Order Placed. Epic Dragon to Epic W. Thoughts and Questions...

[Sergio Perez]

I placed my order for the Epic W.

Last night (2am over here) was frantic, and amidst server dramas, my rep confirmed my order which reassured me I got"in" the boat for the first batch of cameras. This is great because the Macau Grand Prix, an event I cover every year, is coming up and this was the step up I was looking for this Historic event.

As I'm really literally a couple hours to go to place my deposit on the bank for wire transfer, I've been thinking about this Epic Dragon to Helium (Epic W) upgrade. I would like to share with you the thoughts running through my mind, and maybe the Red Team and fellow redusers can shime in on these ramblings. It will not be about money. But performance, which ultimately is what I'm looking for.

I do a lot of slow-motion. I shoot Events for TV Commercials, Motorsports, and, less, admittedly, narrative stuff. I never particularly cared or did material in 50 or 60 fps for broadcast clients. My projects are mainly 25p (Pal country) with varispeed for artistic/ expressive shots. My TVC's are all shot at 25p with varispeed.

For reference, I shoot the whole Macau Grand Prix in High Speed, have someone capturing audio externally, than speed it up in post. Each event I use my Dragon we rent a couple MX's to complement, and we capture Terabytes of data. We have no problem with that.

My concern is this: Is Epic W really an upgrade in terms of versatility to my Epic Dragon? Will my footage look better on the Helium than on my Epic Dragon? What am I gaining by going Epic W?

Again, I'm talking here without any concern about rentals, money, etc, but pure performance and versatility vs the Epic Dragon.

Jumping in to Epic W, and as it is portrayed by Red as a successor of the now legendary Epic , I am hoping that the W at least gives me similar performance to the Epic Dragon in most things the Dragon can do, specially for what I shoot !

My first concern is in the FOV situation vs High Speed.

While I'm getting "everything" the Epic Dragon does in High Speed with its relative resolution, I'm getting a more cropped image. Jarred stated 6K on Helium equals APSC which is good, plenty of good glass for that. On my Epic Dragon, it was an APS-H FOV for 6K. For motorsports, we often need shots at 200fps and 150fps . This would be 4K WS and 3K ws respectively. How would the images compare in terms of noise? The pixels in the Helium are smaller- would this mean more noise?

Obviously the big advantage is everything above 6K. Was hoping for a 6.5K that would make the FOV larger and a 50 FPS slow motion for us that we could use to leverage the crop. If not much of a technical issue, which very well could be by the limitations of the W internals, I think Weapon Helium and "the market" would not be very upset if the EPIC W could go 6.5K 2.1 or WS 50 or 60fps.

This would make the EPIC W at least, "perception wise" for frame rates, resolution vs the Epic Dragon, an upgrade from it. This would be my main shooting scenario in most "non racing" super slowmotion shots.

I completely understand the differences between the Weapon Helium and Epic W. There's a big price difference and its justified. For High speed 8K, for 8K broadcast ready, or clients like NHK, 8K Screen manufacturers, blockbusters, High End Commercials and tv shows of the future, the Weapon Helium its the camera to go. Much like the Epic Dragon is currently.

Going Epic W is going a bit from the top of the line camera that the Epic Dragon is/was, to a sort of Scarlet line- a much powerful Scarlet, mind you, that matches the DSMC1 Epic Dragon in resolution and frame rates and one ups it with 8K, 7K and 6.5K, but at Scarlet frame rates.

For what I do the ideal would obviously be the Weapon Helium. But yes, no finances for it, it is what it is. My work looks much, much grander than what I get paid for it. Such is the fate of being in a place with no industry and market perception.

For what I do, I can only really have one camera. It would make no sense for me to have 2. Going Epic W means I will commit to it for the next 4 to 5 years, at least, like I did with the Epic, then Dragon, and now, the W.

I'm hopeful that down the line there's a possibility for an upgrade to the more powerful Helium spec for us Epic W. I got just a bit concerned when Brent told that there was no upgrade to VV from EPIC W. I truly hope that we can at least dream for an upgrade to Weapon Helium spec in the future! It could mean another additional 15K, or 20K. But it would be a reassuring step for jumping to Helium. Maybe in a couple of months/year, I can afford this !

So what do you all think? I jumped in, a bit of mixed feelings on this upgrade in terms of performance. I know I will definitely get better performance from the DSMC2 design though! But in the end, its all about the versatility and performance of the tool. I'm sure the 8K will be gorgeous. I will shoot the heck of it.

Anyone else went Epic Dragon to W with the Epic Dragon being their only camera?

 

[Daniel Reed]

Sounds like you may be better served with full Weapon Helium if staying under 100fps,
Otherwise, a Weapon Dragon could be a better choice for the increased FOV at high frame rates.

