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Filed under: Cameras •Editing •Post Production •Production •Training •

More Fun with RED

I just finished a four day shoot for solar energy company Sunpower where we used the RED for three days of location shooting and one day of green screen. More about the green screen later—here’s how I did all the live action shots.

(The above movie is not an official finished product—I just cut a bunch of shots together to music I found in Garage Band.)

Last time I shot with the RED, on a political spot for “No on Prop 8” (California), I tweaked and perfected the way I work with this camera. I don’t think it’s wise to trust only in your light meter when using any HD camera because digital capture gamma curves are not as predictable as film gamma curves. They’re also infinitely adjustable, whether you want them to be or not, and can vary from camera to camera based on camera setup or internal wizardry.

So while I can rough in lighting and exposure with a meter my final exposure is always established using whatever information I can glean from the camera. On most HD cameras I use a combination of the waveform and vectorscope to see what’s going on with the image, because eyes can be very subjective and it’s helpful to have a couple of objective tools to see what’s really going on. With the RED I find that the zebras are my best friend, followed closely by the parade RGB histogram, the stoplight, and a toggle switch for raw mode.

With Build 16 RED incorporated a new color space and gamma called “RedSpace”. This appears to be a brighter version of the Rec 709 gamma and color space, which for reasons known to others always looks way too dark on the RED. RedSpace turns the camera into a “what you see is nearly what you get” camera, with the proviso that what you actually get always looks better than what you saw in the viewfinder. When shooting for NTSC or HD delivery I find that judging the image in RedSpace will give the best results when the footage is processed through RedCine, RedRushes or RedAlert using the Rec 709 gamma and color settings: it’ll be close to what I saw when I shot it, with plenty of information left to color grade any number of looks.

I set exposure using the zebras, one of which I set to a range of low=103 and high=109. This gives me the same feel as if I’m shooting with any other common HD camera. Once I set the exposure based on zebras I next look at the stoplight display and make sure I’m only clipping one channel, unless I’m letting an area of the frame blow out significantly. Clipping only one channel allows me to restore some of that detail using RedAlert or RedCine, as they will attempt to transfer detail from non-clipped channels into the clipped channel.

Watching the parade histogram tells me how far I am from clipping significant parts of the image. Due to the linear way any silicon-based sensor sees information I always want to push my exposure as far as I can toward clipping, in order to keep important shadow details out of the noise floor.

Last but not least, if I’m pushing a lot of the image into the clips then I toggle into raw mode, which supposedly shows what the chip is really seeing. There’s still some gamma being applied so it’s not a perfect raw representation, but it will give you a better idea of how the sensor is clipping than RedSpace will. Frequently I’ll set an exposure in RedSpace, panic slightly at how portions of the image seem to be clipping, toggle into raw mode and discover I’m not clipping hardly anything.

I’ve found that, when I’m setting exposure using the zebras and looking at the highlights, I consistently come up with an effective EI of 160 on my incident meter. That’s the number I use when pre-lighting or estimating exposure at times when I can’t get to the camera (if it’s on a jib, for example).

On the following pages I’m going to go through most of the shots in this piece and show you (top) the finished shot, colored in Magic Bullet Looks, and (underneath) the “raw” shot as it was processed in RedRushes using the Rec 709 color space and gamma and using the Mitchell scaling filter. (All of this footage was rendered down to 1920x1080 for editing.) Then I’ll toss in some notes about how we executed the shot.

Off we go…

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Looks great Art. I know I asked you this before in another blog post, but have you tried Camera RGB or Redspace colorspace and compared to REC709? I find REC709 does funky things to colors. I do use the REC709 gamma setting but I have found I generally use Camera RGB or Redspace for colorspace. I’d be curious about your thoughts on this.

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