RED and the Ultraviolet

[benedictspence]

Hi All,

I'm doing a job next weekend on a Red and the director wants to shoot alot of stuff with UV lights... With the Red One's well know IR sensitivity I thought I'd ask if anyone has had any experience shooting with the Red under UV??

I've done a little UV stuff before, just not with the Red, would love to hear from someone that has as I'm not going to be able to do a test!

Ta very much!

Ben

 

[benedictspence]

No?

Anyone??

 

[Martin Weiss]

No experience here, but do you have time to run some cameratests?

 

[Vigen Vartanov]

I thing that you need to get IR Fillter. Or ND With IR fillter.

 

[jbeale]

I did a quick test with a 385 nm UV LED flashlight ("longwave" UV) and the RED recorded it somewhat better than my 20D DSLR (which is not saying much). But I would not expect much UV sensitivity; any camera that is sensitive to UV will have problems reproducing accurate color under many lighting situations.

The only real answer will be found by testing it yourself under whatever specific lights you plan to use, since different UV lights have different spectra and the subject matters also. Often UV lights are used to cause visible-light fluorescence; and in that case you absolutely do NOT want your camera to record the UV, because it would wash out the fluorescent colors you're looking for. You might even want to add a UV-blocking filter. The cheap clear glass "UV filters" sold for SLR cameras do little or nothing for near-UV wavelengths like my 385 nm light, by the way, you want a more expensive dichroic-mirror type filter to block that.

I think it is pretty rare that you actually want UV sensitivity, unless you're shooting the few flowers with hidden UV patterns, and for that you need specialized cameras and usually specialized and rare ($$$) quartz lenses.

 

[benedictspence]

Cheers all and Jbeale!

Will try my dardendest to get a camera test done but I'm not too confident I'll be able to...

Plan is to get a bunch of UV paint and do a few dance sections of the music vid I'm shooting, blash them with some big UV lamps and see what happens. Will post the results!

 

[Dylan Macleod CSC]

Would love to hear the results Ben.

In the meantime...a sickly hilarious blacklight video from UK band The Klaxons...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy-mRFnBWiI

Enjoy.

Dylan Macleod
Cinematographer
Toronto, Canada
www.dylanmacleod.com

 

[Bruce Allen]

Mr Benedict Spence

Are you talking about:

1. fluorescent objects - eg you shine UV light at them and they emit light in *visible* spectrum - which Red records.

or

2. UV lighting - eg you shine UV light on things, and they reflect light in UV spectrum. Red has a filter on it which filters out all light except for UV.

?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com