vincent kardasik
Well-known member
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2009
- Messages
- 1,492
- Reaction score
- 17
- Points
- 38
- Age
- 46
- Location
- Hossegor, France
- Website
- www.lkrtel.com
First thing first, there’s nothing scientific in the following post.
Thanks to my amazing Bomb Squad Rep, Brady Stone, our Red Epic-M Dragon #620 arrived 10 days ago and before an intense month of June, I needed to test it in real life.
While I’m writing this I’m on plane to Taiwan for a week shoot then will follow another missions in LA, Kona and Sumatra.
On all these destinations I will shoot several fashion campaigns for the same client.
Most of the locations planned are amazing but the schedule is tight and we will have to deal with all kind of natural lightning inside and outside at different hours of the day.
In these locations, sometimes you shoot under an heavy rain then next minute sun pops out and you’re looking for some shade.
For these jobs I will use both of my Epics and a set of cine modified Leica-R primes I fell in love with.
I shot these kind of stuff quite a lot with the MX sensor but I wanted to be sure how the Dragon would react as I will have no room for hesitation when it will be on.
As a test, we decided to rent a beautiful house close to where we live and to capture some set-ups with a model, Laetitia, from early morning to sunset.
Our goal was to see how the camera will deal with skin tones in/and environment with mixed lightning.
This house was perfect as it’s full of large windows with an amazing view on a forest.
I rated the camera at 800 ISO, I might rate it lower in the future.
Of course, I read a lot about the latitude of the sensor and how you can push it before it clips but it was quite a shock to see how we could push the camera in the highlights before hitting the stop lights on the right of the histogram.
I had more issues with shadows in the interior scenes.
I had a hard times finding a balance which allows to not clip what was outside the windows and being properly exposed on the subject.
Having the model wearing only dark clothes wasn’t the best idea ever as there is sign of noise on the tee-shirt or the panties on some footage.
Nothing surprising tho as the noise limit signal on the left of the histogram warned us about it.
On some scenes I used a couple of LED panels to get a bit more fill on the subject.
I could have used more lights but this is pretty much the kit I will have on my upcoming jobs so I kept it simple for this test shoot.
Outside, we only use a reflector and sometimes we decided to get rid of it just to see how the skin tones will look with shadows and heavy light.
For example, we shot everything around the swimming pool at mid-day which is not ideal as the sun was straight above our model but I needed to check how much the new sensor could help when you can’t decide of your lightning.
I was more surprised of noticing noise on some high speed shot outside.
Camera was properly black shaded and exposed to the right so I think I have to blame the compression, 17:1.
Same thing on some scenes shot backlight, there’s sign of noise in the background but I guess it’s also due to the compression.
My 1,8 SSD cards are 128Go and I definitely need to get some of these discontinuated Turbos 512Go.
I found some in the US but if anyone is willing to sell me one in Europe, that would be easier for me on all level.
It seems that the camera «flares» less than my Red Epic-X, I guess it’s due to the new OLPF.
We shot 6 SSD cards during the day and I didn’t have any dropped frames or bug.
Only one «offline» clip due to a too fast rec/stop.
The Epic-M Dragon worked like a charm.
I should also mention that I didn’t feel any difference in terms of power consumption.
My RedBricks lasted the same amount of time as with the Epic-X, sometimes I had the feeling it was even longer.
In terms of workflow, I wanted to cut something during the week-end following the test shoot so I uploaded all footage on a LaCie 2Big USB 3.0 drive and started cutting in FCPX on my iMac.
We shot everything in 6K FF or 6K WS and I tripped out how easy it was to handle those files.
With the last version of RCX, I was able to watch all footage at a 1/4 resolution then in FCPX, render times were probably a bit longer than with 5K footage but I’m not even sure.
On my partner’s Mac Pro, it was of course faster.
We used that machine to softly grade our footage on Da Vinci Resolve as we wanted to keep it close to reality.
We did a first grade on RCX and I was amazed by how good it looks when using the different Red Gamma.
Dragon Color and Red Gamma 4 are just amazing, I love the contrast and how it acts on the skin tones.
The reason we switched to Resolve was to see how our machines will react to 6K and to be honest it was really easy too.
A couple of years ago, I would have never believed that editing 6K footage on a consumer iMac was possible.
My only regret is that we had to disable the Red Rocket in the Mac Pro and I couldn’t use the one in my Thunderbolt enclosure with the iMac or the MacBook Pro.
It make me sad to see that these cards are obsolete with Dragon.
I admire the amount of work Red Team did for us to simplify our workflow and allow us to use the GPU capacity of our computer but I feel like I won’t use these two cards anymore.
I love the Dragon so far and I can’t wait to test it in low light and in the water, I will post more as soon as possible.
Video's below, enjoy!
Link for tablet and mobile users:
https://vimeo.com/97373933
Produced by Julie Kardasik.
Directed and edited by L/K-rtel (lkrtel.com)
Cinematography: Vincent Kardasik.
1st AC: Arthur Bourbon.
Production Manager: Alain Riou.
Model: Laetitia Galina.
Make Up: Sandrine Angostini.
Hair: Thaïs Dominguez.
Soundtrack: Unsatisfied by Amy Holford, produced by Dan Dare (soundcloud.com/dandaremusic).
