(Page 1 of 1 pages for this article )

Monday, March 17, 2008

Filed under: CamerasPost Production

RED ONE Build 14 Latitude Tests

Art Adams | 03/17

Wherein I investigate whether the RED ONE’s 5000k chip loses effective latitude in tungsten-lit environments

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!

(Page 1 of 1 pages for this article )

               



You must be registered to comment. This is an effort to reduce spam. Please REGISTER HERE.

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Smileys

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below:



 
Zylight Z90 LED Light Goes Extreme Cave Diving
PVC News Staff | 02/25

When DP Wes Skiles of Karst Productions was tasked with lighting reenactment sequences for the upcoming PBS/NOVA production “Extreme Cave Diving” he knew exactly what to use: Zylight’s intelligent LED lighting system.

Gekko Technology to launch kezia full-colour and tunable-white LED luminaires at NAB Show 2010
PVC News Staff | 02/12

Gekko Technology, a world-leading manufacturer of high-efficiency LED lighting systems for film and television production, will be introducing two major additions to its range at NAB Show 2010 in Las Vegas, April 12-15. Designated kezia 50 and kezia 200, both are hard-source LED luminaires based on Gekko’s kleer-colour light engine, with variants for film and television as well as entertainment.

The Making of an Epic Media Project
Art Adams | 02/10

A RED ONE, a small but agile crew, and a 2k 60’-wide screening in an Omnimax theater. This, truly, is a modern day epic.

Rambus is a company of big ideas, and they wanted their 20th anniversary celebration to include a theatrical production that accurately reflected who they are and where they came from. The resulting…




Advertisements













Partner Text Links



Copyright 2008 ProVideo Coalition LLC