Truth or .... False Color

[Scott Crawley]

Have you talked with any of the underwater guys? They share many of your requirements in a different environment. Maybe they have some control solutions that would suit you.

Deep Dragon is meant to be gloved operation friendly. An UW housing may be overkill, but...

Between touchscreen, Redmote, and side handle, we have several options to control the camera. But there are extreme shootings situations, which I fairly often get into, where none of then are suitable - such as the bottom of a volcano next to a lake of boiling lava I love RED but I HATE that there are no good options for simple analogue mechanical-style control of the basic functions. I'm seriously tempted to butcher a Redmote and try to build my own.

I digress; rant over!

Mike

 

[David Battistella]

Mike,

Good Rant. You put out fires and save peoples lives for a living (a lot of people in the film business claim to do that ) So you understand how important it is to be a pro and know what the F you are doing.

Battistella

DING

RED is a high-end tool for the total pro.

Any amateur rich enough to own will invest in the time needed to learn How It Works. If they don't, they'll throw it to one side and move on, and who cares?

And every pro HAS to invest the time needed to learn how EVERYTHING works on their tools.

NO-ONE needs a 'dumbed down' RED. IMHO. Waste of good development time.

The only thing I want, but don't have, is what I've asked for repeatedly; a 'dumb' but easy to use control box. A dumb Redmote, if you like. Not a mess of frickin dials and unlabeled buttons and options and screens, a decent sized box with decent sized analogue KNOBS, that you can operate wearing heavy gloves, VERY quickly

Six nice big analogue knobs labeled FPS, SHUTTER, IRIS, ISO, L LEVEL, R LEVEL. Plus three buttons - record, focus check, and exposure check - an exposure check that works the way God and Mark Pederson intended. That takes care of 90% of everything I have to use during most docu-style shoots.

(FPS should have a lock - push & turn to change it from 23.98. Hell, maybe they should ALL have push & turn locks)

Between touchscreen, Redmote, and side handle, we have several options to control the camera. But there are extreme shootings situations, which I fairly often get into, where none of then are suitable - such as the bottom of a volcano next to a lake of boiling lava I love RED but I HATE that there are no good options for simple analogue mechanical-style control of the basic functions. I'm seriously tempted to butcher a Redmote and try to build my own.

I digress; rant over!

Mike

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

i don't know how you get an 'actual' mid representation without applying some kind of LUT (redlogfilm/redgamma/etc)...
i think linking it to processing is the only way to determine where 18% is

The sensor is linear. 18% is 18%.

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Mike,

Good Rant. You put out fires and save peoples lives for a living (a lot of people in the film business claim to do that ) So you understand how important it is to be a pro and know what the F you are doing.

Battistella

Hey, I've been a volunteer fireman/hazmat tech/rescue tech for many years (and volunteer or paid, you still HAVE to approach that work as a total pro of course); I shoot, and rent cameras for living, or try to… still getting myself on my feet as regards business since moving to NZ. It's been a bit slow recently, haven't had a paid job since the volcano shoot two weeks ago.

Mike

 

[David Battistella]

CONFIRMING

I have my EPIC up doing MOCO tests tonight and on the LATEST release Firmware, with the EXPOSURE RAW VIEW enabled,
MOVING ISO AROUND in RAW view DOES NOT effect the exposure colors IN RAW VIEW.

Battistella

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Have you talked with any of the underwater guys? They share many of your requirements in a different environment. Maybe they have some control solutions that would suit you.

Deep Dragon is meant to be gloved operation friendly. An UW housing may be overkill, but...

Good idea. I've looked at Deep Dragon, but they just put a standard Redmote in a waterproof housing, which is exactly what I don't want; it works exactly like a standard Redmote. I want a box with just the the big dials and buttons I mentioned; one knob or button per function. Doesn't even need a display or calibrations on the control box; I can just turn a knob and see the effect on the top line of the LCD/EVF...

Mike

 

[paulherrin]

Its unclear for me why astrophysicist want noisy pictures. ISO 3200 is only a meaningful ISO when overexposing it by 2 stops.