Music permission by Dan Dare.
Special thanks: Georges Ferrandis, Guillaume Dartenuc and Brady Stone.
Thanks to my amazing Bomb Squad Rep, Brady Stone, our Red Epic-M Dragon #620 arrived 10 days ago and before an intense month of June, I needed to test it in real life.
While I’m writing this I’m on plane to Taiwan for a week shoot then will follow another missions in LA, Kona and Sumatra.
On all these destinations I will shoot several fashion campaigns for the same client.
Most of the locations planned are amazing but the schedule is tight and we will have to deal with all kind of natural lightning inside and outside at different hours of the day.
In these locations, sometimes you shoot under an heavy rain then next minute sun pops out and you’re looking for some shade.
For these jobs I will use both of my Epics and a set of cine modified Leica-R primes I fell in love with.
I shot these kind of stuff quite a lot with the MX sensor but I wanted to be sure how the Dragon would react as I will have no room for hesitation when it will be on.
As a test, we decided to rent a beautiful house close to where we live and to capture some set-ups with a model, Laetitia, from early morning to sunset.
Our goal was to see how the camera will deal with skin tones in/and environment with mixed lightning.
This house was perfect as it’s full of large windows with an amazing view on a forest.
I rated the camera at 800 ISO, I might rate it lower in the future.
Of course, I read a lot about the latitude of the sensor and how you can push it before it clips but it was quite a shock to see how we could push the camera in the highlights before hitting the stop lights on the right of the histogram.
I had more issues with shadows in the interior scenes.
I had a hard times finding a balance which allows to not clip what was outside the windows and being properly exposed on the subject.
Having the model wearing only dark clothes wasn’t the best idea ever as there is sign of noise on the tee-shirt or the panties on some footage.
Nothing surprising tho as the noise limit signal on the left of the histogram warned us about it.
On some scenes I used a couple of LED panels to get a bit more fill on the subject.
I could have used more lights but this is pretty much the kit I will have on my upcoming jobs so I kept it simple for this test shoot.
Outside, we only use a reflector and sometimes we decided to get rid of it just to see how the skin tones will look with shadows and heavy light.
For example, we shot everything around the swimming pool at mid-day which is not ideal as the sun was straight above our model but I needed to check how much the new sensor could help when you can’t decide of your lightning.
I was more surprised of noticing noise on some high speed shot outside.
Camera was properly black shaded and exposed to the right so I think I have to blame the compression, 17:1.
Same thing on some scenes shot backlight, there’s sign of noise in the background but I guess it’s also due to the compression.
My 1,8 SSD cards are 128Go and I definitely need to get some of these discontinuated Turbos 512Go.
I found some in the US but if anyone is willing to sell me one in Europe, that would be easier for me on all level.
It seems that the camera «flares» less than my Red Epic-X, I guess it’s due to the new OLPF.
We shot 6 SSD cards during the day and I didn’t have any dropped frames or bug.
Only one «offline» clip due to a too fast rec/stop.
The Epic-M Dragon worked like a charm.
I should also mention that I didn’t feel any difference in terms of power consumption.
My RedBricks lasted the same amount of time as with the Epic-X, sometimes I had the feeling it was even longer.
In terms of workflow, I wanted to cut something during the week-end following the test shoot so I uploaded all footage on a LaCie 2Big USB 3.0 drive and started cutting in FCPX on my iMac.
We shot everything in 6K FF or 6K WS and I tripped out how easy it was to handle those files.
With the last version of RCX, I was able to watch all footage at a 1/4 resolution then in FCPX, render times were probably a bit longer than with 5K footage but I’m not even sure.
On my partner’s Mac Pro, it was of course faster.
We used that machine to softly grade our footage on Da Vinci Resolve as we wanted to keep it close to reality.
We did a first grade on RCX and I was amazed by how good it looks when using the different Red Gamma.
Dragon Color and Red Gamma 4 are just amazing, I love the contrast and how it acts on the skin tones.
The reason we switched to Resolve was to see how our machines will react to 6K and to be honest it was really easy too.
A couple of years ago, I would have never believed that editing 6K footage on a consumer iMac was possible.
My only regret is that we had to disable the Red Rocket in the Mac Pro and I couldn’t use the one in my Thunderbolt enclosure with the iMac or the MacBook Pro.
It make me sad to see that these cards are obsolete with Dragon.
I admire the amount of work Red Team did for us to simplify our workflow and allow us to use the GPU capacity of our computer but I feel like I won’t use these two cards anymore.
I love the Dragon so far and I can’t wait to test it in low light and in the water, I will post more as soon as possible.
Video's below, enjoy!
Link for tablet and mobile users:
https://vimeo.com/97373933
Produced by Julie Kardasik.
Directed and edited by L/K-rtel (lkrtel.com)
Cinematography: Vincent Kardasik.
1st AC: Arthur Bourbon.
Production Manager: Alain Riou.
Model: Laetitia Galina.
Make Up: Sandrine Angostini.
Hair: Thaïs Dominguez.
Soundtrack: Unsatisfied by Amy Holford, produced by Dan Dare (soundcloud.com/dandaremusic).
Music permission by Dan Dare.
Special thanks: Georges Ferrandis, Guillaume Dartenuc and Brady Stone.
