their investments. If you buy a $40k camera package and it's not the right choice for a project, you will still feel pressured to pick it since you don't want to drop $40k on a camera *and* have to rent an F65 for half the year. RED also has done everything in their power to lock users in. You can't convert REDCode to Cineform and it doesn't record ProRes so you needed to then also invest in REDRockets to play back in real-time (now a criticism mostly out of date with GPU). So not only were you pressured into maintaining a rather homogeneous camera selection, you were also encouraged to keep a pretty homogeneous set of post equipment to handle said footage. People made the sensible decision and just stick to a single provider by and large as a result.

And it's not like RED is exactly discouraging this. Of course they're going to trumpet their product as the best, all around in every single way superior camera. Look at all of the Recon posts proclaiming that the rest of the industry isn't comparable. RED's image is that they alone have a camera that everybody should be using for every project. And it's certainly an image that's fostered that RED is in a class of its own. Which is of course what you precisely expect from marketing. It would be pretty shocking to see a company say that their product is run of the mill and average. But we shouldn't be too surprised when people expect what the marketing is selling them. After all, if someone sells you a wundermachine that costs about the same as a small house in the country it had better be pretty capable. Especially if like the Dragon you all but have to purchase it sight unseen. I did my due diligence and actually did the wild behavior of waiting for Dragons to be reviewed before putting in an order--and it looks like as a consequence I'll get my Dragon in like 2015. Again, don't create a system in which you have to take marketing at face value or receive your product a year after ordering it--and then be shocked and amazed that people decide to buy something sight-unseen. You're requiring someone to put their faith into you. I think what you're seeing is a lot of people who plopped down a decent car's worth of money with literally nothing more than RED's marketing promise and the inevitable backlash that comes from people feeling as if they got less than was promised.

There was a great article a few years ago about psychology research on how customers respond to businesses that position themselves as a "Part of the Family". RED definitely falls into this camp. They clearly position themselves as first and foremost your friend and family member, not as a big faceless corporation. What the study showed was that customers responded very positively: they were more loyal, they purchased more goods and they rated you more highly in satisfaction surveys. But what they also found was that when the company acted unlike a friend or family member, for instance charging a late fee--the backlash was far more severe. "We're like family, what do you mean you're charging me a late fee!?" Companies have to recognize that when they ask their customers to be more flexible and understanding--the customers expect the same in return. RED can sell products sight unseen because we view them like family or a friend. If a friend says the car they're selling is in good working order, we let down our guard and take them on faith. RED was touting 18+ stops of dynamic range, then 16.5 but with the red noise it's more like 14. RED touted 1600 ISO that was like 800 ISO and now people are posting favorable reviews of Dragon like "The noise isn't worse than MX".

RED has setup a very revolutionary marketplace with people owning their own cameras (and being bound to their ecosystem), they're very closely involved with its customers base, RED's public beta testing for those who are interested in bleeding edge technology sets them apart from the competition by "Delivering the future today" (w/ bugs). RED almost always launches with hiccups that in any other company would only be known to a very secret group of beta testers. It's a very different approach--and RED has profited handsomely. This is just the other side of the coin. There are downsides to their approach. People will get more miffed, people will have higher expectations, people will feel more entitled to family-like treatment but that's part of the give and take. You can't just enjoy the fruits of a unique business approach and then condemn your customers who expect more in exchange for their loyalty.

/ Rant mode off.

 

[Christian Simpson]

It all comes down to the claims that were made at announcement and first sightings....16.5 stops DR! 2000iso the new 800! 17:1 is comparable to 7:1!....well if anyone picked up a dragon a worked it like that they are probably in for a nasty surprise....
of course it is an overall improvement to epic.....
To halt or cancel production with dragon at this point still seems strange to me....I haven't seen anything that shows it is worse then epic?

I think Paul has nailed the issue here. Everybody was told one thing and it turned out to be something a little different, at least for now. Is it an improvement, yes. Is it what we were promised? Not yet. I guess that sucks a little bit but hey I've already paid for the upgrade with 2 bookings this month so I ain't too mad about it. I have faith they will get the secret sauce worked out. I will say its pretty amazing how hard it is to clip those highlights now.

 

[Jose Espinosa]

To be honest I was kind of worried after reading all of these threads. But I just got my Dragon (new-OLPF) and wow, it blew my mind. I just ran a quick dirty test in a horrible and dim light that my Epic-MX didn't handle very well, went to RedCine X and white balanced it, and I'm very surprised, specially about the skin tones. They are amazing. Even with a bit of the red noise on the darks I think the patterns are a lot nicer to look at than MX, and if that will also be tuned to make it better I will be extremely happy. The upgrade for me is worth it. I loved my MX but Dragon is more than a step up. Congrats Red Team!. I will try daylight tomorrow.

 

[Russ Fill]

I've got my Dragon and I'm never looking back...

/RANT ON... Everyone needs to realize that, back in the film days, you would need to test a new film stock under a variety of conditions and learn its behaviour... Why does this not apply to digital imagers? EVERY camera sensor is like a film stock -- even within a single manufacturer -- you need to LEARN each sensor you're shooting with. It's really that simple. All of the whining that the Dragon doesn't behave like an MX... well it's NOT an MX... It's a different beast and has its own characteristics.

I NEVER go into a production with a new camera blindly. Hell, I never go into a new FIRMWARE blindly. These boards are part of my daily routine of keeping abreadst of where each camera is evolving into. I don't always have time to share my personal methodologies and sometimes when I do, they seem to fall on deaf ears, so I'm fine with keeping them to myself as well.

I see a lot of keyboard warriors out there bitching about image specifications and not a lot of bonafide production useage being created by these malcontents. Honesty people, get out there and create. Actually DO something, even if its on spec with no money. I respect that. Just whining and not putting your money where your mouth is is downright tedious and boring. And if there's one thing we certainly don't need MORE of in this world is whiny tedious boring bitching... If you want that, get married!

OR take my advice and impress us all by actually SHOOTING something for the love of all that is holy!

/RANT OFF....

Love it Chris well put. Thank you.