Suggested Filter Package fo RED

[I Bloom]

I'm interested to hear what people think would be an ideal set of filters for shooting with the RED and what they think would be the ideal size to start investing in. I'm thinking of a basic list for starters such as:

4x4
ND3, 6, 9
Black Pro Mist 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2
ND Soft Grad 3, 6, 9

Any thoughts on your kit?

IB

[J. Bernard Vallon]

I've been wondering how necessary ND filters are with a camera like this. If your in the field in New Zealand with no ozone, and your meter says f22, but you want f4, why cant you just stop down the variable shutter until you get yourself to 1/2000th of a sec? Yes, you'd get the high speed shutter look, but thats only a problem if your filming fast action AND you dont want it to look like high speed shutter.

Is the variable shutter only good down to 1/250th or something?

[Hans von Sonntag]

I'm interested to hear what people think would be an ideal set of filters for shooting with the RED and what they think would be the ideal size to start investing in. I'm thinking of a basic list for starters such as:

4x4
ND3, 6, 9
Black Pro Mist 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2
ND Soft Grad 3, 6, 9

Any thoughts on your kit?

IB

Hi ibloom,

I always have a set of NDs with me 0.3, 0.6, 0.9 and 1.2. - no shooting without NDs. By far the most important filters.
Additional to the NDs I always have a circular polarising filter in my pocket. Useful for al lot of things eg. reflections, clouds, water, etc.

Since there is a build-in white balance option in the RED you don't need 85, 85b or 81EF any more (supposed to). Still, I am curious how the sensor behaves if you don't use the WB and do the colour temperature correction in an old school way with the filters mentioned above.

I don't use Promist filters. The last time I used them is 10 years ago and I find this footage very out-dated now. Almost everything has its revival... I might use them again sometime.
Since colour correction and digital sfx can do a lot you don't have to create the look entirely in the camera - but still, filtering in camera is a different beast.

Remember that RED has no artificial edge enhancing. RED behaves much more like a 35mm camera, no reason to bring down unwanted sharpness on a daily basis (if this is the intended usage of a set of Black Promist).

Bottom line: I would buy the entire ND range and a Pola as a must-have. ND Grads are nice to have (I use them very rarely, since power-windows in CC can do a lot and). Black Promist, White Promist, all the softeners, the colour filter bunch, enhancer, low-contrast and all the other filters can be rented on purpose. There is now reason to spend 1.000k into a set of those ones IMHO.


Hans

[Albert Cheng]

ND soft grads can be very useful for preserving detail under a wide variety of lighting situations (like shoothing near windows). But yeah, .3 .6 .9 and circular pola as a minimum kit should get you going. Up from that, I would go ND grad. Then constrast filters.

[Hans von Sonntag]

I've been wondering how necessary ND filters are with a camera like this. If your in the field in New Zealand with no ozone, and your meter says f22, but you want f4, why cant you just stop down the variable shutter until you get yourself to 1/2000th of a sec? Yes, you'd get the high speed shutter look, but thats only a problem if your filming fast action AND you dont want it to look like high speed shutter.

Is the variable shutter only good down to 1/250th or something?

Hi PerfectOptics,

Came across these things when I used the SONY HDCAM for the first time. I find it very important to achieve the shallowest DOF possible with this camera so I tried to fix this with the electronic shutter. Looks different, feels different. I am rarely in the situation to shoot stills. Since we are in a moving picture industry motion blur is always an issue not only with fast action but with any simple pan. I use 1/50 and NDs (I like the 1/25 feature in the HDCAM, RED does have this too AFAIK, no film camera can do this...)

my 2 cents,

Hans

[Ken Corben]

ND set and pola required for sure - question is what size and with what matte box - presuming RED 18-50 EFP location shooting?

I too had a brain fart and was looking at my selection of tobaccos, corals, promists and remembered it's digital 4K baby. Can you say Nattress plug ins for redcine.

[Hans von Sonntag]

ND soft grads can be very useful for preserving detail under a wide variety of lighting situations (like shoothing near windows). But yeah, .3 .6 .9 and circular pola as a minimum kit should get you going. Up from that, I would go ND grad. Then constrast filters.

I am with you. Add ND 1.2. You don't have to use .3 and .9 in two trays. Filtering 4 Stops happens quite often.

Contrast filters will be one of my first tests with the RED in conjunction with CC. Since white clip is the weakest and most annoying part in digital shooting (apart from shallow DOF) I am really interested to find out how RED will cope with this.