You might be disappointed with the FOV loss on Epic-W for high speed overcrank;
however, both Weapon Helium, Epic-W, and Epic Dragon require dropping down to 3K FF for 150fps

The FOV hit for Helium is noticeable; Helium FOV is approx 27% smaller then Dragon at same resolutions
See Phil's format compare too to see the FOV difference:
http://phfx.com/tools/formatCompare...wo_typeTech=RED|Helium&formatTwo_format=3K FF

Going Epic W is going a bit from the top of the line camera that the Epic Dragon is/was, to a sort of Scarlet line- a much powerful Scarlet, mind you, that matches the DSMC1 Epic Dragon in resolution and frame rates and one ups it with 8K, 7K and 6.5K, but at Scarlet frame rates.

I agree, albeit with a lower Field of View then Epic Dragon at the same resolutions.

 

[Andy Roberts]

You can also do 150 FPS on Epic-W at 4K WS.

I have confirmed, the best I can get at 6.5K WS is 47 FPS (46.86)... not 48 or 50 FPS. What happen when you're 1 frame off of a multiple?

But when you drop to 6K FF, you can shoot up to 80.67 FPS / 10:1

6K WS gets to 100FPS / 10:1

 

[Roger Munns]

Some good thoughts there Sergio. I have used rental Epic-Dragon cameras in underwater housings for the past two years and needed to buy my own camera recently. I was very much on the fence between a used Epic-Dragon, which I could have set-up for about $22K, or a new Epic-W which runs to about $29K when moving from a Scarlet-W deposit. I actually think the Dragon would have been the better sensor for me given that I need to shoot a lot of slomo (like you) and don't want to crop too heavily. Delivery in my job is normally 5K as 6K is a little too data heavy for most of the production houses I work with. 7K and 8K are not much interest to me right now, especially when only at 30FPS. Perhaps I'll need it in the future. Despite that I ended up going with the Epic-W. I am going to have to pick up some new lenses to handle the crop factor at 5K for those high frame rates but I was sold on the improved low-light shooting and it being DSMC2 which has some obvious benefits including peripherals that will be suitable for any other DSMC2 cameras I may upgrade or switch too. That and the lower risk of buying new from Red vs Used online.

I had a very stressful last couple of days while weighing everything up and trawling through these forums but I hope I made the right decision. Time will tell.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

I think the most important thing to understand going from 6K Dragon to 8K Helium (Epic-W) is that you loose high speed in s35mm. It's like using the old Red One in terms of sensor sizes, as long as you shoot normal speeds you're fine, but shooting high speed you start to crop under s35mm. If you only shoot normal speed that's fine, but I've never been involved with anything that didn't want to do something in slow motion for some shots. Locking out that capability can limit what you can do creatively. You will still get 4K masters that look awesome out of the Dragon 6K and still be able to shoot s35mm high speed at 82 fps. That's quite the difference between their high speed capabilities.

That being said, we don't know how the Helium actually performs as a sensor yet since we don't have any new color science for it. But from what I've seen, there isn't much of a difference in color separation and image quality except for resolution and noise handling.

 

[Sergio Perez]

I think the most important thing to understand going from 6K Dragon to 8K Helium (Epic-W) is that you loose high speed in s35mm. It's like using the old Red One in terms of sensor sizes, as long as you shoot normal speeds you're fine, but shooting high speed you start to crop under s35mm. If you only shoot normal speed that's fine, but I've never been involved with anything that didn't want to do something in slow motion for some shots. Locking out that capability can limit what you can do creatively. You will still get 4K masters that look awesome out of the Dragon 6K and still be able to shoot s35mm high speed at 82 fps. That's quite the difference between their high speed capabilities.

That being said, we don't know how the Helium actually performs as a sensor yet since we don't have any new color science for it. But from what I've seen, there isn't much of a difference in color separation and image quality except for resolution and noise handling.

Yeah Christopher, that's why I said you guys with that 15K upgrade path to Helium should take it. Its the true Epic Dragon 2- The Revenge.

I transferred my funds, and am going W. It was the only way I could go to DSMC2 that i could afford. I applied and ordered and will battle test the W on the most important job I have all year. I've done this with the Dragon and I do believe I will still be surprised by this camera. Its obviously not the Helium, but I'm really curious to see how it stacks up to what I did the last 2 years with the Dragon. You know what? maybe being limited to 30fps in 8K will force me to not overuse slow motion and rethink my style of shooting. This is also interesting.

 

[Michael Tiemann]

I look at the choices this way:

1. Mark Toia makes a great case that the Helium pixels are superior to DRAGON pixels in two ways: more light sensitive and less shadow noise. For people really needing that extra 1-2 stops, Helium seems to have it.

