RED ONE Build 14 Latitude Tests

My goal was to see if RED’s 5000k chip is limited in exposure latitude under tungsten lighting conditions due to a tendency for the red channel to clip early. This seems to be the case, but I’m told there’s a post fix for this problem that I hope to learn about in the near future.

Here’s what I did:

-Shot a Kodak 18% gray card, with some texture to it, at different exposures to see where the camera clipped and to see where significant underexposure noise occurred.

-Shot two tests, one under tungsten light and one under tungsten + full CTB, to see how the camera did under both kinds of light.

-Originally set exposure by setting gray at 50 units using the camera’s Rec 709 output, which turned out to be a stop slower than REDLog would have me believe. Zone 4 on Rec 709 turned out to be Zone 5 in REDLog. (The ASA appears to be a true 320.)

-Took the darkest three tones for each lighting situation and boosted them to 18% gray value to better see noise; also isolated each color channel to see where the noise was coming from.

-Included histograms for each clip from Red Alert.

-Captured in RedCode28, 4K 2:1, 23.98 fps and 1/48 shutter.

I wasn’t able to check underexposure latitude as far down as I wanted because of the ambient light in the test location.

The process was: open .R3D in Red Alert and export clip; then reset white balance to 5600k and capture the histogram to see what the daylight-balanced chip was doing in each situation. The clip was scaled and output as a ProRes HQ Quicktime, 1280x720, and assembled on a ProRes HQ timeline in Final Cut Pro 2. It was then output via Compressor using H.264 VBR encoding at 1k/sec. bit rate, where I tried to keep the file size down without letting the noise get lost or exaggerated by the compression process.

Enjoy!

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