RED DSMC Motion Mount has arrived!

[D Fuller]

Phil,

While you are testing things, would you try testing some dimable led practical lights. Either strip lights or the Edison-replacement types. Since LEDs dim by changing frequency, the present a real challenge to the standard Epic MX shutter. (I've been shooting a lot of them lately, and they are a real challenge.) I'd love to know if the Motion Mount's global shutter can deal with that.

 

[Matt Ryan]

Motion footage with motion mount vs standard mount or you don't have the mount yet haha

And some strobes or camera flashes with each. Really excited to see how this works.

 

[Phil Holland]

Phil,

While you are testing things, would you try testing some dimable led practical lights. Either strip lights or the Edison-replacement types. Since LEDs dim by changing frequency, the present a real challenge to the standard Epic MX shutter. (I've been shooting a lot of them lately, and they are a real challenge.) I'd love to know if the Motion Mount's global shutter can deal with that.

Tricky one. A lot of these act differently. I have a various LED stuff here. Panels, fixtures, bulbs, etc... I'll see what I can do.

Motion footage with motion mount vs standard mount or you don't have the mount yet haha

And some strobes or camera flashes with each. Really excited to see how this works.

Based on what I'm seeing the Motion Mount in ND Only Mode is pretty much the standard mount. Although, I'll likely include that with the field tests.

Strobes and flashes for sure.


Just wanted to knock out a couple quickies before the weekend for y'all to look at.

 

[Vadim Bobkovsky]

I love the frame grabs with motion mount on and dare I say you look badass Phil, not sure if MM helps with that . Would be interesting to see some motion with soft shutter, but that will come eventually I guess.

 

[Patrick Grossien]

Just wanted to knock out a couple quickies before the weekend for y'all to look at.

Phil as usual sharing his wealth of knowledge and his time in experimenting with the new stuff! A big

THANK YOU!

should be going out to the man once more!

 

[Sam Winzar]

Looks great so far! I think this is going to be perfect paired with the Dragon as well you have a useable ISO of 2000, losing 1.6 stops isn't really an issue.

One thing I'd like to know is if the Motion Mount plays well with Polarising filters?

 

[Phil Holland]

One thing I'd like to know is if the Motion Mount plays well with Polarising filters?

I've got a circular polarizer and 1/4 wave retarders both in 0 and 45 degrees.

I did a simple test today, but I'll have more sample images soon.

 

[Mick van Rossum NSC]

Phil, great tests. One thing I noticed while playing around with it at IBC was when slowly dialing in the ND's with 0,1 increments some color shifts (warmer/cooler) occured. When talking to some Red technicians about it they said that they saw what I saw but could not figure out if it was some kind of reset at the LCD or something else. Just curious if you noticed it as well.
Cheers

 

[Phil Holland]

Phil, great tests. One thing I noticed while playing around with it at IBC was when slowly dialing in the ND's with 0,1 increments some color shifts (warmer/cooler) occured. When talking to some Red technicians about it they said that they saw what I saw but could not figure out if it was some kind of reset at the LCD or something else. Just curious if you noticed it as well.
Cheers

Yep. That's the color change effect I mentioned. It appears, and this is theory, but as you increase or decrease your ND value there's a dip to warmer or cooler and then it "adjusts". In the manual there's mention of "new color science" that's just for the Motion Mount apparently. I think this actually somehow effects the REDCODE RAW file itself and is applied in Redcine-X Pro in someway, shape, or form. From what I can discern it doesn't effect the quality of the file in any way, which is good.

All theory, but based off my observations I think that's how it's working.

 

[Maik Müller]

+1 what Patrick said. Thank you Phil for your detailed reports, tests and sharing your thoughts. This is really helpful. It's great to have you here.

Looking forward to see some motion-samples.

 

[Christopher Probst]

I simultaneously did my own tests of the motion mount and came up with several very different conclusions. I'm en route to New Zealand now, however, and did not save the images of my test from the SSD. It was quick and dirty for the information that I needed for my shoot. I did try to get Phil involved so that he could take the information here, but I couldn't get him to respond in time.

Either way, I'll try to write up something formal later, but in general I did much more rigorous tests of IR performance under tungsten lighting and matching it with all combinations of IR filtration out there...

I also tested strobes with the various shutter modes and under different frame rates.

 

[Terry VerHaar]

This seems to be some really badass technology RED has developed. Get's me wondering what else they can come up with when they have a little scotch and get to brainstorming.

 

[Phil Holland]

but I couldn't get him to respond in time.

I was off at a meeting, picking up stuff for the tests, and shooting some tests later in the day. Sorry I missed you before your flight.

