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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 :)

Weapon Dragon Sensor vs Epic Dragon Sensor?

Thats a bit dumb excuse I think.

Possibly there is a slim difference but if shot identical settings / olof´s etc then you would need to be pretty deep into the pixels to see it. And simply Mg should preform slightly better.

But normally when shooting two cameras there is different lenses and camera angles and all other sort of things involved, then matching one camera to the other is related to so many other parameters than the version of dragon sensor so I think not even the doctors at red could tell one from the other. And in this case the MG has the upper hand. So not much of a risk involved.

But sure, if they have another epic and feel more confident with two of those then I guess thats a valid decision.
 
BrendanLeahy said:
I was hoping to get a gig where someone asked for an Epic Dragon, and I currently own the Weapon Mg. I was under the impression the sensors and OLPFs were the same in terms of looks?

Here's the answer I got back:

"Hey there Brendan- the company has had some issues with mixing different reds, even though the sensors inside should have matched- so they don't want to risk it."

If anyone has had the same experience, I'd be curious to hear.
Click to expand...

Tell them that it's the same sensor and mixing MG and Dragon will not create any differences. If they still tell you that they won't risk it I'm sorry to say that they are stupid, so then tell them that you have settings in the MG to make it match up with a regular Epic. If they don't buy that, they are smart and stupid at the same time so then just tell them that if they can see radical differences and that post is a pain because of it they can charge you for the extra time.

If the color science is the same there won't be any difference. I've shot stuff on my MG that were mixed with a regular Epic MX camera and there wasn't any problems. The bottom line... they don't know what they are talking about and your issue isn't that they have an issue it's how to convince them there isn't any problem. :tongue_smilie:
 
As much as I agree with this in theory, I have had some weird situations, where my Epic Dragon looked very different from my Scarlet Dragon.
Nothing that couldn't be fixed with a quick grade, but I was surprised to see the 2 cameras with the same settings looking so different out of the box. But piece of cake to match in post.
But I also had a shoot where an Epic-W with Helium was matched easily with an Epic Dragon with no issues, so your client might be overreacting, but how to tell them that?
 
I upgraded from EPIC DRAGON to Weapon DRAGON (both Mg and CF), and this hit two nerves for me. The first nerve is to call bullshit on people who's fear of what they don't know (which is different than the fear of the truly unknown) leads them to make stupid decisions. IPP2 is freakin brilliant, and it enables older cameras to benefit from the latest and greatest advances in RED's imaging pipeline.

The second nerve is to say "yes, but..." based on the fact that the Weapon platform is so, so much cleaner than EPIC DRAGON. My decision to upgrade from EPIC to WEAPON was as much impulse and blind faith as anything else. It was also expensive as hell, for somebody buying into "it's better" without really seeing concrete specs. When my cameras came back, I marveled at how much better were the shadows, how much more image quality came through for a given level of compression, and how, with higher data rates possible, I could really reach into the full quality of the DRAGON sensor. You have a client who doesn't want all that quality because they fear a mismatch?! That's the "yes" part of the "yes, but..."

Now, for all the improvements that WEAON brings, there two things that don't really change, based on what I've seen on these boards over time. Those who know what they are doing (Toia, Probst, and Holland most famously, but dozens of others as well) get great IQ from EPIC DRAGON. And they can get better--fantastic even--quality from EPIC DRAGON clips processed with IPP2. The second thing is that with all the benefits of DSMC2 as a better platform for DRAGON and IPP2 as a better imaging pipeline, there are still postings every week about problems with shadows, problems with noise, problems with image quality, etc., which all redound to: there are a lot of people who don't know how to light, meter, and expose properly. I thought that WEAPON would provide enough marginal improvement over DRAGON that all the typical EPIC DRAGON mistakes would be smoothed over with the better specs of WEAPON. Not so. Thus, the "but..." part is that if one is shooting at the ragged edge of EPIC DRAGON, stressing the sensor, the noise platform, etc., then yes, the breakdown of one camera is difficult to emulate with a different camera.

But--and this is the real but--the real solution to getting better matching between these two cameras is simple: master your technique and it will translate to just about every camera. In that case, newer, better cameras just make it damn easy to get the job done. Which is what we should be expecting--and getting--from our new technologies. Rejecting WEAPON because one doesn't understand what one actually has in hand with EPIC is damn depressing.

M
 
BrendanLeahy said:
I was hoping to get a gig where someone asked for an Epic Dragon, and I currently own the Weapon Mg. I was under the impression the sensors and OLPFs were the same in terms of looks?

Here's the answer I got back:

"Hey there Brendan- the company has had some issues with mixing different reds, even though the sensors inside should have matched- so they don't want to risk it."

If anyone has had the same experience, I'd be curious to hear.
Click to expand...
I agree with the producer ... with post now a days people don't have time to screw with things. Also to me the weapon gives superior r3d over dragon epic, and I could see some poor guy trying to make all the dragon epic footage match the weapon quality. Now if both the weapon dragon and epic dragon footage are perfectly lighted, I'd agree with the other posters. BUT from a producers viewpoint, they have to make all sorts of compromises and it's fairly rare that things are lighted without any cost constraints. Another point of confusion from a producers viewpoint is all the different ways a r3d can be ingested into a prores file, so a lot of the comments from the producer are people doing different ingest methods between epic and weapon (yes ... i know the ingest process could be identical between epic and weapon, but in many cases the options that the weapon offers could have artificially created variations in the ingest process).
 
Outside of human error (treatment of r3ds) or a specific issue related to out of spec cameras I can not see the mixing being an issue. If lots of different scenes are shot there will even be moments where the weapon will match better 'some' epic shots than than the epic from another scene...for example a comfortably lit epic will match a underlit weapon more than an underlit epic!

That said I have sympathy with the producer as it is all quite confusing..

BrendanLeahy said:
I was hoping to get a gig where someone asked for an Epic Dragon, and I currently own the Weapon Mg. I was under the impression the sensors and OLPFs were the same in terms of looks?

Here's the answer I got back:

"Hey there Brendan- the company has had some issues with mixing different reds, even though the sensors inside should have matched- so they don't want to risk it."

If anyone has had the same experience, I'd be curious to hear.
Click to expand...
 
What Stacey said.

Even if a chart is not present a proper colorist should be able to match them nicely. If this was a drastically different camera the production choice would be well founded but colour offsets like these are minute, we match much more serious cases. This is ridiculous and camera is the least of the problem. They practically said "we don't want to bother with post and just want to apply the same look on all shots".

Nowadays everyone wants to play professional production but unwilling to follow through.
And of course the problem is always in someone or something else.
 
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