Hans

well, i'm no astrophysicist per se but i enjoy seeing the stars, sometimes with my scarlet. usually i process these frames between 320-800, but it's really helpful to blast it on the lcd for setup purposes. if you blackshade, which you should, the images are pretty quiet (and i'm sure they're better on dragon) and that combined with normal astrophoto-techniques like frame averaging and frame summing (in and/or after capture) gets really good stuff. yes, canon's are great for star-lapses with built in NR if you want that, but my red gives me full control, more options, and continuous recording. there are plenty of other scenarios where cranking up your iso is a good idea, see gunleik's nsfw graininess (er noisiness) peering into the shadows, on purpose...

and another great gg werk of ert

so, just leave my high-iso's alone plz, & thank yous

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

The only thing I want, but don't have, is what I've asked for repeatedly; a 'dumb' but easy to use control box. A dumb Redmote, if you like. Not a mess of frickin dials and unlabeled buttons and options and screens, a decent sized box with decent sized analogue KNOBS, that you can operate wearing heavy gloves, VERY quickly

Mike

Oh ... you mean the PRO WIFI IO Module with the redmote screen on the side and nice big fat buttons I mentioned over here - http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?111859-RED-FOCUS/page4

 

[Elsie N]

I think your camera is pretty safe Elsie But again, you can build your own stripped down menu by using the Edit List feature if it makes you sleep better at night. I haven't figured out how to export and/or save one yet.

Heh, heh... I'd much rather RED do that for me if I can get them to. OBTW, lean setup doesn't mean inability to make changes... my thinking is doing away with things like sleep mode and so forth. There was a thread where the sleep mode may have been the cause for a camera crashing and requiring some expensive replacement parts to fix it.

 

[D Fuller]

I think Paul was actually saying to forget it with respect to tools - since you have ISO based exposure tool in VIDEO mode.

And yes - I constantly stress to people that although the ISO setting on the camera does not effect the exposure - 9 times out of 10 - it effects the CHOICE of exposure - either by reactions to the monitor path - or ... by a light meter if used - or by tools like the HISTOGRAM which are downstream from IRE/ISO processing and effected by it.

So ... yeah ... "it's just meta-data" .... but it's usually the meta data that has a heavy hand in your exposure - which is sort of a big deal

Yes, it's a huge deal. It's an essential part of the language with which we talk about exposure.

I agree completely with what you say here (there's not much you write here lately that I don't agree with) but I think that one of the reasons why your suggestion is so important is that it will help a DP to visualize the relationship between the "working" ISO (the one he/she is calculating exposure for) and the camera's native ISO (the sensor's fixed sensitivity). Seeing raw-based false color on top of metadata-infleuenced monitor images would help to clarify just where you're pushing the image within the sensor's DR, as well as showing sensor clipping and noise floor.

After some detours, I've come to think about exposure on Red in much the same way that I used to think about it on film. A film has a fixed sensitivity (ISO), but knowing that, I can choose to expose at a different ISO and push or pull in post (either chemically or in transfer). I know the image will have different characteristics if I do that, and that's part of my exposure calculation. I expose Red with very similar thinking, and that's where ISO has become important again -- not the camera's ISO setting, but ISO as a reference for light levels in front of the lens.

I know that the sensor is about 320 ISO native, but I don't love the completely-clean image I get at 320 for most things. At 800, I get a bit of very pleasant noise, which I like, and the added benefit of some headroom that lets me roll the highlights off nicely. But for things like tabletop package shots, I usually want a "fatter negative" with more color and a bit less noise, so I expose for 640 or 500, knowing I have to watch the highlights more carefully (where your suggestion for monitoring is so important) but knowing that it will do things to the image that I want.

I'm sure none of this is a revelation to you, but the point of all this is that without ISO as part of the language, I'd just have to invent some other way to think and talk about this stuff. And for a lot of Redusers, i think ISO has gotten to be just a camera setting.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

CONFIRMING

I have my EPIC up doing MOCO tests tonight and on the LATEST release Firmware, with the FALSE COLOR RAW VIEW enabled,
MOVING ISO AROUND in RAW view DOES effect the exposure colors IN RAW VIEW.

Battistella

huh? There is no "FALSE COLOR RAW VIEW" - there is only RAW view + EXPOSURE or RAW view + VIDEO - both display false colors. RAW view + EXPOSURE is actually "true"

You mean RAW and EXPOSURE selected? Sorry - moving ISO does NOT effect the exposure colors while in RAW view. If you select VIDEO + RAW - then it DOES.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

one of the reasons why your suggestion is so important is that it will help a DP to visualize the relationship between the "working" ISO (the one he/she is calculating exposure for) and the camera's native ISO (the sensor's fixed sensitivity). Seeing raw-based false color on top of metadata-infleuenced monitor images would help to clarify just where you're pushing the image within the sensor's DR, as well as showing sensor clipping and noise floor.

