Hi all- I apologize, but I’ve been swamped with work of one sort or another, and when I tried to sit down and start sorting through the latest RED test footage today I couldn’t finish it. I took a nap instead. I must be getting old!
I’ve got three days of shooting this week, and hopefully I’ll be able to pull the footage together and post it by the end of the week. If I were to speculate wildly about the results of the latest round of RED testing, I’d say the following:
The RED definitely has an infrared problem, as previously seen on Reduser.net. We put 7 stops of ND on the lens and saw very severe magenta color shifts on black cloth due to IR contamination. Apparently if the ratio of visible light to infrared becomes too low the RED sees the IR quite easily. I understand that at least one filter manufacturer is currently working on the problem.
We tested build 15, which seems very different to build 14. On build 14 we saw severe problems with red clipping under tungsten light that turned highlights cyan and required highlight recovery work in REDCine and REDAlert to bring back highlight detail. On build 15 it seems that a lot has been done internally to eliminate this problem: the camera seems to hold highlights vastly better under tungsten light, and highlight recovery actually seems to make things slightly worse. There’s obviously something different going on in the camera with this build.
I think there’s some additional processing going on in there, particularly with the red channel. It’s interesting to note that build 14 saw the red channel being the quietest, with green second and blue the noisiest. Now green is the quietest (although still fairly noisy), with red being noisier and blue about the same. Something seems to have happened to the red gain. Also, preliminary histogram examination shows red rolling off around clip instead of hard clipping, which is interesting.
It’s a completely different camera now. I hope to post some build 14 and 15 comparisons and more data later in the week. Stay tuned.
Thanks, as always, to camera guru Adam Wilt for his help and photos. Also thanks to DP Alan Hereford, DP-in-training Ted Allen, and video engineer/co-owner Jay Farrington of Chater Camera (chatercamera.com).
I’ve also got a new showreel coming together, so I suspect I’ll have a lot to say about that process at some point.
Art Adams A native of Northern California, Art Adams spent ten years in LA--first at film school (Loyola Marymount) and then working in the film industry. He started out as a camera assistant on low budget features and worked his way into spots, music videos, features, sitcoms and episodic television shows. He transitioned from assistant to operator to DP by the time he returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1993.