What is EPIC?

[Jason DeSimone]

preach on!

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Epic = more fun

 

[Joseph Hutson]

What is EPIC?

The camera which costs less, offers 6 1/2 times the resolution, 5 times the framerates, 25% of the weight compared to its "competitor".

Highest Dynamic Range over every other Cinema camera (with HDRx), an upgrade path already known to customers and potential customers, a completely modular approach to building the body up​ for use with other camera models...

Oh, and a continually evolving camera where the best is added and the worst taken away and substituted for free (for example, the heatsink)

 

[Zach Gray]

But I don't want my output scaled to fit 0.0 -> 1.0.

RED footage shot at ISO 800 produces values considerably higher than 1.0 from the half float linear path in the SDK. See here for an example. And I want those values preserved so I can deal with the over-brights as a creative decision further down the pipeline, not automatically scaled to a 0.0 -> 1.0 range.

Remapping the data from 0-1 doesn't limit your ability to creatively deal with overbrights. It's just shifting the gradient. The real issue is loosing fidelity by remapping to a lower bit depth, ie 12>>10 or 16>>10. You could scale your half float linear to a 0-1 32 bit image without loosing anything. Maybe I'm missing something.

I think you are promoting a modern linear working method. That's were we should be going. Gavin might be suggesting that we have legacy systems that we need to work with. And until those systems change, we can make them 'safer' to work with by mapping 0-1 until they get with the RAW/LinEXR program.

 

[Nick Shaw]

I think you are promoting a modern linear working method. That's were we should be going.

Indeed I am.

Gavin might be suggesting that we have legacy systems that we need to work with. And until those systems change, we can make them 'safer' to work with by mapping 0-1 until they get with the RAW/LinEXR program.

With Gavin's proposed method, the scale and offset necessary to fit to the 0 -> 1 range would vary depending on the image, so it would be necessary to pass that information on a per clip basis through the post chain – not very efficient, and open to error. If I want to fit float data in an integer container I prefer to use Cineon log (16 bit DPX is my format of choice). Then you get real time performance on systems which can't achieve that with float data, and you can convert back to float with a standard known curve.

 

[vincent kardasik]

What is Epic?
The best camera in the World and I received mine yesterday!
Sorry, it's not helping the thread at all but I couldn't resist...

 

[Kaku Ito]

After receiving Epic-M of our own, I feel like I'm on a time machine.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

With Gavin's proposed method, the scale and offset necessary to fit to the 0 -> 1 range would vary depending on the image, so it would be necessary to pass that information on a per clip basis through the post chain.

I rarely see red footage go above 1.5 in linear space. In Log it's usually just barely clipping. Yes there would be a little exposure shift between shots... but by your reasoning every shot would have the exact same exposure. You're going to have to do a baseline grade anyway--this would just ensure you have *all* of your data to work with. 10bit Log should be plenty of bit depth to handle 'compressed' 0->1.5 lin footage.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Sorry... I don't buy that. There weren't any other companies that were saying that they were releasing a 4K camera in 2006 when we announced. We were alone at the time.

I don't think you can name one company, let alone 10.

Jim

I think people also get confused with shd which is 16:9 only and not nearly 4k. There were some shd shown off, like the JVC, and I think Olympus actually released one around 2004, but no 4k from memory.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

None of those were for sale in 2006, the Olympus quad-HD camera is still just a prototype after five years as far as I know. The Dalsa Origin was the only production-ready (by which I mean people were shooting small projects on it) 4K camera that predated the Red One but it wasn't for sale nor in large production. I don't know when the Phantom 65 came out but I think it was a year later than the Red One.

 

[Mark Andersen]

Wasn't it Robert Altman who said:

"the cheapest part of making a film is the film"

David

That may be true but on many smaller projects its more significant. When I was shooting stock imagery on 35mm celluloid, it would cost me about $90 a minute just to turn the camera on. That was film, processing, shipping and telecine, plus a lot of time on my part. Today when I turn on the camera it's only about 50 cents a min. for Hard drives to archive the footage. I am sure a lot of smaller projects are in a similar boat, corporate stuff, music videos, docs etc. where there isn't huge sets and actors dwarfing the film stock budget.

 

[Mark Andersen]

What is Epic? It's opportunity, potential, a level playing field. It's not inexpensive, but so much more affordable than cameras used to be. The Epic won't turn you into Gordon Willis, Greg Toland or Conrad Hall any more than a Fender guitar will make you Hendricks or Clapton. But it will give you the potential and ability to try. The game has changed, the rules are different and the future is bright Red.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

None of those were for sale in 2006, the Olympus quad-HD camera is still just a prototype after five years as far as I know. The Dalsa Origin was the only production-ready (by which I mean people were shooting small projects on it) 4K camera that predated the Red One but it wasn't for sale nor in large production. I don't know when the Phantom 65 came out but I think it was a year later than the Red One.

Thanks David, I thought they had gone production with the one where they stitched sensors together through a prism. Did the viper people ever release a shd? It is irrelevant anyway, last year ambarella released a consumer camera chipset that could record 5mp video, and I suspect that they will have a shd one this year. The chipset can actually pull more than 8mp 60fps uncompressed off the sensor, but nobody has bothered to hack one to record it, even the cheap one I have here. So, shd is is going to become more common place. the past is the past.

 

[Thomas Church]

Wasn't it Robert Altman who said:

"the cheapest part of making a film, is the film"

David

When you're on a low-budget or no-budget film, certainly not. Film stock and lighting gear kill these projects.

People like Christopher Nolan, David Lynch and Darren Aronofsky, who got their break doing low-budget DIY feature films, certainly took far longer to complete them because they had to save up to buy film stock.

Nolan's "Following" took a year. Lynch's "Eraserhead" took four.

Not to mention that cameras as sensitive and noise-free as the EPIC also allow you to shoot with practical lights in a lot of situations. This means you can have an extremely small crew if that's what you can afford.

I'm not saying that the "industrial" way of shooting is going or should go way, but allowing a smaller, more intimate filmmaking to grow with professional results to back it up will be a true revolution.

Maybe the coming of a second "New Wave" of cinema worldwide.

In the next few years you will be able to edit and finish natively an entire feature lenght film shot on 4K using a laptop hooked up to a 10 TB Thunderbolt hard drive while drinking coffee in your bedroom. This is incredibly huge.

Let the ideas and not the budget speak for themselves. A lot of filmmakers these days hide behind craft and don't have anything to say.

In fact that's what 90% of Hollywood films do. The bells and whistles are there to divert people from the fact that there is zero content.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

No one ever did, not 4K, not SHD [quad-HD]. Dalsa had the Origin and then came the RED One. Some could argue that a few cameras had 4K or better sensors for acquisition, but none other than Dalsa and RED actually recorded in a "4K" format. The Genesis, for example, uses a 5760x2160 CCD sensor. But instead of a Bayer pattern color filter array, it uses RGB stripes. The sensor CFA literally has one column of RED pixels adjacent to a column of green pixels adjacent to a column of blue pixels and so on and on and on... It met with a lot of harsh criticisms on release. Conversely, it has also been an example used to hotly debate the resolution claims of RED... The Thomson Viper is another example, similar to Genesis and almost as hotly debated, as it has 4320 vertical pixels on its sensor...