Red Dragon for Stills & Film

[Jesper Hammarbäck]

Hi,

I meet Inez and Vinoodh and talk about that we often used the RED camera to take out stills.

Now the 9 oct I will have a test to make a fashion lookbook and take out the stills.

Is there any way to get good sharp images with high shutter speed and also record a second video for film that have a slower setting?

Or how do they do it?

Best,
Jesper

 

[Brad Allen]

There's a few ways you could probably approach this:

1. Overcrank/Slowmotion
If you shoot at a higher framerate, then even when shooting with a 180 degree shutter, you're still going to be having something relatively sharp. Or you may even prefer to shoot with a 90degree shutter to improve upon this effect without affecting the "feel" of the motion too much.

2. HDRX
If you shoot with HDRX enabled, you are essentially shooting two exposures simultaneously - one with a slower shutter for motion and one with a faster shutter speed for highlight protection. You could use this to allow you to capture both formats simultaneously. Beware though - you cannot afford to starve the sensor of light in any capacity if you are wanting to pull decent stills from the higher shutter speed stuff. However much over-protection you dial in is how underexposed that frame actually is. I would highly recommend doing some tests before hand in this case, as your still frames have the potential to be nosier than your motion footage.

3. Compromise
Work out if stills or motion is the priority for the shoot and tailor your shutter speed accordingly knowing that you will have some compromise for the lesser intended use.

Hope this helps!

 

[Michael Tiemann]

Brad's advice is spot-on. If you can get close enough to what you want with overcranking, great. If you have to use HDRx, then...

If you are using STH OLPF, let your A-track images be 1-1.5 stops over-exposed (highlights will be protected) and aim for 1/2 stop underexposure of your X-track images.

If you are using LLO OLPF, let your A-track images be 0.5 stops over-exposed and aim for 1-1.5 stop underexposure of your X-track images (shadows will be OK).

At 25fps, a 180 degree shutter is 1/50th, 90 degree shutter is 1/100th. A 1.5 stop difference gives you a range of 1/150th to 1/300th. A 2 stop difference gives you a range of 1/200th to 1/400th.

Either way (overcranking or HDRx) you are going to massively increase the nominal data rate of your project, which means you have to compensate with higher compression ratios and/or smaller resolution settings. Therefore you have to validate that not only are you getting the shutter speeds you need for your stills, and the necessary exposure you need for your stills, but also the image quality (REDCODE compression and resolution) you want. EPIC DRAGON will likely impress you on these counts. SCARLET DRAGON will likely come up short.

 

[Serge Polevitzky]

Michael -- slightly off topic, but what is the best HDRx workflow ? I have an Epic Dragon & basically follow what you suggest for the STH OLPF, and then in REDCine-X 37, I set 'blend' to where it 'looks good.'
Fine. I then 'Save RMD'. But none of Resolve 12 (just released final version), FCP-X 10.2.2, or AE CC 2014 seem to pick up the 'blended' output ... only what appears to be the 'A' track. So I've been
'Exporting' as a way to get the 'blended' results out of REDCine-X 37. The export is taking a very long time, as in 22 hours for a 37 second 6K original clip exported as a 4096-2160 ProRes 4444 4K output on an 8-core 2013 MacPro w/ two D700s. (Also, there doesn't seem to be a ProRes 4444XQ output option in REDCine-X 37's Export, while 4444XQ is available in just about every other app. ... ?)

Thanks -
Serge

 

[Michael Tiemann]

Serge,

As I've said before, when I do use HDRx, it's to capture stills with less motion blur, not to actually blend the two images. If I over-expose my video by 0.5-1 stops and under-expose my stills by 0.5-1 stops, I gain 1/2 to 1/4 the motion blur in my stills, which can make the difference between tack-sharp and not.

That said, I pulled up some of my HDRx streams into CC 2015, and it does just fine reading the RMD file correctly. DaVinci 12 does not (as you have found). I haven't tried exporting the blended results because, again, I don't blend. I also have an 8-core 2013 nMP with a pair of D700s.

 

[Alberto Guglielmi]

Are you guys shooting with Epic or Scarlet?
I am trying to decide which way to go. Dragon is the choice, but which camera I am not sure.
Scarlet is way less expensive, and I can take stills at 6K. But I have the feeling I won't be able to do motion and stills together. Is there a way to set the camera to shoot stills at 6K and do 5K motion at the same time?

Epic of course is more capable. It is just a $ issue

 

[Michael Tiemann]

You cannot do different resolutions at the same time. You pick a a resolution, HDRx or not, a frame rate, a shutter angle, a REDCODE level of compression, aperture, and lighting levels and you are off to the races. For SCARLET DRAGON, those choices are a lot, lot more limited than EPIC DRAGON. I'm very happy with the 5K/24p/8:1 images that come from my SCARLET. But I'm also glad I can do more with my EPIC when needed. You can of course buy a SCARLET and rent an EPIC when needed.