(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:



 
Cinematographer Gordon Willis talks The Godfather
Matt Jeppsen | 06/18

The Godfather Cinematographer talks about lighting decisions

In this short video, the cinematographer of the Godfather explains his creative and technical choices in the film. He discusses the criticism he received for underlighting Brando, the use of silhouette and overheard lighting. Enjoy.

Cine Gear Expo 2009
Adam Wilt | 06/07

Tools and toys of the trade, on the Paramount lot in Hollywood.

The “expo” part of Cine Gear Expo took place on Friday and Saturday last week (there were also Master Classes and film screening starting Thursday and ending Sunday). This year…

JVC Does 4k and 8K Prototypes
Scott Gentry | 05/12

Did I miss this at NAB?  Did JVC just decide now to unleash these?

image

D-ILA technology and...wait for it....wait for it....keep waiting… 8,912 x 4,320 or 3,840 x 2,160 resolution.

More to follow...but you’ll have to wait for it……




Advertisements












Partner Text Links



Copyright 2008 ProVideo Coalition LLC