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Scarlet Low-Light Footage

J

Jeff J Daniels

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This year was the 40th Annual Great Forest Park Balloon Race in St. Louis.
Part of this event is the Balloon Glow that takes place the night before the race.

I took this opportunity to test out my Scarlet in an extremely low-light condition. Apart for some food stands and glow necklaces, the only light sources are the hot-air balloon burners themselves.

Overall, I'm very happy with the low-light performance.


Shot @ 4k. ISO ranging from 800-1280.
Lensed with Duclos Zeiss ZF.2 28mm f/2 and 50mm f/2.
Cut in Premiere CS6, NO NOISE REDUCTION
 
well done Sir.
Always nice to see affirmation of Scarlet low-light performance. Helps when you obviously know what you are doing....

Stu Aull
SX199
Alaska
 
Thanks Stu.

I struggled with using Neat Video on a few of the noisier shots (awesome kid dancing, photographer OTS) but wanted to post the "native performance" even with the Web compression.
I am still blown away by the latitude every time I shoot. Specifically on this shoot, sometimes I could barely make out a subject on monitor, then the burners would flare up, but everything held.

Love this camera.
 
No No No! I've read on the interwebs (message boards and blogs) that the Scarlet sucks in low light… tell the truth - in order to get footage this clean you actually shot this on an iPhone5 or a DSLR.

/*end sarcasm*/

Looks great even with web compression, I'm sure it looks even better uncompressed & fed through a proper monitor.

G.
 
Yup, looks great. Good example for lowlight footage. Thanks for sharing.
 
Jeff,thanks for sharing the low light footage looks great!
 
Nice work Jeff, it is always good to see fellow St. Louis Scarleteers out there!
 
Here's one of my recent vids. The beach and boardwalk shots at the end were shot all in low light and were tweaked to be usable. I started the shoot at sunset and about an hour later with no on-location lights, I thought for sure that my footage would be no good. I tweaked in Red Cine-x, used Neat video and it was just fine. I no longer have doubts with the scarlet at low-light. I have another video coming up that I'm editing, shot primarily at night, and it's also looking pretty good.

http://hypebeast.com/2012/09/adele-vs-daft-punk-something-about-the-fire-carlos-serrano-mix-video/

 
Not trying to steal anyone's thunder here. Figured I'd share a bit of footage I have from a low light situation. All shot at 800 ISO, no Noise Reduction/Coloring yet. I'd put it on vimeo but i'm all out of space for the month. Watch in 720.

Sorry for the fragmented song, but I just exported it from the middle of another project/edit i'm working on changing. Kind of made me fall back in love with my camera again. Not as good as some of your shots already on here, but it was a blast to see and shoot!
 
Looks great Jeffrey, thanks for sharing.

2K 60fps ?
 
I've seen similar clips posted from other cameras as well described as "low light" footage. I don't agree with that statement.

It seemed like a great event to be shooting at, and I'm sure the Scarlet clips are stunning. However, many lights in this film are very bright. When you expose for the lit balloons and let the dark night roll of into black (it's unavoidable), you're actually lighting up the sensor quite a bit.

Similar to how you could photograph fireworks in the dead of the night at f8, ISO100...

I'm definitely not trying to put you down, but I just don't think going out in the Vegas night, for instance, and shooting neon signs qualifies as low light either.

Only reason that I'm writing this is that it might serve as a basis for a good discussion?

To me, low light footage is where you need to expose for poorly light areas, that aren't lights themselves, or reflecting much light. In those scenarios you get the true low light capability of a camera. I would love to see how Scarlet handles that.

Low light has been one of my fears with current RED sensors as I would shoot mostly in available light, and I haven't really seen how Scarlet performs in this area.
 
A-Lonely-Soldiers-Dinner-lowres.jpg


Andree is this low light enough. Lit with a single candle. I did crank the denoise up in RCX and brought the brightness setting up a bit as well. Other than that, my stop is at F3 with ISO at 800.

There is noise, but what do you expect, it's a single candle.
 
Epic, same sensor, all natural light, no additional lighting. https://vimeo.com/38020250 . ISO 800 . Start watching at 1:30. Some noise, but completely acceptable. No noise reduction.
 
Adam Beck said:
It's nice looking Sergio, what was your f-stop?
Click to expand...

Thanks Adam, the F-Stops varied, for example the very wide shots where at 2.8, most night telephotos where at 2.0, and occasionally i would go 1.4 with the 24mm. So it is between 1.4 and 2.8, if I remember correctly. It was almost a year ago!
 
Adam Beck said:
A-Lonely-Soldiers-Dinner-lowres.jpg


Andree is this low light enough.
Click to expand...

Hi Adam, thanks for sharing.

But to answer your question, no. This is more of the same.

Your scene is exposed for the candle, which is very bright. The light we see in the scene is the sensor's native falloff form that exposure at ISO800.

The scene could work as a low light scene for me, but then you'd have to expose for the pan and bottle. Put those items at around 40-50 IRE and you'll get there. I'd expect this scene to need at least ISO 6400 and fast glass for that.

Now, I agree that the kind of exposure that you've shown here is nice, but the fact that you're at f3 ISO800 kind of shows that your not "low lighting" the sensor per se.

Imagine that this one candle was the light level in the scene. And now imagine that the bottles around the table were people and that the scene wasn't cosy and that it called for a more normal exposure. You'd have to crank up the ISO.

Yes, you could say "whoa, badly lit...", but that is EXACTLY what's meant by low light. It's uncontrolled, available light that you have to work with. Sometime too little of it.

As soon as you start to light a scene yourself... well, then I guess you know who's to blame if there's excessive noise...

To me, as a rule of thumb, when you're exposing for a light source, you're not in low light mode any more. That is not to say that there isn't only very little light. That is quite possible. But then the idea is probably to achieve just what you did here: a nice, moody result.
 
A much easier way to get to what I mean:

Show me a scene that has a good exposure, not overly bright, at ISO 6400.

I'd like to have a look at that!

Thanks!
 
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