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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Red for city nightscapes?

S

Sarah C.

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Hey guys, anyone got a demo shot/frame from a Red of a cityscape at night? Preferably something like a bird's-eye view with lots of dark buildings and street lights as the only lighting. I'm trying to convince a production group to .. GO RED for a certain shoot. My preference is to show a full size frame with none or little compression... want to see Red do better than a film camera!

thanks much!
~Sarah
 
I'm curious to shoot some tests...as my experience with low light tungten lit scenes has been abit underwhelming (at least with a T3 18-50). I assume it is still best to shoot at ASA320 in terms of the tradeoff between light level and noise!?
 
Hi thanks guys! I downloaded a night test reel by Gunleik. It looks like the blacks may have been intentionally crushed in grading? Also.. looks like the darker values are noisy.. and the darker the noisier. Does this sound typical for Red?

Here's a frame from the reel.. note how little detail.. well, about none is located in the blacks. (This is not meant to disrespect Mr. G.. I believe he/someone did this intentionally to somewhat hide the noise). I'm looking at this via a MacBook Pro with the LED screen.. so it may look even darker on some monitors!
~S

Gunleik_still.png
 
all images will have noise in the shadows, in fact that is what makes it a shadow, is a lack of good information in a certain area. For a good test for a city scape you want some superspeeds and maybe even a 360 shutter. But, if it were my production I'd use stills from a DSLR and add grain
 
Hey P.O.,

Yeah.. I know.. noise is going to happen. I was just hoping to have some form of proof that the Red could outperform a Genesis HD camera. So far I'm not seeing it. :( As for stills.. no can do.. likely our moving shot would be from a helicopter!

~S
 
Sarah, how the footage is processed will have more of an impact than which camera (Red One/Genesis) should be used. I do have footage shot in downtown LA at night using a Crane on a Shotmaker. It was shot at ISO 640 and has noise but it's quite well controlled because it was post processed correctly. Here is a 720P quicktime.

http://www.evingrant.com/flicks/BBCweb720.mov
 
Thanks, guys! Trick of it is.. I don't own a Red otherwise I'd go do some tests myself. Since the people I work with have not used a Red camera it's a tough sell and that's why I'm glad you guys are sharing some examples!! I know correcting the footage is key, that's why I'm glad you guys are able to share some ungraded material. Then I can even let others "play" with it here at work. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Red... I'm a fan even if I do not own a camera.

thx agn!
~Sarah
 
OK.. thanks again everyone for your help! I really enjoyed getting the uncorrected media so that I can see before/after correction to see how much damage is done to an image via color grading and sharpening. I imagine it would be even better to work directly with the RAW format.

Here' some comparisons of stills from the footage I got from Evin and Kenn. Evin: yours is over-cooked in terms of the black/shadow details. Maybe you are hiding the noise as a result from the color grading? Gunleik has the same effect.. could even be that it is better at full rez before you guys compressed into Quicktime. I took Kenn's uncorrected and just did a few seconds of color grading ala Photoshop to see what we've got to play with. It is evident that as soon as I began to tweak the image, noise begin to reveal itself. When I sharpened the image.. noise got all the more defined! I expected to see this. Kenn's footage is different from Evin's in that he has a lot more ambient light for fill. There are still some dark areas for me to study to see how bad the noise is and to what point can it be suppressed via grading and other... manipulations. So... below is just for fun... will be sending the QT's to some of my co-workers here about the Red camera. Thanks again!

Note: the jpeg compression made these worse than they should be.

Evin's Biker Dude
Notice how little shadow detail there is anywhere in this frame.. even on the helmet, jacket, building in the background..which should have some! I'm guessing this is like Gunleik's images.. it got graded and then the compression was the nail in the coffin.
RedOne_Biker.jpg


Kenn's more ambient NY scene
Flat to begin with(uncorrected image)
NY_001.jpg


Kenn's NY scene with Photoshop
Brief Sarah Color Grading/Sharpening
I tried to balance the contrast without causing too much noise. Note the sky.. that's telling of what got boosted: noise. Happened from the color tweak and sharpening.. but also understand I was NOT working with the RAW image, but a lower rez one.
NY_001-PS3.jpg


~S
 
Tico said:
Sarah, over at redrelay.net you may find suitable exterior night shots in R3D. I suggest the Shibuya district clip from Visceral Psyche (I believe).
Click to expand...

Looks too bright for my purpose... I'm needing to look at footage that is mostly dark. Thanks for the thought! Much appreciated. Kenn's will do. It is a little on the bright/ambient side but there are some values that go very dark.

~Sarah
 
that taxi shot shows how vital CCing skills are to any cinematographer or editor working with RAW. good job on that, especially working off burned-in images. looks good on my monitor.
 
Sarah here is the frame you pulled as a 4K DPX. I exported it from RA using Red Log which will look flat and awful but gives you the highest precision transcode from the RAW data to DPX so you can play with it in Photoshop.

(Control/left click to download 32MB)
http://www.4kninjas.net/pics/BBC4klog.dpx
 
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