Hans

[Hans von Sonntag]

ND set and pola required for sure - question is what size and with what matte box - presuming RED 18-50 EFP location shooting?

I too had a brain fart and was looking at my selection of tobaccos, corals, promists and remembered it's digital 4K baby. Can you say Nattress plug ins for redcine.


I guess 4x4 will do. For EFP an Arri LMB 4 will be perfect. It is very sturdy, you can clip it on the lens, and it has a bendy rubber sunshade. I don't know the front diameter of the RED 18-50, so this has to be checked first hand.

I doubt there will be filtering options in REDCine since it it is a conversion tool. I would do this in a proper CC tool, like the upcoming Apple Color, Speedgrade, Scratch, etc...

Greame Nattress created very nice filters for FinalTouch which I happily used a lot. FinalTouch is now Color. Apple recommends these filters for Color.

Hans

[Ken Corben]

Hans,

Thanks for the great tip on matte box and the clarification on CC. It is still best to pay a professional colorist to grade an HD project though even with Apple's new releases? Or do you think a good editor that is up to speed on Apple Color can do a good job (assuming one-hour HD broadcast 1080i final master)? Big cost savings in post budget for the latter, no?

[Hans von Sonntag]

Hans,

Thanks for the great tip on matte box and the clarification on CC. It is still best to pay a professional colorist to grade an HD project though even with Apple's new releases? Or do you think a good editor that is up to speed on Apple Color can do a good job (assuming one-hour HD broadcast 1080i final master)? Big cost savings in post budget for the latter, no?

Hi Kenneth

I find colour timing closer to the camera dempartment than to the editing department although it is considered to be part of postproduction. For sure it is useful to know something about editing since a lot of "knobs" you have to press are kind of editing "knobs". For a computer experienced DP this should not be a difficult thing to learn. Of course any talented/interested editor can do this as well. Many colorists are former editors. Again CC is a thing of taste.

Color is former FinalTouch. FinalTouch used to be pretty buggy. But then FinalTouch is a professional tool in terms of results you can achieve. If Apple got rid of all the bugs Color will be a serious competitor and the tool of choice for many. In 3 months or so we will know more.

I always found CC vital for any serious film project. Apples Color can be the perfect low budget partner for RED.

Hans

[PaulClements]

Do people have preferences on the make of the filters they use? if so which?

[David Mullen ASC]

Generally for 35mm cine lenses, the most common filter / mattebox size has become 4x5.6 (often called 4x5).

ND's are still necessary, absolutely. Changes to shutter speed in order to simply compensate for bright sunlight will produce noticeable strobing artifacts to motion, not just super fast motion. A 45 degree shutter angle -- the equivalent of stopping down 2-stops or using an ND.60 filter -- is quite dramatic in its effect on motion.

After ND's, the next most common filter is a Pola.

After that, it just depends on your tastes. Some will use soft-edge ND grad filters in order to control bright areas in the frame, but in order to have more control on placing the termination line of the filter, you often need to use the large 6x6 filter and mattebox.

Diffusion is also popular.

Color-correction filters, UV/Skylight, clear glass "optical flats" for protecting the lens from flying mud, blood, whatever during stunts, etc., diopters and split-diopters, contrast filters, etc.

[Rob_K]

I don't think a camera like the Red needs a circular polarizer because it is a single chip system. Any normal old pola should work just as well. I think that and a full set of ND's and ND grads would be a nice filter package for most camera systems these days. If I recall correctly (Which I may not) Red's advertised latitude isn't quite up to par with the Dalsa's of the world (Much less film) so I think the grads would be most handy if one can afford the expense.

Of course, there are always those projects that don't have the time/budget for proper color correction, in which case a full set of every filter in existance is still a nice thing too.

[PaulClements]

What about green/bluescreen filters such as formatt's ProComp?

[David Mullen ASC]

I've never tested those.

I usually light blue or greenscreens with Kino blue or greenscreen tubes, which are so narrow in bandwidth / color spectrum that you can't help get a pure saturated color out of the screen -- you could practically use a white background with those tubes (although I don't recommend it)...

[Mike Prevette]

4x4 won't be big enough for most 35mm lenses. Primes yes, but most larger zooms no.

[PaulClements]

Do you have a preference to which make you use David?