One thing I noticed was an interesting artifact that shows up in an extreme whip pan at higher frame rates using the Motion Mount Modes. I'll have a concise video up soon and more stills.

Based on some quick looks last night I can see high speed flicker control on crazy LED lighting is still the golden zone for the normal mount. While you can do high speed with it there are certain caveats and shutter limitations regarding dimmed LED sources. It's actually the same nonsense we deal with from those sources on any camera, but a little more restricted.

That said, under most types of conditions, so far I'm impressed.

 

[Will Keir]

Phil,

What if you find fatal flaws in the motion mount?

There are several at us looking closely at the motion mount. This device could be revolutionary, it could be a beta on it's way to changing the way we think about exposure. We just don't know without proper testing, I'm excited about your tests, thanks for your support.

 

[Will Keir]

Thoughts? Did it earn a place with you on your New Zealand shoot?

I simultaneously did my own tests of the motion mount and came up with several very different conclusions. I'm en route to New Zealand now, however, and did not save the images of my test from the SSD. It was quick and dirty for the information that I needed for my shoot. I did try to get Phil involved so that he could take the information here, but I couldn't get him to respond in time.

Either way, I'll try to write up something formal later, but in general I did much more rigorous tests of IR performance under tungsten lighting and matching it with all combinations of IR filtration out there...

I also tested strobes with the various shutter modes and under different frame rates.

 

[Will Keir]

Dragon will give us 2-3 more stops of light? We lose one stop with the MM, total net gain of 1-2 stops.

I think I'd just take the MM off for low light stuff. Is there any reason to need IR filtering in low light situations? Only need in bright locations that stopping down is required, am I right?

EDIT: what Phil said! I believe it's good to leave on for a lot of the standard shooting. Just think about when you didn't need to use an ND or how often you need low light capabilities. Maybe with the Dragon this turns out even more in favor for the motion mount.

 

[Phil Holland]

Phil,

What if you find fatal flaws in the motion mount?

There are several at us looking closely at the motion mount. This device could be revolutionary, it could be a beta on it's way to changing the way we think about exposure. We just don't know without proper testing, I'm excited about your tests, thanks for your support.

Believe me. I'm every bit as interested. This thing cost me a good chunk of change and I'm really putting it through it's paces on how I and we can use it on set and location.

If I find fatal flaws I report them to Red and advise you guys on how to avoid them out in the field like I have in the past. Nothing for me to really hide from anybody. Unless it starts shooting gold bars out at me.

As mentioned I'm seeing something funky on really, really extreme whip pans at higher FPS with Motion Mount shutter modes enabled, you don't see the artifact under ND Only though. Although under other conditions you can certainly avoid it, I'll show images with that. I have a theory. There are the "strobe safe" guidelines within the Motion Mount Manual that tell you what shutter speeds are safe and "none" when it's not. I'm thinking that this correlates to extreme movement, so when it says "none" there you should be super careful as perhaps it can produce motion artifacts.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about in the Square Shutter:



To keep this simple I'll refer to this as "fast movement ghosting" in the future".

So a safe extremely fast pan at 5K can exist up to 75 fps in Soft or Square mode. I learned that yesterday in about 2 hours of testing.

I've also found an interesting bug in relation to the Motion Mount and Redcine-X Pro that doesn't "hurt" the footage, but may shock you when you first see a very weirdly blue or orange image. Simply moving the white balance slider in RCX seems to make that vanish btw.

Again not something I'm seeing in ND Only mode, which is nice. So you still have access to "as expected" performance and decent range of shutter angles to choose from.


One thing I can say straight up is that the ND Only Mode works pretty much like we hoped. There is a "warning" in the manual about going to 8 stops of ND, the maximum, and having your lens set to wider apertures. They refer to it as "Out-Of-Focus Field Modification". It's certainly noticeable on focus pulls as it spreads the bokeh out diagonally and in static shots if you look very closely you can see some color aberrations to the out of focus area. You can see it in the examples I posted actually. However, this is cleaned up in two ways. The manual recommends adding a 1.2 ND into the mix to give you 4 stops and then you can use the Motion Mount to add 4 stops on top of that if you need to shoot "WFO" wide open. I notice it clears up with my particular lenses somewhere between T2.8 and T4, the manual states T4 so that makes sense.

Chris did some tungsten tests and I'll also be doing similar. I use primarily daylight sources ranging from natural light, HMI, flouro, and LED. That's what I looked at first. Did a bit of that late last night. I have a bunch of tungsten here though and I'll take a look too.

