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RED DRAGON VS. F65 TEST HELP

jacob.schwarz

jacob.schwarz

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Reduser Family,

I have a technical client that really wants me to shoot on the F65 claiming that it is sharper. They have done test in the past with the Epic MX which is were there statement comes from. Now i don't know anything about the circumstance of that test but all the same i want to shoot on the dragon and need some firepower. Do any of you guys out there have side-by-side of a dragon vs. f65? I had a F65 lined up here in Utah to do my own test but they just bailed on me and all my LA contract say that their F65 are unavailable to run the test for me and have never done test in the past.

So if any of you have test frames or have access to both a Dragon and F65 and could help me out that would be great. I personally think the dragon with it more photosites holds up just awesome.

Thanks,

Jacob
 
I have done HDR test with an F65, not sharpness, but it did looked a bit sharper, in raw. The f65 was the best picture I had ever seen at the time (a year ago). I'm not even sure if Dragon is better.

The big downer about the f65 is the physical size and the media (size and workflow). It is seriously heavy on both.

We shot something like 18Tb a night, 9 per cam, as it was HDR with a 3D rig.
With a USB3 offload on 2 separated machines, it wasn't fast enough to keep the pace, we had to take some breaks and the DIT couldn't sleep continusly for 4 days in a row.
The picture is darn good, but I never want to shoot with it again. Too heavy these days. 10 years ago it would have been fine, but nowadays, it's unacceptable, even with a better sharpness

And by the way, it depends on the lenses you put on. WIth S2-S3 lenses, the Dragon and the F65 could be very similar as they resolve more than the lenses themselves
 
I found someone in LA that is going to do the test for me. I can post the results if anyone is interested.
 
Will do. Personally i really hate when clients make camera request. If they like what i shoot just let me shoot with my camera :-)
 
I've done side by sides, with the same lens, answer the answer is yes and no.
So many factors coming into play with outputting or transcoding your raw data on both cameras.
The Sony if you blow the image up to 800% you can see a tiny bit more sharpness, but you start to see a edge artefact which tells me that some sort of basic sharping is being applied in camera. They say there is know sharpening applied, but the edge artefact which you only see at 800% on the sharpest lines appears... RED you don't see that artefact at all.
When you process the files through what ever process you like, RED can get even sharper without edge degradation like the Sony.
In RCX there are multiple different export settings, Mitchell smooth is default, sync sharpness makes things crazy sharp.. to sharp I feel.
But if your talking straight off the chip, with no sharpening added from any of the two cameras.. and using the identical lenses. My thinking is that they are evenly matched... Until you ZOOM deep into the sony and see that little edge sharpening thingy..

Sony f65 despite the size of it and how massive the files are still is a benchmark of digital capture to which I feel only Dragon has equaled if not slightly surpassed.


I dug up this old test from years ago with the F35...

7d_f35_redone.jpg



red-f65_nab.jpg


Sony_Arri_Epic_2.jpg
 
Mark - While you are on this subject. Do you have a go-to amount of sharpening and noise reduction for RED-MX files? Do you use Red's tools for noise reduction and sharpening or tools somewhere else (Resolve, Scratch, NLE based etc...)

Thanks

-Michael
 
Maybe try and get Red or a rental house to do the test? I could get my Dragon committed to a test at Abel NYC, and chances are they got a F65 on the shelf anyway for the above issues. What lens choice would you want and do you want to try and hold off for the new Dragon firmware? What kind of time constraint do we have?

edit I hit refresh and see that you already have a test lined up now. Please keep me posted regardless on the results... I agree with Toia, the workflow becomes a huge factor with this as far as what codecs your going to be using and outputting from..
 
F55 not having dynamic range of mx? That hasn't been my experience, were you shooting raw or log? There's 14 stops there in the f55 for sure...
 
jacob.schwarz said:
I have a technical client that really wants me to shoot on the F65 claiming that it is sharper. They have done test in the past with the Epic MX which is were there statement comes from.
Click to expand...
Ask them why they believe the sharper camera is necessarily the best camera. There's a lot more to performance than just sharpness alone, and I would balance workflow effectiveness, storage costs, speed of debayering, practicality of workflow in color correction, dynamic range, color accuracy, and many other factors.

BTW: I know of some major Hollywood projects shot on Red that were image enhanced and heavily noise-reduced in post. And by that I mean some major, Oscar-nominated pictures. Even in those cases, sharpness is one of those things that's (literally) a two-edged sword.

As far as I'm concerned, this is a Mercedes vs. BMW comparison. Both great products, both with many pros and cons, both effective in the right hands. Me personally, I don't think the F65 has the most practical workflow out there, and I would lean more towards the F55 in that regard if I had a choice.
 
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