Scarlet: Low Light Shoot

[Patrick O'Sullivan]

This past week we got commissioned to do a spot for the Perth Fashion Festival. The festival is a ways away but we went out to the latest event to put together a little 30 second promo for the festival organizers.
It turned out to be a great opportunity to try out the Scarlet in very bad lighting conditions.

Behind the scenes there was almost 0 light. Just one or two super dim overheads. We weren't going for the harsh on board look so we were just stretching the ISO as high as possible.
Even the show was a tough environment as off center was almost black. I cranked up the grade to see how it would handle. It all came back no problem.
Looking at the footage I am very impressed with the Scarlet's performance. I couldn't imagine shooting any commercial work in situations with lower light than this.
All shot with the C/Y 35mm f1.4 wide open except the last shot which was the 25mm.

The clip is all finished, just waiting for the go ahead and then I'll post it here.

For now the stills will have to do:

 

[jaadgy akanni]

Man, that lens is juicy; love those images. Thanks for posting

 

[Matthew Richard Harris]

Thanks for posting something positive in terms of low light performance, looks fantastic. A healthy 1.4 F-Stop always works wonders.

 

[Mike P.]

What was the ISO on these? Are you able to post a .r3d; I'm loving the skin tones... Did the first shot have a blue-light somewhere? If there was a lot of really white(blue-ish) light that's probably why it looks so dang clean (the blue-channel was getting as much as it needed.)

 

[Lliam Worthington]

Beautiful grabs in trying conditions Patrick. I'm pretty in love with the 35.
I assume those grabs are after de noising and sharpening in your workflow?

Best

Lliam

 

[Lorenzo Straight]

Yummy indeed.

 

[George Su]

Looks great! What was the ISO, and what Look settings? saturation, contrast?

 

[Alvise Tedesco]

Wow. Very happy to see that cleanliness is possible.
Pretty frustrating if you're the shooter and don't have the necessary, sophisticated know-how in post
Where do I start? Learn Resolve? Or there's a denoise magic plug-in for fcp?
Thanks

 

[stu aull]

nice Pat - as others say, plse post the specs!!!!

Stu Aull
S-X #00199
Alaska

 

[Mark Kern]

You don't need resolve to pull this off. REDcine gives you everything you need to get this particular look. Esp. when you are looking at exposure tweaks.

You don't need to denoise the footage here. I bet this was all done without, am I right?

 

[Mark Kern]

I second the vote for some R3D stills as well to play with!

 

[Michael Su]

Nice to see some Zeiss still lenses love here! Super sweet!

 

[Patrick O'Sullivan]

What was the ISO on these? Are you able to post a .r3d; I'm loving the skin tones... Did the first shot have a blue-light somewhere? If there was a lot of really white(blue-ish) light that's probably why it looks so dang clean (the blue-channel was getting as much as it needed.)

The ISO was 1600 I believe. There was a blue strip LED in the corner of the room. Definitely helped the first shot.

 

[Patrick O'Sullivan]

Beautiful grabs in trying conditions Patrick. I'm pretty in love with the 35.
I assume those grabs are after de noising and sharpening in your workflow?

Correct Lliam. This has been denoised using Neat Video and is the fully color corrected version.

The 35 is the go to in the Contax set.

 

[Patrick O'Sullivan]

Wow. Very happy to see that cleanliness is possible.
Pretty frustrating if you're the shooter and don't have the necessary, sophisticated know-how in post
Where do I start? Learn Resolve?

The cleanliness is coming from Neat Video. When cranked in the grade (inside resolve) there is a noticeable amount of grain. The structure though is still there which allows Neat Video to pull through with some pretty quality looks.

I would say start with Resolve & After Effects. After Effects is mind boggling and is used in every project and Resolve is king of color at the moment (when it comes to normal human pricing, ie free).

Nowadays if you are shooting and letting some else do the post chances are they aren't going to get the best from it unless they've seriously done their homework on the RED workflow. Not that it is hard, just the opposite in fact, but you have to know what you are doing or you can screw it up fairly easily.

I say at the very least learn the basics of the full pipeline so you can knowledgeably discuss the workflow with those on your team.

 

[Patrick O'Sullivan]

You don't need resolve to pull this off. REDcine gives you everything you need to get this particular look. Esp. when you are looking at exposure tweaks.

You don't need to denoise the footage here. I bet this was all done without, am I right?

Close but not 100% Mark.

This footage has been denoised. There is noise present in the R3Ds and when graded it becomes more pronounced. You can get very close to these looks simply by using Redcine but you can't get into the secondaries. There are a few layers in there that would have to be skipped if it weren't for Resolve.

No excuse not to use resolve now when it is free. So easy to plug into the workflow.

 

[Mike P.]

Yo, Patrick, any chance for a r3d still or are the rights reserved up the ying-yang?

 

[Chris McKechnie]

Was your histogram far to th left?

 

[Robert L. Mickles]

Looks really good!