A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to take part in a RED camera test with my friends at Compass Cinema. We went out to local camera rental house CameraTrux and where they had set-up their RED with an assortment of lenses as said “test away!” Since I’m a post guy I take every opportunity I can to play with cameras and things outside of the edit suite so I took my HV20 and the GT35pro adapter along for the ride. When it wasn’t too annoying I tried to shoot some footage along side the RED to compare and contrast with the footage from the GT35pro. I shot footage of the still life as well as the chain link fence outdoors. It’s funny when you think about a 4K camera with some really great lenses being intercut with an under $1,000 consumer HDV camera and vibrating lens adapter and how it shouldn’t seem possible but they actually go together pretty well with the video compressed down for web viewing. The RED footage is a transcode through Clipfinder to 1080 ProRes and the back-to-back shots have been color corrected with Colorista to make them match better ... except for the fence outside. I couldn’t seem to get those tones to match closer. I need to keep reading Steve’s great book The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction
While they look pretty good here on Vimeo I did a test where I took a similarly dark shot of the still life and the red-berry bush outside and did some grading on the RED raw R3Ds in REDAlert vs. the Canon HDV files in Final Cut Pro ... It’s quite the difference in latitude and what you can do with the image. As was to be expected.
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