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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Shootout: RedOne vs F35

I watched both Red and F23/F35 footage projected 4K at NAB a few days ago.
I wasn't that impressed with the F23/F35 stuff they've shown. Some shots looked very video-y. They intercut the F23 with F35, I couldn't tell which is which.
From what I've seen, I much preferred the Red's image quality.
 
danbrazda said:
I'd love to see a side-by-side shootout between these two cameras. Same lighting, lenses...etc. Would take a lot of connections to get the 2 cams in the same place at the same time but as diverse as this forum is maybe someone can pull it off. Just curious if the differences would be apparent enough to justify the cost of the F35. Any conjectures?
Click to expand...
It's been done, with Red #378 against one of Omnibus' F35s. Unfortunately we weren't given the F35's results so we can't definitively say one was better than the other. I can tell you Omnibus were impressed by Red and probably had a slight case of buyer's remorse after spending that amount of money on three of the F35 beasts!!

If anyone particularly wants this comparison to be done publicly and is willing to pay for the F35 rental we'd be happy to organise it.

Paul
 
Verko said:
Red fits my aesthetic very well, though I can conceive of a situation where I would favor the Sony's - perhaps some kind of THX 1138 kind of film or the first part of "Joe Versus The Volcano."
Click to expand...

You don't see those two films mentioned in the same sentence very often.

But it made me smile.

:biggrin:
 
Sure, an RGB stripe gives equal resolution to each of RGB, whereas a Bayer pattern gives higher luma resolution at the "expense" of chroma being a lower resolution. However.....

On a bayer pattern we know the colours are not co-sited. One of the tasks of the demosaic is to make the colours appear co-sited and lined up nicely on top of each other. That's one of the reasons the demosaic can reduce the absolute resolution a little bit. However, it's a known issue and we deal with it. In an RGB stripe, you sort of just assume the colours are co-sited when they're not, just like running a pixel shift 3 CCD on 4:4:4 you assume co-sited when they're not.

The only real issue with a bayer pattern is chroma moire. We've seen it on very sharp test patterns, but we also have our chroma de-moire tool too, so it's hardly a practical issue for "normal" shooting subjects.

Camera design is the art of compromise. To me, the Bayer pattern is still the best compromise, when you use it with a full understanding of how it works.

Graeme
 
CraigWB said:
I'm not sure that the F35 is just a Sony branded Genesis I think there is more to the camera than that.
And I think that in the FreshDV interview the price is still undecided but will probably be around $200,000 to $250,000
Click to expand...

Is that including the deck? OK, I'll have 14 Reds instead :biggrin:
 
I'm just gonna say this is one of the coolest threads I've read here in a while. Tons of smart, experienced, passionate people hashing it out.

Will F35 owners/users ever have such a forum? I think not.

-shooter
 
Very smart people indeed, hashing out which dog is top dog/better dog. And I am happy for their passion and that they have the time to do it.

Many of us who have Reds (if we're fortunate) are working to pay for a camera that we frankly don't care much whether it's better than such and such, we know it's an astonishing tool and allows us to take risks using cinema expression on a higher quality plane than we could've afforded a year ago. For that I am grateful, whether it's better or not better or just different from the F23 or F35 or the D20 or D21. And maybe they are all great innovations and remarkable tools that are all plenty fine enough to do the job. There are Canon fans, Nikon fans, Pentax fans, Olympus fans -- I've used them all, and they all worked and when I look at the photographs, I don't really care or remember which tool I used.

But of course, let's keep testing and pushing the geniuses behind the technology to continue astonishing us. Then put our astonishment to good use making this very tiny part of human expression work toward making the world a bit beter place.
 
This is a great thread. Very intelligent notes and comments.

A couple of things after going to NAB and talking to head Sony engineers,Ted from Red, Band pro, and a lot (and I do mean a lot) of DPs and shooters.

The Sony F23 is now at about 120k for a body and viewfinder...not 10 times a red, but still a lot. ( remember with red you need handles,,,etc..etc...not just 17,500)

The Sony Viewfinder on both the F23/35 is at least 720 . And the cameras have a true (HD) output 1080p.

As far as tests being done. A Dp from NY (Du art) shot Redone and Sony ex-1 footage and projected them both at 4k at the Sony booth ( 1pm on tuesday april 16th ) Some liked the EX-1 better ( maybe because we were at the sony booth)..others like myself, thought they were very close. Thats a 7,000 camera. About 1/3 the cost of the Red.

The F35 Sony Does have a Genesis imager. But as far a technology... thats about it for being the same. 5 years of development have gone into this camera. Its like saying build 1 to build 16 plus a few years! ( fyi Sony is building an EXMOR type chip for the F35, 2k and next years 4k systems. It might be ready when the f35 is released)

I will be shooting a test ( that is fair!!) when build 16 and the f35 are both ready. This will be done with arri Master Prime ( full frame cameras) and Digi Prime (for 2/3's cameras) and of course we will presenting this first without titles of which camera is which.