Bingo.

 

[D Fuller]

You see,

we can talk ISO, false color, exposure and that all we want, but FOOD is what really matters. HAHAHA

Battistella

Enough with all this bloody camera talk. Let's eat!!

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Oh ... you mean the PRO WIFI IO Module with the redmote screen on the side and nice big fat buttons I mentioned over here - http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?111859-RED-FOCUS/page4

Doesn't need to be that fancy. Certainly a display of some sort would be 'nice to have' but totally non-essential.

Heck… I suck at AutoCAD but I can draw what I want in ten seconds, so I did:

Doesn't even have to be wireless, a wired hookup would be fine. Just THAT - a simple box with labelled knobs and buttons that allows me access what I need to access in a hurry, quickly. If I need to mess with any other settings I reach for the standard camera control options. But a box like this would be a godsend… I've blow shots because I've had to try to dig into menus and manipulate the touch screen with gloves to do something as basic as set an audio gain, for instance.

On a typical big or small production set it's as useful and necessary as an ashtray on a motorbike - but for other jobs it would solve a LOT of ergonomic issues my Epic has, but my first SLR - a 1970s Russian Zenith! - didn't have!

Get the idea now?

Mike

 

[Elsie N]

Doesn't need to be that fancy. Certainly a display of some sort would be 'nice to have' but totally non-essential.

Heck… I suck at AutoCAD but I can draw what I want in ten seconds, so I did:

Doesn't even have to be wireless, a wired hookup would be fine. Just THAT - a simple box with labelled knobs and buttons that allows me access what I need to access in a hurry, quickly. If I need to mess with any other settings I reach for the standard camera control options. But a box like this would be a godsend… I've blow shots because I've had to try to dig into menus and manipulate the touch screen with gloves to do something as basic as set an audio gain, for instance.

On a typical big or small production set it's as useful and necessary as an ashtray on a motorbike - but for other jobs it would solve a LOT of ergonomic issues my Epic has, but my first SLR - a 1970s Russian Zenith! - didn't have!

Get the idea now?

Mike

I'm sure RED could build that for you. Not sure how many NZ$ it would cost. A group buy would surely bring the cost down.

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Heh. ISO.

One of my partners in crime on the recent insane volcano shoot is a very experienced guy, but had never really laid hands on an Epic before; his background is ENG. In my briefing I decided to simplify, and trained him that ISO is mislabeled; 'think of it as an alternate viewfinder brightness control...'.

He did a good job (although he underexposed by a stop or two at times; he didn't trust the ability of Dragon to handle the top end, based on his ENG experience) - but he loved the camera and now is looking to buy a RED. Another convert

Mike

 

[D Fuller]

ISO is mislabeled; 'think of it as an alternate viewfinder brightness control...'.

Heh, heh, heh. I'll use that.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Doesn't even have to be wireless, a wired hookup would be fine. Just THAT - a simple box with labelled knobs and buttons that allows me access what I need to access in a hurry, quickly. If I need to mess with any other settings I reach for the standard camera control options. But a box like this would be a godsend… I've blow shots because I've had to try to dig into menus and manipulate the touch screen with gloves to do something as basic as set an audio gain, for instance.

On a typical big or small production set it's as useful and necessary as an ashtray on a motorbike - but for other jobs it would solve a LOT of ergonomic issues my Epic has, but my first SLR - a 1970s Russian Zenith! - didn't have!

Get the idea now?

Mike

Not sure there would be much of a market for that - but it could be done via Gig-E cable -

http://www.red.com/store/products/lemo-to-cat5e-ethernet-cable-9

RCP SDK - https://www.red.com/developers

http://store.arduino.cc/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=11

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Not sure there would be much of a market for that - but it could be done via Gig-E cable -

http://www.red.com/store/products/lemo-to-cat5e-ethernet-cable-9

RCP SDK - https://www.red.com/developers

You're right about the market - but I had no friggin idea that SDK existed! Thanks a bunch, I clearly need to pay more attention!

Here we go, watch this space!

Mike

 

[Jacobo Martinez]

If RAW EXPOSURE MODE in MX is based on 320, without metadata, when you see RAW EXPOSURE MODE on dragon is it also based on 320?? Digging deeper, are the stop lights based on 320 on the dragon?