REDCINE export washed out

[Florin Andrei]

I don't own a RED camera, but I'm planning to get a Scarlet when it's released.

I'm playing with REDCINE build 108. I downloaded the shuttle launch video from RedRelay:

http://redrelay.net/owners/0206/

Using REDCINE I did an export to something close to Blu-Ray: HD 1080, QuickTime, MPEG-4, maximum quality, 25Mb/s.

EDIT: That was H.264, not MPEG4. It's H.264 that has issues, MPEG4 is fine from a gamma curve perspective (but I'm not 100% convinced there's no corruption anywhere in the file).

There's a pretty big difference between the looks of the .r3d file played by REDCINE, and the .mov that resulted from the conversion. The result looks washed out.

I assume I can play with the settings in REDCINE to adjust the look of the output, but my question is, why does REDCINE display the image in one way, and exports it in another way? I expected it's WYSIWYG.

 

[Shawn Booth]

Welcome to the world of RED -

from your screen grab I can see you didn't make any adjustments to the file, you just exported it. But also, it appears you downloaded a video, not the .r3d file. Is that correct?

EDIT: Nope you are working with .r3d files - you'll need to adjust the image. What are your project settings? Why MPEG out of REDCINE? Try and wait to compress using Compressor.

 

[Florin Andrei]

I am using the .r3d file. I exported to a format I thought would be accessible to the AVCHD authoring application I'm using - ArcSoft Total Media Extreme (very simple and cheap). I want to generate an AVCHD disc (poor man's Blu-Ray) out of this shot, and play it on the PS3 at 1080 resolution.

OK, I clearly mistook REDCINE for a WYSIWYG application. I was not even aware there are adjustments I need to make - that was the first time I ever used REDCINE.
If it's not too much to ask - if you could tell me briefly what I need to do I'll make the adjustments and try again.

EDIT: What happened is that in the Color screen I pulled the controls and noticed that the image displayed by the application responds to the changes. I changed the color balance, yup, the image does change. Changed brightness, sure thing, it does get adjusted.
So then I looked at the image with all the controls to neutral and I thought it looks OK for a first attempt. So I just exported it.
Much to my surprise, the exported version looks very different from the image played by REDCINE.

 

[Shawn Booth]

If it's not too much to ask - if you could tell me briefly what I need to do I'll make the adjustments and try again.

Like you said, if you make adjustments you see them. Have a go at it and see what you like.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to be able to tell you what to do. See what you like, play around. I can say in the curves window, a simple S curve is a good place to start.

Do you have a broadcast monitor? Scopes?

 

[Florin Andrei]

Yes, I did define several different curves, and it showed up on the viewer in REDCINE. The problem is, what I see in the REDCINE viewer and what I obtain after I do an export are very different things.
I can make all adjustments I want in REDCINE, once I export it's a very different image, washed out. So I made all the adjustments for nothing. :angry01:

By the way, I forgot to mention, I'm using Windows XP Pro SP3.

EDIT: GeForce 7900 GS with Nvidia drivers version 169.21, Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5200, 2 GB RAM

EDIT2: Upgraded the Nvidia drivers to the latest version 175.19. No change.

 

[John Tissavary]

Due to the appearance of the two images I'd guess the problem to be the dreaded gamma bug in quicktime. This has been plagueing imaging professionals for years now, and Apple has yet to fix the problem.

Try exporting to a single DPX or TIFF frame and see if what you get looks like what you see inside of RedCine. If it does, then Quicktime is the culprit. If it still looks incorrect then something is not getting applied to your images, probably a result of user error (g). I'm not a RedCine user so I don't know the right buttons to push, but I believe there are some basic RedCine docs on red.com - have a look through them and I'm sure you'll find the correct procedure if that's the case.


cheers

jt

 

[Florin Andrei]

Bingo! That was it. I switched the export to MPEG4 and now it's not washed out anymore.
I'm encoding one of the dragster movies from here:

http://redrelay.net/owners/0010/

And it looks fine from a gamma perspective:

For some reason, when playing it with QuickTime now the exported video gets corrupted somewhere in the middle, with strange and very disruptive artifacts all over the image. It recovers eventually, but several frames are lost.
However, if I play it with VLC (link) it's OK.
If I could only find a format that works with no problems. :sad:

BTW, the REDCINE documentation on red.com doesn't appear to be in any obvious place. I'll keep looking for it.

EDIT: I am so old school. I thought the documentation is some kind of PDF file. Now I see there are several videos. Cool, I'll watch them.

EDIT2: The MPEG4 file is definitely not a happy puppy. Total Media Extreme does not refuse it and it's able to author an AVCHD disk image, but the player included in the application stumbles in several places when playing it (the original, before rendering to AVCHD). The Playstation, however, will happily play the AVCHD with no problem. Weird.

 

[Scott Roberts]

It seems that there are some issues with washed out video:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=10&t=643310