RED Weapon Forged CF #47 "Skully" - Los Angeles

[Patrick Kendall]

Phil, did you have to turn in your old PL mount when you upgraded?

 

[Phil Holland]

Phil, did you have to turn in your old PL mount when you upgraded?

Why yes I did. In fact RED does indeed inspect the mount and all that. I believe it was mentioned somewhere that they were making sure it's up to snuff for future use. I also think when they inspect the camera you are upgrading RED is using those mounts as part of the inspection. During the upgrade process my PL Mount was "released" after my camera cleared inspection (yay!).

Phil... I love you, but hate you right now. Every one of these that trickle out of RED HQ makes me wish I had paid for the Forged upgrade. Oh, well. I guess I can wait a bit longer. I keep telling myself that I really don't need the Weapon until 8K arrives anyway. Which is true.

Congrats. I'm sure you will do great things with Skully.

Thank you Jeff.

Forged made more and more sense for me. Specifically for one client I'm working for that has led to 2 other clients. 8K will also play a role there. I'm very curious to see where this little Weapon goes. It's been an informative day of testing. I think at the moment, at least how I've been feeling out Weapon for these early tests, the Auto Black Shade is just crazy convenient. Absurdly functional. That and I've been itching to shoot at lower REDCODE RAW Compression Ratios for a while. Specifically between 5K-6K. The images are indeed different and improved compared to my RED Epic Dragon. Hard to describe at the moment, but I'm working on a rational explanation. I haven't taken the STH OLPF off the camera yet, but ISO 800 is looking real sweet.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Doubt you'll have time to test it Phil, but I'm very curious to see the difference in color reproduction between the STH and STD OLPFs on Weapon with all other variables controlled. I'd be particularly interested in seeing how the two images compared at various Kelvin temps - 2,800/3,200/4,000/5,600/8,000. Also would be fun to see how each OLPF stack performs on a hot day in the desert with talent wearing black shirts made from different materials to judge the character of any IR pollution that snuck in under extreme conditions.

So if you have a bunch of free time ;-)

Cheers - #19

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Doubt you'll have time to test it Phil, but I'm very curious to see the difference in color reproduction between the STH and STD OLPFs on Weapon with all other variables controlled. I'd be particularly interested in seeing how the two images compared at various Kelvin temps - 2,800/3,200/4,000/5,600/8,000. Also would be fun to see how each OLPF stack performs on a hot day in the desert with talent wearing black shirts made from different materials to judge the character of any IR pollution that snuck in under extreme conditions.

So if you have a bunch of free time ;-)

Cheers - #19

STH is so much better for color. Which reminds me I still need to post some examples of why I ALWAYS try to recommend STH over LLO - unless you are really, really screwed on light.

RED should have called it the NO LIGHT OLPF - cause STO is just fine in "LOW" light.

I do not have a STANDARD yet to test - looking forward to that.

Just FYI - I just started testing NISI ND filters - and my initial findings are rather shocking - as they pretty much bitch slap the hell out of all the usual suspects with respect to color shifts - WAY better that TIFFEN. I'm on West Coast next early next week but I'll post examples from my tests hopefully next Friday. But these filters are seriously no joke and DITs and colorists are gonna love 'em.

 

[Matthew Quinn]

all i have to say is bad ass. /Drool

 

[scott devitte]

STH is so much better for color. Which reminds me I still need to post some examples of why I ALWAYS try to recommend STH over LLO - unless you are really, really screwed on light.

RED should have called it the NO LIGHT OLPF - cause STO is just fine in "LOW" light.

I do not have a STANDARD yet to test - looking forward to that.

Just FYI - I just started testing NISI ND filters - and my initial findings are rather shocking - as they pretty much bitch slap the hell out of all the usual suspects with respect to color shifts - WAY better that TIFFEN. I'm on West Coast next early next week but I'll post examples from my tests hopefully next Friday. But these filters are seriously no joke and DITs and colorists are gonna love 'em.

+1 on the NISI. Picked up a full set at IBC. Can't wait for their variable nd.

 

[Nathan Apffel]

Phil,

Congratulations on your weapon, we are all excited to see what you find!

We have been in line on a Weapon MG since a day or two of Red opening the deposit program. We will eventually step up to 8K (not rushing).

After seeing what a lot of people are saying, it seems the forge and carbon will have the largest quality bump in regards to compression, data transfer and final image. The form factor of the current Dragon suits my needs just fine, the only reason I am upgrading is for future upgrade paths and image quality upgrades.

Quick question, and I am just looking for your personal opinion here.

Do you think the weapon MG is a 'big enough' upgrade to merit the investment, or would you suggest pushing towards a forged body to get the 300mb/s, etc actual image quality upgrade?

 

[Phil Holland]

STH and STD OLPFs

Certainly, there will come a time when I need to do "the whole thing all over again". I tested the STH and LLO OLPFs rather thoroughly in the best, at least 3 times from my post here on REDuser.

I am a bit with Mark on this one as I do prefer shooting with the STH for a lot of reasons. Initial impressions are it's "still good" with some improvements due to Weapon tech. Improved optical path, perhaps some sensor related electronic things, and the lower REDCODE RAW Compression Ratios do wonders.

NISI ND filters

I will need to test those NISI NDs agains the Formatt/Hitech Firecrest NDs. Big time.

Do you think the weapon MG is a 'big enough' upgrade to merit the investment, or would you suggest pushing towards a forged body to get the 300mb/s, etc actual image quality upgrade?

