RED MX IMAGES APPEAR BETTER THAN SCARLET-X

[Brett Harrison]

There is one thing I see a bit when I teach, (which is not a thing I claim to always be able to live by), and that is that people insist on taking bad images.

They see it in the monitor that the composition, lighting or motion sucks, and still insist on grabbing that frame, because they don't have the capacity to make new decissions when the original plan didn't work. And then they frequently start blaming the camera...

That has made up my 1st rule of thumb when teaching:

• Don't take bad images!

Also explained a bit in the sentence:

• If you think what you see looks like it sucks, it probably does.

Sometimes I think it looks like people expose and compose like it had no consequence, and somehow magically expect "Pirates" or "Girl with the dragon tattoo" or "Spiderman" to show up in post.

I can reveal a secret:

It won't. Even though it is shot on RED and graded in Resolve...

I took around 3,000 images with a little Canon s95 and it was funny to compare the first images with the last images in lightroom. It was like somewhere along the way I had somehow discovered the 'awesome' switch on the camera. Even in thumbnail you can see the design is so much better in the last third compared with the first two. That's why artists start out with a thumbnail sketch before progressing to a fully-blown art work: there's no point progressing until you've got the basics right.