Two Questions Answered RED vs HD, and RED vs Hasselblad

[chris layhe]

We have been doing a few little samples to provide an easy answer to the never ending question posed by clients from indie films to corporate megaliths "why use a RED" and thought you guys might be interested. The piece is on our web site blogs at http://www.clai.tv/red-vs-hd-the-reality/ - it doesn't pretend to answer all of the questions but it sure does seem to provide a decent visual reference to explain why we have gone on and on about shooting in 4k and 5k for the past four years! Feel free to embed the link if it is useful.

While we are at it we bumped into another great example of RED reality and popped this into another blog at http://www.clai.tv/portraits-with-a-red-epic-video-camera/ that really came as a surprise to us and a huge pat on the back to RED (you clever sausages you!)

Happy Christmas and everything else to all of you out there... from all of us at CLAi.


Chris

 

[Andrew Allsbury]

Great post Chris!

 

[Alex Rawet]

Thank you for posting this, I was having a Scarlet vs. XF300 conversation with someone just the other day!

 

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Excellent work, Chris! Thank you for sharing.

 

[Liam Hall]

We have been doing a few little samples to provide an easy answer to the never ending question posed by clients from indie films to corporate megaliths "why use a RED" and thought you guys might be interested. The piece is on our web site blogs at http://www.clai.tv/red-vs-hd-the-reality/ - it doesn't pretend to answer all of the questions but it sure does seem to provide a decent visual reference to explain why we have gone on and on about shooting in 4k and 5k for the past four years! Feel free to embed the link if it is useful.

While we are at it we bumped into another great example of RED reality and popped this into another blog at http://www.clai.tv/portraits-with-a-red-epic-video-camera/ that really came as a surprise to us and a huge pat on the back to RED (you clever sausages you!)

Happy Christmas and everything else to all of you out there... from all of us at CLAi.


Chris

I don't think you've answered any questions.

There's little value comparing an S35 RAW camera with a 1/3 inch prosumer HDV camera. Indeed, if any professional filmmaker is having to justify their choice of gear against a "kid in the mail room" or someone's "nephew" then they have a problem that can't be solved by a camera.

And sorry to put a major downer on your post but neither of the stills in the second link look particularly sharp to me, certainly the Red shot looks soft. Whilst you can pull a decent sized image out of a Epic, I don't think photographers will be ditching their stills kit just yet.

 

[chris layhe]

I don't think you've answered any questions.

There's little value comparing an S35 RAW camera with a 1/3 inch prosumer HDV camera. Indeed, if any professional filmmaker is having to justify their choice of gear against a "kid in the mail room" or someone's "nephew" then they have a problem that can't be solved by a camera.

And sorry to put a major downer on your post but neither of the stills in the second link look particularly sharp to me, certainly the Red shot looks soft. Whilst you can pull a decent sized image out of a Epic, I don't think photographers will be ditching their stills kit just yet.

Hi Liam,

As professionals, we do a wide range of work - be it full production or just camera/dit rental or editing - which at the lower end of the scale includes corporate, music video and indie films here in San Francisco... and I can assure you that it's not just small corporate clients that think they can get good results with the kid on their staff and the HDV-style camera he used in college.

So part of my job is to educate them about what the end results will look like if they go down that route and what the difference will be between that and the Epic, and hope they understand that the difference is worth having - if not this time then next time. I think that it is a situation we all encounter from time to time, whether you are shooting features and a producer is suggesting sticking an EX1 into the camera mix instead of an extra RED, or a couple of GoPros because he has heard the new ones make great shots, or shooting stock footage and the buyer says he is going to commission someone working with a basic HD camera because the difference isn't worth paying for.

If we are having the same discussion about Alexa vs. Epic then I'll do the same tests with the Arri to show the client - but showing the difference there isn't suitable for heavily compressed footage on a web site! The second set of shots wasn't our work, as I mention several times, but if you follow the link to the original full size uncompressed files you will definitely see that the RED isn't in the same class of sharpness as the Hasselblad - which is no big surprise as it has a far lower resolution... but it shows that under certain circumstances (particularly where there is action and getting enough frames to have a choice becomes critical) the Epic could definitely hold it's own today, which I personally wouldn't have expected to be the case at all. And with a Dragon sensor...

One of the problems we sometimes have as RED professionals is looking at everything as though life is a test bench - and it's important to consider these types of posts for what they are designed to achieve... in this case showing to people who know very little so we need a common visual standard that we can discuss in their terms. I'd love to see some of your own comparison test footage, so that we all can share those results with our peers and our clients, and help to set that bar of common understanding... if you can do that?


Chris

 

[Björn Benckert]

Hi Liam,

As professionals, we do a wide range of work - be it full production or just camera/dit rental or editing - which at the lower end of the scale includes corporate, music video and indie films here in San Francisco... and I can assure you that it's not just small corporate clients that think they can get good results with the kid on their staff and the HDV-style camera he used in college.

So part of my job is to educate them about what the end results will look like if they go down that route and what the difference will be between that and the Epic, and hope they understand that the difference is worth having - if not this time then next time. I think that it is a situation we all encounter from time to time, whether you are shooting features and a producer is suggesting sticking an EX1 into the camera mix instead of an extra RED, or a couple of GoPros because he has heard the new ones make great shots, or shooting stock footage and the buyer says he is going to commission someone working with a basic HD camera because the difference isn't worth paying for.

If we are having the same discussion about Alexa vs. Epic then I'll do the same tests with the Arri to show the client - but showing the difference there isn't suitable for heavily compressed footage on a web site! The second set of shots wasn't our work, as I mention several times, but if you follow the link to the original full size uncompressed files you will definitely see that the RED isn't in the same class of sharpness as the Hasselblad - which is no big surprise as it has a far lower resolution... but it shows that under certain circumstances (particularly where there is action and getting enough frames to have a choice becomes critical) the Epic could definitely hold it's own today, which I personally wouldn't have expected to be the case at all. And with a Dragon sensor...

One of the problems we sometimes have as RED professionals is looking at everything as though life is a test bench - and it's important to consider these types of posts for what they are designed to achieve... in this case showing to people who know very little so we need a common visual standard that we can discuss in their terms. I'd love to see some of your own comparison test footage, so that we all can share those results with our peers and our clients, and help to set that bar of common understanding... if you can do that?


Chris

Just a few things. If you are about educating people then it's maybe it's not so vice to explain that "epic" is this and "HD" is that... As Epic is a camera and HD is a pixel format. So comparing the two is a bit like doing a comparison between tires and engines on a car site.

Most of the tests there have no relevance to the fact that one is shot with an epic. Alexa shoots HD, it's motion blur and other featiures does not differ much from the epic... just one example.