2. At 6KFF and below, WEAPON 8K, EPIC-W, WEAPON Carbon, and WEAPON Mg all provide the same frame rate performance (and data rate) as one another. Thus you get the same spatial/temporal resolution as far as the sensor is concerned. What is different, obviously, is the sensor sizes, and so you have to look at your lenses to decide whether there's a huge demerit or no demerit in shifting from DRAGON's slightly excessive size (larger than some s35 lenses can cover) to Heliums definitely diminutive size. If you regularly use your widest lens and depend on the full size of DRAGON's 6K sensor to use it (as I do my Canon 14mm), then the smaller sensor size of Helium is going to force a change (such as buying Canon's 11-24mm zoom, or recording the full 8K using slower max frame rates and/or larger data recording rates).

3. Helium gives the choice of resolutions beyond 6K, but within the same realm of sensor size as DRAGON. In these cases, max frame rate goes down (bad for slo-mo), average data recording rates go up (which means storage needs and IO bandwidth need to go up), and GPU capabilities need to go up, too. If 6K is already the limit of your computing platform, 8K might prove "too much of a good thing". On the other hand, if you love the built-in 2x zoom that you feel you can get with 6K, but you always wish it were just a bit more, well 8K is more! Like almost 80% more data/pixels!! That could mean a for-real 2x zoom (shooting never less than 4K), a 3x zoom (never worse than 2.7K), or a 4x zoom (never worse than FullHD).

These three factors are not perfectly independent--they blend together. I have a WEAPON CF (waiting for VV upgrade) and two WEAPON Mg cameras. I am wondering whether I should go to WEAPON 8K and two EPIC-W cameras or wait longer for the VV upgrade and stick with the DRAGON sensor. I'm really quite happy with the DSMC2 DRAGON--much happier than original DSMC DRAGON. But it was Mark Toia who convinced me to join the RED family with his footage from the original EPIC DRAGON, and so I'm thinking very hard about what he said about Helium. At the same time, I honestly don't think my current lenses justify an 8K sensor size with an s35 image circle. I do trust them to do 8K across VV. And so the equation is heavily influenced by my lens strategy, not only RED's awesome sensor specs.

 

[Sergio Perez]

I look at the choices this way:

1. Mark Toia makes a great case that the Helium pixels are superior to DRAGON pixels in two ways: more light sensitive and less shadow noise. For people really needing that extra 1-2 stops, Helium seems to have it.

2. At 6KFF and below, WEAPON 8K, EPIC-W, WEAPON Carbon, and WEAPON Mg all provide the same frame rate performance (and data rate) as one another. Thus you get the same spatial/temporal resolution as far as the sensor is concerned. What is different, obviously, is the sensor sizes, and so you have to look at your lenses to decide whether there's a huge demerit or no demerit in shifting from DRAGON's slightly excessive size (larger than some s35 lenses can cover) to Heliums definitely diminutive size. If you regularly use your widest lens and depend on the full size of DRAGON's 6K sensor to use it (as I do my Canon 14mm), then the smaller sensor size of Helium is going to force a change (such as buying Canon's 11-24mm zoom, or recording the full 8K using slower max frame rates and/or larger data recording rates).

3. Helium gives the choice of resolutions beyond 6K, but within the same realm of sensor size as DRAGON. In these cases, max frame rate goes down (bad for slo-mo), average data recording rates go up (which means storage needs and IO bandwidth need to go up), and GPU capabilities need to go up, too. If 6K is already the limit of your computing platform, 8K might prove "too much of a good thing". On the other hand, if you love the built-in 2x zoom that you feel you can get with 6K, but you always wish it were just a bit more, well 8K is more! Like almost 80% more data/pixels!! That could mean a for-real 2x zoom (shooting never less than 4K), a 3x zoom (never worse than 2.7K), or a 4x zoom (never worse than FullHD).

These three factors are not perfectly independent--they blend together. I have a WEAPON CF (waiting for VV upgrade) and two WEAPON Mg cameras. I am wondering whether I should go to WEAPON 8K and two EPIC-W cameras or wait longer for the VV upgrade and stick with the DRAGON sensor. I'm really quite happy with the DSMC2 DRAGON--much happier than original DSMC DRAGON. But it was Mark Toia who convinced me to join the RED family with his footage from the original EPIC DRAGON, and so I'm thinking very hard about what he said about Helium. At the same time, I honestly don't think my current lenses justify an 8K sensor size with an s35 image circle. I do trust them to do 8K across VV. And so the equation is heavily influenced by my lens strategy, not only RED's awesome sensor specs.

Great post.

I completely agree with you Michael. I would find it even interesting if Red could Provide some sort of Micro 4/3rds adapter or mount for those requiring High speed shooting on Helium/ Epic W. The Olympus and Panaleica lenses are, frankly, gorgeous- I own some of them for still photography- and it could be a whole new system for certain shots.

