Wednesday, April 09, 2008

We’re Off To See The Wizard

Chris Meyer | 04/09- 10:22 PM

NAB always brings the promise of finding that secret ingredient we need to make us better at what we do.

It’s been awfully quiet around here lately...too quiet. But you know why: It’s the week before NAB (the National Association of Broadcasters) Convention, the largest annual industry trade show for those of us in North America), and we’re all hunkered down either a) finishing projects before NAB, b) getting our presentations ready for NAB, c) making out our shopping lists for NAB, or d) all of the above.

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

RED Build 15 Flesh Tone Latitude Test (under tungsten light)

Art Adams | 04/09- 08:37 AM

RED ONE Build 15 Flesh Tone Latitude Tests (tungsten)

In my quest to figure out just how much overexposure latitude I can get out of a RED under tungsten light, I decided to do a test with a flesh tone reference and a RED with build 15 loaded. It turned out to be almost a completely different camera.

Previously I was only able to see two stops of overexposure latitude on a Kodak 18% gray card under tungsten light. That was using build 14. This build seems to yield 3 stops of latitude before clipping flesh tone, which already has more red in it than a gray card. Also, instead of the red channel clipping and causing highlights to turn cyan until the other channels clipped, I see no indication of that at all now. The clipped highlight is very clean and holds color a lot longer than I expected.

On top of that, the DRX highlight recovery tool in Red Alert now seems to cause more problems than it solves. When I used DRX on these clips they turned green, the exact opposite of what they’re supposed to do--which is to take red channel clips that have turned cyan and use the other two unclipped color channels to rebuild detail in the clipped channel, while using the white balance meta data to blend all of that into a neutral highlight.

I don’t know what they did to keep the highlights so clean, but I’d be willing to take this camera into a real world situation now. The only thing that bugs me is that the red channel, which used to be the cleanest color channel by far, now seems very noisy. Maybe that’s a side effect of whatever was done to clean up the highlights.

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Review: Camhandle camera support

Adam Wilt | 04/06- 07:22 PM

Renegade tripod handle makes handheld shooting smoother.

The $220 Camhandle looks like a tripod handle gone AWOL from its tripod. Its attachment plate bolts to the underside of the camera, and it hangs off the left front side. It looks goofy, but it works surprisingly well. I tested it for two weeks on the notoriously hard-to-handhold PMW-EX1.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

RED wiki Launched

Scott Gentry | 04/01- 01:32 PM

Yeah, yeah, I promised in my last post that I would only have one RED post.  I lied.

After a request for a RED Wiki, we threw one together here!

What’s in it so far?  Nothing.  This will be an experiment to see if the community can fill this up with valuable information, no flame wars, no exaggerations, etc.  If we can get a valuable tool working, we all win.  If no one adds to it...we’ll remove it.  It’s up to you.  And Mike, and Adam and Art I guess.  Graeme Nattress want to contribute?

Sunday, March 30, 2008

RED results coming soon--stay tuned!

Art Adams | 03/30- 07:28 PM

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.

Friday, March 28, 2008

Pix: Zacuto rig; RED tests

Adam Wilt | 03/28- 04:42 PM

A Zacuto support kit for small cameras; Art Adams tests RED build 15 at Chater Camera

Art Adams uses his spot meter during exposure testing.

Camera porn: some photographs from the past couple of days…

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