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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 :)

Tungsten Sensor

What's "too much" in terms of noise or grain is a matter of taste and a matter of what you are trying to do with the footage. For a chromakey bluescreen shot, obviously you may want less noise in the blue channel. For a typical warm night interior where on film you'd be using a fast film stock, a little blue channel noise is not the worst thing unless you have to brighten the footage in post a lot. Which is why I'm suggesting to be conservative in terms of rating the camera under tungsten light.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
What's "too much" in terms of noise or grain is a matter of taste and a matter of what you are trying to do with the footage. For a chromakey bluescreen shot, obviously you may want less noise in the blue channel. For a typical warm night interior where on film you'd be using a fast film stock, a little blue channel noise is not the worst thing unless you have to brighten the footage in post a lot. Which is why I'm suggesting to be conservative in terms of rating the camera under tungsten light.
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It is not easy to classify footage originated from film vs. digital under the same illumination as uniformly useful. The different noise characteristics of these two mediums means different mechanism for evaluation and what is acceptable in terms of taste and tolerance.
 
Personal taste is one reason why some person will say that a certain amount of noise is "awful" or "unacceptable" while another will say that it looks fine. You have to shoot your own tests and decide for yourself. But make sure you take your tests through the post color-correction steps out to the final delivery format if possible (or worst-case scenario for image quality needs) because some noise problems can be magnified as the image goes through all the post steps.

On the other hand, there are also post solutions to noise problems.

I'm not saying that noise and grain look or behave the same, only that people who shoot film aren't always looking for or expecting super "clean" images, and there are probably some people shooting digitally who don't mind some noise either.
 
A good compromise I found after a bit of testing ( build 11? dec 07 ) was to shoot tungsten with a 80D, this only half correction shifting the cameras native 5000K to something like 3700K , with only 2/3 of a stop loss. After correcting to neutral in redcine these files were definately less noisy in the blue channel than the unfiltered tungsten shots. Pretty close to the 80A ( slightly over )corrected shots.
 
Just a curious question for Team Red, is there anyway to look at Red footage without any channel gain applied?

Also, is there is any additional form of filtering built into the camera/sensor? I've read that its balanced for 5500K, and you don't seem to endorse magenta filtering, which makes me wonder if its already in the camera. An answer to this question would be helpful.

Thanks!
 
In RedAlert turn matrix off.

There's no filtering in camera. You just get what the sensor gives. All post-sensor balancing is just metadata.

Graeme
 
Can you do that in Redcine? I can't run RedAlert on my PC.

So if there's no in camera filtering, it probably wouldn't hurt to use a little bit of magenta during the daytime. The trick however would be not using too much. It sounds like you need to use ND filters anyways with the camera when shooting outside, couldn't hurt to throw in a little magenta. From what I understand, this should also help with the cameras usable latitude. If someone with a camera could figure that out, that would be awesome.
 
I've been thinking about this for a little bit...

When you say the sensor is made for 5500K, I'm assuming you "biased" it that when making it... if thats correct, then you wouldn't need any magenta filtering. That would make some sense, as it would eliminate the need.
 
I understand that sensors tend to be naturally biased towards higher color temperatures but..

the only thing that makes me think otherwise though is that when I turn off the color Matrix to see the image without any channel gain applied (as well as with linear light turned on), I should see a somewhat green image, but I don't. A greenish cast image what you would see if the sensor weren't somehow artificially balanced to output a properly white balanced image under daylight without channel gain applied. When you don't compensate in someway, you will always have more green light than red or blue, and at higher color temperatures, you have more blue light than red, but even if you shoot under tungsten, the overall image would still look very green.
 
Well,

Even with film, i see that a lot of interior scenes that look warmer than neutral white balance... I mean, if your light is on the yellow side, then it is normal that the footage will look warm...like in real life.

I also think that using a light blue filter will prevent to have to cool down col temp too much in post.

Aiming at perfect neutral white balance often leads to unnatural looking pictures anyway IMHO.
 
Graeme Nattress said:
If blue noise is a bother, the new noise reduction does a very fine job on chroma noise.

Graeme
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Where are the tests on that? I remember seeing one thread about it and it looked promising. I'm surprised I haven't seen more test of that. Guess I'll have to do one.
 
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