I would say, if I was in your situation, to definitely keep holding on for VV. Panavision selected it for a reason. The characteristics of a full frame sensor just create an image that is different from anything else.

I'm excited for my Epic W. That Canon lens is in my "to buy" list, for sure!

 

[luigivaltulini]

I look at the choices this way:

1. Mark Toia makes a great case that the Helium pixels are superior to DRAGON pixels in two ways: more light sensitive and less shadow noise. For people really needing that extra 1-2 stops, Helium seems to have it.

2. At 6KFF and below, WEAPON 8K, EPIC-W, WEAPON Carbon, and WEAPON Mg all provide the same frame rate performance (and data rate) as one another. Thus you get the same spatial/temporal resolution as far as the sensor is concerned. What is different, obviously, is the sensor sizes, and so you have to look at your lenses to decide whether there's a huge demerit or no demerit in shifting from DRAGON's slightly excessive size (larger than some s35 lenses can cover) to Heliums definitely diminutive size. If you regularly use your widest lens and depend on the full size of DRAGON's 6K sensor to use it (as I do my Canon 14mm), then the smaller sensor size of Helium is going to force a change (such as buying Canon's 11-24mm zoom, or recording the full 8K using slower max frame rates and/or larger data recording rates).

3. Helium gives the choice of resolutions beyond 6K, but within the same realm of sensor size as DRAGON. In these cases, max frame rate goes down (bad for slo-mo), average data recording rates go up (which means storage needs and IO bandwidth need to go up), and GPU capabilities need to go up, too. If 6K is already the limit of your computing platform, 8K might prove "too much of a good thing". On the other hand, if you love the built-in 2x zoom that you feel you can get with 6K, but you always wish it were just a bit more, well 8K is more! Like almost 80% more data/pixels!! That could mean a for-real 2x zoom (shooting never less than 4K), a 3x zoom (never worse than 2.7K), or a 4x zoom (never worse than FullHD).

These three factors are not perfectly independent--they blend together. I have a WEAPON CF (waiting for VV upgrade) and two WEAPON Mg cameras. I am wondering whether I should go to WEAPON 8K and two EPIC-W cameras or wait longer for the VV upgrade and stick with the DRAGON sensor. I'm really quite happy with the DSMC2 DRAGON--much happier than original DSMC DRAGON. But it was Mark Toia who convinced me to join the RED family with his footage from the original EPIC DRAGON, and so I'm thinking very hard about what he said about Helium. At the same time, I honestly don't think my current lenses justify an 8K sensor size with an s35 image circle. I do trust them to do 8K across VV. And so the equation is heavily influenced by my lens strategy, not only RED's awesome sensor specs.

I do not think there is much difference in noise in blacks. Between Dragon and Helium at exposure parity. Let us remember that Weapon can get to 3: 1 versus 5: 1 Helium .. and the noise to 3: 1 is much smaller.


however, the best way is Vista Vision, the one I'm also waiting for me.

 

[David Ellison]

Do we know much about the noise floor of the epic-w?

 

[devon lyons]

Some good thoughts there Sergio. I have used rental Epic-Dragon cameras in underwater housings for the past two years and needed to buy my own camera recently. I was very much on the fence between a used Epic-Dragon, which I could have set-up for about $22K, or a new Epic-W which runs to about $29K when moving from a Scarlet-W deposit. I actually think the Dragon would have been the better sensor for me given that I need to shoot a lot of slomo (like you) and don't want to crop too heavily. Delivery in my job is normally 5K as 6K is a little too data heavy for most of the production houses I work with. 7K and 8K are not much interest to me right now, especially when only at 30FPS. Perhaps I'll need it in the future. Despite that I ended up going with the Epic-W. I am going to have to pick up some new lenses to handle the crop factor at 5K for those high frame rates but I was sold on the improved low-light shooting and it being DSMC2 which has some obvious benefits including peripherals that will be suitable for any other DSMC2 cameras I may upgrade or switch too. That and the lower risk of buying new from Red vs Used online.

I had a very stressful last couple of days while weighing everything up and trawling through these forums but I hope I made the right decision. Time will tell.

I'm in the same boat. I need lots of slowmo and the Helium crop is scaring me away from the EW. I was going to switch from SW to EW but I just picked up an Epic-X with low hours to get me through until I'm allocated a DSMC2. But now I think I would be best served with an SW and maybe keep the Epic X if needed.

If you shoot a lot of high frame rates is the EW crop going to make a Dragon a better choice?

 

[Curran Giddens]

Great post.
I'm excited for my Epic W. That Canon lens is in my "to buy" list, for sure!

Yup. I have tried the 11-24mm on Helium and it's great! Since it didn't work with my mattebox, I had to also buy a NiSi 180mm filter holder. I will let you know how it works. NiSi claims there is no vignetting at 11mm.