One thing I can say for LED users that have dimmable sources is there's certainly some crazy things going on with those as always. The Motion Mount is modulating at a different frequency and those themselves get silly when dimmed, so you'll see variation during a shot. Not good. A solution though is to simply use ND on the lights and use them at full power if you need to control them. I keep sheets of ND .3 and .9 handy for all my lights FYI because of this. This actually spawned more so from the limitations of using LED in a dimmed state for any high speed work.


I think this new Motion Mount is going to take a bit of getting used to for those who dig deep. So far though from my first 1/2 day of just making observations it's working pretty nice with all modes between 24-75 fps. ND Only is "business as usual".


On the less critical side of things I'm rather smitten with the concept of taking the camera outside in broad daylight without anything else and just being able to shoot while having decent control over my aperture.

As Red shooters we're typically shooting between ISO 320 and 800. Dragon's going to be likely land in the 800-2000 range. Straight away just attaching the Motion Mount to the camera turns it into an ISO 106 (if 320 is your native ISO) or ISO 264 (if 800 is your native ISO) camera. Pretty interesting stuff.

Btw. If you crank a full 8 stops and rate at ISO 320 you are essentially seeing an ISO 1 image.

 

[Will Keir]

What about IR filtration?

 

[Phil Holland]

What about IR filtration?

I'll be doing more tests, but did you see post #34? That's straight out of the camera at 8 stops. Very good daylight performance. Haven't done tungsten yet. Coming up for sure.

That black shirt turns purple, real purple under really hard ND filtration.

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showth...has-arrived!&p=1261197&viewfull=1#post1261197

 

[Phil Holland]

Okay. This is an important one.


Circular Polarizers, Variable ND, and Quarter Wave Retarders

The Motion Mount itself has a built in linear polarizer built into it. This could potential create some unwanted effects in rather specific conditions, but what's more interesting is how we can use that to our advantage.

All images below are straight out of camera, REDcolor3/REDgamma3, no corrections made.


Circular Polarizers

We all have Circular Polarizers and use them regularly. Enriching colors, increasing contrast, and controlling unwanted reflections. But one of the most asked questions I've had in the last couples days is what exactly a Circular Polarizer does when combined with the Motion Mount.

Here you go:




So if you look at that image carefully you'll notice rotating the Circular Polarizer isn't doing what it normally does. This is due to the linear polarizer built in to the Motion Mount. However, it is slowly changing the color temperature from warm to cool as you rotate.

---

Variable Neutral Density Using a Circular Polarizer

If you flip over a Circular Polarizer, in this case I'm using a 4x5.65" Schneider True Pola, you can indeed create a Variable ND filter. Not something I'm actually fond of doing, but it's certainly something people do use. The key thing about this technique is you must be mindful of how far you go. When getting close to the maximum darkness you can indeed effect the quality of your material. This has been one of my major issues with using a Variable ND for all your work.

Check out the image below. Rotated just slightly without changing the exposure:





So just what exactly happens when you choose the dark side? Meaning looking into the Reversed Circular Polarizer set to visible black. Well you get into a weird world of color, IR contamination, and optical artifacts. Somewhat to be expected at such a high density.

This shot was taken at T2 straight into the sun:





You'll notice I'm using the Motion Mount's Soft Shutter at it's maximum 4 stops as well as the maximum on the Reversed Circular Polarizer. It's here where you can actually reveal some IR contamination. I have no idea what the actual ND value is here, but I'd say we're talking in the ND 3.9 range if I had to take a stab at it. This is an extreme example, but I wanted to show you guys what happens if you go way too far off the rails:





However, used with a deft hand and within reason you can indeed use this technique to produce usable images. Personally I'd just add an ND 0.9 or 1.2 into the mix, but if you're in a pinch it's good to know you can indeed produce "normal" looking images:





Again, please be aware and keep in mind. If you got to the extremes you'll get some funky colors and a noticeable dip in image quality.

---

Quarter Wave Retarder

The next logical question here is how do you produce that Circular Polarized Effect and get all that control back into your hands. Well if you've done high end 3D work you already know the answer. It comes in the shape of a Quarter Wave Retarder. I tested today Schneider 0 and 45 degree Quarter Wave Retarders, I'd say a 0 would do you just fine. They are essentially the same, just a different angle of orientation when dropped into the filter tray.

Here's what it looks like:




There we go. Reflections controlled. Mischief Managed.

What is cool about a Quarter Waver Retarder is you don't really lose any additional light. So it doesn't really effect your exposure at all. Optically it's essentially clear.


Okay. I hope that helps and clears things up for a few people. I did more studying of captured material today than I expected. Tomorrow and Monday I'll go out into the scary real world and get some practical shooting done.

Now that I have "hard" ideas about how to get the best out of Motion Mount I can go out in the field.