I guess because technology is so great these days HD or 4k or whatever is in the eye of the beholder. I think the F35 footage is the best cleanest 2k or for that matter 4k footage I have ever seen. But clean or noiseless may not be the best to everyone. I cant wait. I have been waiting for a great 35mm 4k camera for a long time ...build 16...bring it on!!

And for the Future...the best picture I saw at NAB was the 8k camera prototype by NHK and Sony....talk about resolution!!! 34mega pixel camera!
 
The power of wavelets

The power of wavelets

combatentropy said:
Furthermore, I think wavelet compression is stunning.
Click to expand...

Combatentropy, I apologize in advance if the following message is terminology heavy but I wanted to provide a clearer picture why something more important is at play here and is not mentioned frequently, which Wavelet compression has taken advantage of very nicely.

Most Red users will be filming natural images. The power spectrum of natural images falls of more like 1/f^2, where f is the frequency, assuming that image statistics are at least wide sense stationary. For natural images, for which as mentioned, certain important image statistics fall off as square of image frequency, it will be helpful if we can capture this fall behavior using some ideally linear transformations. And, transforms such as Karhounen-Loeve / PCAs /etc., do capture this information very well, which is in accordance with certain Markov processes.

Wavelet processing is closely related with band-pass filtering, which electrical engineers have been doing for ages, and hence, such band-pass behavior ties in nicely with capturing the image power fall off, though, perhaps, not as ideally as KLT / PCA. However, it is reasonably good.

Therefore it is the properties/statistics of natural images that Wavelets is able to exploit more usefully than the often-used DCT/DFTs that are helping us here. On the other hand it is possible to provide example of images where Wavelets performs poorly because they could not exploit certain image statistics.
 
bhtdmc said:
You don't see those two films mentioned in the same sentence very often.

But it made me smile.

:biggrin:
Click to expand...

Very glad to be of service. Smiling = good.

The first part of "Joe Versus the Volcano" really stuck in my memory; the fluorescent sickly image and the ballast buzz sound to go with it. I'm so glad I don't work in a regular office!
 
RED said:
...
As far as tests being done. A Dp from NY (Du art) shot Redone and Sony ex-1 footage and projected them both at 4k at the Sony booth ( 1pm on tuesday april 16th ) Some liked the EX-1 better ( maybe because we were at the sony booth)..others like myself, thought they were very close. Thats a 7,000 camera. About 1/3 the cost of the Red.
...
Click to expand...
This is where test get very hard to evaluate unless you know exactly how they were done. The EX1 can spit out uncompressed, 10-bit color out of its HD-SDI port. I bet that looks amazing. So how were both images recorded? And what was the subject matter? Were there a lot of highlights? What lens was used on the Red? What stop on each? How was the DoF? I could go on and on as you obviously know. I have no doubt that under certain conditions an EX1 can make nicer images than a Red One... and of course vice versa.
 
Steve Phillipps said:
So am I getting my bits and bytes mixed up here? HDCam is 144 megabits per second and Red is 36 megabytes per second (ie 288 megabits)?
I thought I was an expert until 3 minutes ago!
Steve:waaa:
Click to expand...

Back to Steve's point, for a minute...
When talking about specs, remember the pixels:

HDCAM is 144 Mbit for a 1920x1080 final pixel image...
RED is 288 Mbit for a (roughly) 4096x2048 final pixel image...

On the surface, the RED frame appears to have 4x more pixels, but only 2x the data rate.

It's certainly not an apple to apple comparison, but it is important to remember that despite how pretty the frames look, there is a substantial amount of data gettting squeezed down into the final Redcode 28 or 36 stream.

(erm... but please review Graeme's post below for an accurate breakdown of the data... Graeme's Da Man!)
 
HDCAM is storing 1440x1080 luma (=1555200) + 2 * 640 * 1080 (=1382400) chroma "pixels". That's a total of: 2937600 8bit "pixels", or 23,500,800bits.

We store 4096x2304x12 bits = 113,246,208bits, or nearly 5 (4.81) times as much.

However.... And this is the key part....

Wavelet based codecs are more efficient than DCT based codecs. RAW is easier to compress than "video", and wavelets get more efficient on larger frame sizes! Put that all together and that's why REDCODE RAW 4k images look much better than HDCAM on only around twice the data rate. That and the magic pixies.....

Graeme
 
I think proportionally, I learn more from Graeme's posts than any other reduser, even if I don't understand half of it. :)
 
Thanks Tom, I think.... But this is a forum, so if you don't understand, I'll try and help with the missing info to make it all make sense.

Graeme
 
Well that's no reflection on you, Graeme! I just don't have a good knowledge base with a lot of this stuff to begin with, so often when I read your posts I end up on wikipedia or whatever trying to get up to speed on the basics of what you are saying. :)

Mullen is kind of the same way. Even after two years of subscribing to American Cinematographer, I only undertsand about half of what he says, just because it's so detailed and requires some base of institutional knowledge.
 
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