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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 :)

What I learned today getting my Scarlet and lenses checked by a lens tech.

Jonas Klittmark said:
Scarlet settings: 23.976 fps but mounted on a tripod and without moving the camera, shutter 1/48, Tiffen water white .9 ND, we focused manually while looking at 1:1 focus assist
5D settings: still photo, shutter 1/50, Tiffen screw-in (cheapo) .9 ND, ISO 100, did not touch or change the focus after setting it on the lens when it was on the Scarlet

Is this normal?
Click to expand...

Why did you put one .9 one the Scarlet and a different one on the 5D? How do you expect to compare the images? You have introduced a variable into the test that you can not account for.

It is not possible to draw any meaningful conclusions here, IMO. You need to limit the variables to one, in this case the bodies. Everything else needs to be exactly the same.
 
it's an endless thread as the 5d is sharpening in camera (even with sharpness at 0 in camera raw in post) and the scarlet has no sharpening. Obviously the scarlet will be softer when compared directly. Again, you have to sharpen a bit the scarlet image to match them.
 
Scott Crawley said:
Why did you put one .9 one the Scarlet and a different one on the 5D? How do you expect to compare the images? You have introduced a variable into the test that you can not account for.

It is not possible to draw any meaningful conclusions here, IMO. You need to limit the variables to one, in this case the bodies. Everything else needs to be exactly the same.
Click to expand...

I agree with you - we should not have done this. Maybe we'll get a chance to do another test where we can remove this variable. However, I will say that the much higher quality filter was on the Scarlet and the cheaper filter was on the 5D. If anything, I imagine that it would degrade the picture quality on the 5D and not the other way around. But sure, I'd rather not have the variable at all.
 
Uli Plank said:
Questions: Can your 5D shoot motion with that quality? Why do you see aliasing?
Click to expand...

If your point is i) that the Scarlet has an advantage in being able to shoot 4K @ 24 fps vs the 5D which shoots 2K (also using questionable line skipping), then I agree.

If your second point is ii) that it's an advantage that the Scarlet does not show the aliasing that the 5D does, then I agree.

What I'm still wondering is whether the level of sharpness achieved by our Scarlet in this example is typical or not. If there is something wrong with our camera or setup, I'd obviously like to address that. If this is as good as it gets, so be it.
 
Not to butt in --

Not too widely known, but the present generation of Canon sensors seem to have a multiple of 160 as their best ISOs. No kiddin', an image shot at an ISO of 640 can be less noisy than one shot at, say, 200. Somewhat counterintuitive. So possibly trying a multiple of ISO 160 for the best results out of the 5D II. I used the SAFEWAY sign to get a 'white' reference for color balancing. A Bank of America building for gray. The 5D image looks pretty sharp to me, but also has some moire in the Transamerica spire and at least one of the buildings to the right of the Transamerica. (Brown & green gunk .. ?)

Mt 2¢,
Serge
 
Serge Polevitzky said:
Not to butt in --

Not too widely known, but the present generation of Canon sensors seem to have a multiple of 160 as their best ISOs. No kiddin', an image shot at an ISO of 640 can be less noisy than one shot at, say, 200. Somewhat counterintuitive. So possibly trying a multiple of ISO 160 for the best results out of the 5D II. I used the SAFEWAY sign to get a 'white' reference for color balancing. A Bank of America building for gray. The 5D image looks pretty sharp to me, but also has some moire in the Transamerica spire and at least one of the buildings to the right of the Transamerica. (Brown & green gunk .. ?)

Mt 2¢,
Serge
Click to expand...

ISO 160 definitely has the least amount of noise but at the expense of reduced dynamic range (compared to ISO 100). Pick your poison... In any case, my goal is to make the Scarlet look better, not the 5D! :)

Totally agree on the moire on the building, it's surprisingly bad for coming from a RAW file.
 
My point was this: the Scarlet was made for moving images, the 5D for stills!

If it shows moiré even on a still, what does it mean? I think I wrote this before: the OLPF on the Scarlet (and Epic) was chosen more conservatively, because any moiré is shouting "here I am" when a camera is panning (for example), while only a professional shooter might spot it in a still. I want to say that it's to be expected that a Scarlet is softer than a 5D, and it's a good thing to be. If you need some stills from your Scarlet, there's nothing wrong with adding some sharpening in post. Well, you may add some to motion, if you like, but I rarely do. I like the fact that the images from RED don't look like video…

If you think that a Scarlet should better be sharp as hell for that much more dough than for a 5D, think again. It is the best movie camera for that amount of money on this planet right now. The 5D is one of the best stills cameras (not having compared the MIII or the new Nikon yet). Every camera manufacturer needs to tweak one direction or the other to optimize, so even if RED calls theses DSMC, it still goes: horses for courses.

And finally, yes, I think your Scarlet is fine! Stop pixel peeping and shoot a film :wink5:
 
sam karr said:
it's an endless thread as the 5d is sharpening in camera (even with sharpness at 0 in camera raw in post) and the scarlet has no sharpening. Obviously the scarlet will be softer when compared directly. Again, you have to sharpen a bit the scarlet image to match them.
Click to expand...

I still think Brian needs to check his backfocus. The first photo had a softness very similar to how things looked for me before I got my backfocus fixed. The difference for me has been night and day. It's worth checking.
 
I just got our Scarlet this week and its definitely soft. Even softer than the original photo of the plants Brian posted on this thread. I looked at his photo and thought, "wow, that's pretty sharp!"

I'm thinking I've got backfocus issues as well. Yes, it should've been checked before it left RED, and maybe it was but was shifted in the shipping process? Maybe the self-locking mechanism of the backfocus isn't as good as it should be? Whatever the reason, I'm definitely getting the image of a $3000 prosumer HD camera with this $12k sensor. I just opened a trouble-ticket with red. Seems like a few others in this thread (like the previous post) have also had similar soft issues that have been fixed by a backfocus adjustment. I'd do it here but I do not have a good lens OR a PL mount. Just a 17-55mm Canon EF lens and a 18-135mm Canon EF lens.

Like others I applied sharpening to the R3D in Premiere (in the R3D file's "source settings"). I also had to apply the sharpening filter to it on the timeline and by the time it became crisp, it looked like it was compressed with an h.264 codec and blocky with smeared colors around the edges.

Also having noise issues too :(

Here are a couple R3D's:
http://66.147.244.90/~laymenmi/red/

And an image :(
This was exported as a .tiff from Redcine-x and saved as a .jpg in Photoshop.
http://66.147.244.90/~laymenmi/red/Scarlet_blurry_shot.jpg
 
It would be useful to take the camera to a rental house or to someone with some high-quality lenses like Zeiss Master Primes and shoot a comparison as a frame of reference against your lenses using some rez charts at different f-stops. You need to isolate whether the problem is with the lens or the camera. Even better would be to bring in someone else's Epic or Scarlet as another frame of reference, shoot your lens and the Master Primes on that camera as well then compare frames between the two lenses on the two cameras.
 
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