That's going to be a thing for everybody to decide for themselves. What I can say is I spent two weeks with early Weapon MG cameras and tested them out a bit. You do see the various gains by having a lower compression ratio as well as wherever that 1/2 a stop of shadow improvement occurs. In that sense it is indeed a worthy" upgrade to Epic and especially Scarlet Dragons.

 

[Michael Jarvis]

That is a thing of beauty Phil.

 

[Patrick Kendall]

During the upgrade process my PL Mount was "released" after my camera cleared inspection (yay!).

Thanks Phil. So just to clarify, Red took your old PL mount and gave you the new MG PL in it's place as part of the upgrade deal for CF package? Or did you end up with both PL mounts in the end? thanks.

-patrick

 

[Phil Holland]

Thanks Phil. So just to clarify, Red took your old PL mount and gave you the new MG PL in it's place as part of the upgrade deal for CF package? Or did you end up with both PL mounts in the end? thanks.

-patrick

Correct. And I'm holding onto both of my mounts at the moment because I have no idea how the 8K upgrade is going to work with the PL Mounts, but I do know the 8K PL Mount will be "slightly different" in terms of the flocking and matte design.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Correct. And I'm holding onto both of my mounts at the moment because I have no idea how the 8K upgrade is going to work with the PL Mounts, but I do know the 8K PL Mount will be "slightly different" in terms of the flocking and matte design.

Hmm, As the Ti PL is 2000usd I find it odd that red sells us a new mount in the upgrade and let us keep the old one.

What´s the improvement of the Mg weapon mount except it´s Mg? I can´t say I been having any kind of trouble with my Ti mount so I dont really understand why I need a new one.

is there any new electronics or such in the new mount? If not I will stick to the ti one.

 

[Patrick Kendall]

Okay, understood. Thanks Phil.

Hmm, As the Ti PL is 2000usd I find it odd that red sells us a new mount in the upgrade and let us keep the old one.

What´s the improvement of the Mg weapon mount except it´s Mg? I can´t say I been having any kind of trouble with my Ti mount so I dont really understand why I need a new one.

is there any new electronics or such in the new mount? If not I will stick to the ti one.

Bjorn, It's "given" to you as part of the upgrade deal for CF if I'm a correct. Whereas the MG package doesn't get the new MG PL mount. but yeah, I would rather knock $3500 off the price if it's not needed... It was a little bit unclear (when I talked to my Red Rep) if we had to turn in and lose our old PL mounts, so it sounds like to me we get to keep it and end up with two.

 

[ignition]

Ahhh so excited our REDuser Godfather of RED Imagery (that's you, Phil!!) has his crafty paws on the beast itself... expecting many enlightening technical and philosophical posts to follow

Skully indeed... a nod to Weapon's iconography and pleasingly familiar to the female lead of a certain cult TV show that originally aired in 1993 (and would love a reboot shot on Weapon, I'm sure...)

Looking forward to your musings, sir.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

Hi Phil,

Congratulations on your RED Weapon... it looks awesome! I was wondering about the auto black shade calibration... do you know in which situations that it would be better to manually calibrate? Better yet.. is the auto black calibration working as well as you would expect it to?

 

[Jake Wilganowski]

Super quick and very important question, do weapons internal 3d luts display on the red screen or just the sdi/hdmi outs? I know the OMOD luts don't work with red screens, so would b very cool if the internal luts did

 

[Mikael Lubtchansky]

Super quick and very important question, do weapons internal 3d luts display on the red screen or just the sdi/hdmi outs? I know the OMOD luts don't work with red screens, so would b very cool if the internal luts did

It does. I think LUTs can be applied to any monitor path / output on WEAPON.

 

[Jake Wilganowski]

Super cool

 

[Phil Holland]

Phil, what's the power-up time on your forged Weapon? Know what the differences are between that and the other Weapon bodies?

I think it's like 30-38 seconds. However, there's a firmware update coming next month that's going to cut that in approximately half according to Jarred, so I haven't really even bothered timing it yet.

Yesterday I did have the Forged Weapon on it's first "actual" shoot outside of my weirdo initial tests. I think that would be the 5th day I've had the camera.




For this shoot 3X REDVOLT XLs worked fine. I'll likely have thoughts on those by Wednesday in terms of their ability to hold a charge and all that.

Weapon itself was set to 5.5K HD @ 3:1 ISO 800 with the STH, which I'm liking a lot. Whatever RED did between the new Optical Path Design, Processing. elimination of weird artifacts (CMOST smear); has improved the image quality and noise across the image. Combined with the lower REDCODE RAW Compression Ratios, ISO 800 on Dragon hasn't looked this good until now. This footage will be available soon. Have some more work to do on this small project today first.

 

[sergio arguello]

I'm still struggling to commit. And not that I don't think the new weapon cameras are awesome, because they are.

But my internal math meter tells me not to blow another 150k (x3 Cameras) + accessories and only really get PRORES as and extra over the EPIC, when i don't really use PRORES that much .. mmmm

Phil, Hit me with some solid reasons why I'm going to be 150k better off.

RED should not have built the EPIC DRAGON so well. I'm now struggling to swap it out.

Maybe I just wait until the 8K is mass delivered.... It's sure to be better in every-way. mmmmm.... thinking thinking...

your not alone...i was directly inline to do the whole thing and reading the spec sheet its exactly that a epic dragon in a tuxedo that gives pro-res. I have too many jobs that still need DNXHd
and not only that but a DIT i love and would miss not seeing on set.