[Brian Ferguson]

The matte boxes we used in our displays at NAB were ARRI MB-20, thanks ARRI. The 18-50 takes a 114 mm ring for the matte box. This is larger than a 4x4 will cover. The Arri box has trays that take the 4 x 5.65 and 5.6x5.6 in the same tray. So no matter what brand of matte box you choose if you are going with the 18-50 you should consider a larger size than 4x4. The ND's are a must for outdoor shooting, the sensor is rating at 250 ISO and you find yourself on ND .9 or 1.2 to keep the lens between 3.5-5.6 in bright light. The shutter option is there but you also get the "Private Ryan" effect at the short shutter exposures.

An affordable way to go would be to 4 1/2 rounds in a clip on lens shade or maybe 138 mm rounds which should cover the 300 mm as well (I'll measure to make sure). Also be aware that the 300 mm RED Lens has a built in 43 mm tray which has a clear filter in it and it should always have a clear or ND or something in it to keep your focus correct. We are looking into procurement of 43 mm ND filters for the 300 mm since the thickness of the filter mount has to be correct to fit the tray.

Brian Ferguson

[Nathan Troutman]

Since we're recording to RAW, 4k, & are able to take this "digital negative" and conform to a 4:4:4 color space, wouldn't it seem to be good shooting practice with a RED camera to use low contrast filters quite a bit (especially outside) to record the most detail possible in both the dark and bright areas of the frame and then take this "flat" image and push it around in post while having the most detail available from the start? Basically shoot flat to maintain the most detail and then make dynamic in post.

Wow, that was a long question.

[Brook Willard]

I suppose you could, but remember that only so much can be done to a flat image. If you push the "total" contrast of the image too far on the other side of your low-contrast filter, you could run into posterization errors on the other end.

In short: Too much latitude, not enough steps [bits] to represent it.

[Brian Ferguson]

Basically shoot flat to maintain the most detail and then make dynamic in post.
.

Well I am not the RAW expert that Jim, Graeme, Jarred and Deanan are but when I see the RAW image before grading it starts out looking a little bit flat and the with curves and black settings in REDCINE the image just pops out at you. But you start with, what seems to me, a fairly blank slate like you suggest. I don't know if you would want to take that any further that direction.

[Finner]

It sure would be a beautiful thing if RED came out with a 4x5.6 swing out matte box. The Redrock one is just a little to cheaply made to last a decent amount of time and the way the filters fit in the trays I would be worried of them falling out and breaking. Unfortunately there is just no reasonably priced matte box out there and its not like one would be that expensive to produce.

Jim it would be so great if you could put some of your talented team hire a few more and have a "Red M Box" built. I am pretty confident the demand would be big.

[Nathan Troutman]

Just wanted to see what people thought. Obviously you don't want to compress it too much. I'm proposing that you would want to "manage" contrast to keep the camera recording within it's lattitude so that blacks don't get crushed and whites don't blow out - even if that is the look you are eventually going to go with. Better to shoot the detail and then crush and blow-out in post?

For me this is a change in shooting style. Take HDV for example. I've found doing the reverse is the only way to get quality results with HDV, in that, shooting with dynamic high contrast allows the codec and heavy compression to work better. With a flat image the compression breaks down and detail is lost, but in high contrast the differences between pixels is greater so the compression works better and the image records and looks better.

[Brook Willard]

Nathan, that's exactly what could happen if the image is too flat to recover. 12-bits is a lot more than 8-bits, but it still has its limits. It's like shooting really flat film for DI... you can do *some*, but you aren't truly unlimited.

I'll leave the rest of this for those with direct experience with REDCODE RAW.

[Joe Aurili]

Just wondering what the reason is that a CMOS can not just accept less light programmatically per pixel, instead of adding ND filters to reduce light?

[David Mullen ASC]

Basically that would be negative gain in video, although usually you are limited to -6db at the most, which is only one stop.

Besides, I don't see what the big problem is with using an ND filter, plus your image will be a lot more consistent if you keep the sensitivity the same and control exposure outside with ND filters and inside by controlling your light levels. Squashing and pushing your signal up and down to handle extremes in exposure would lead to a less consistent image in terms of noise.

[Shawn Nelson]

For the Red 18-50mm will a 4x5.65 glass filter totally cover the necessary area if I place it within a 5x5 filter slide on a 5x5 matte box?

[Brook Willard]

Since the front hood of the 18-50mm lens used the 114mm ring for the Arri MB-20... I don't know.

The actual front element of the lens is smaller than the front hood of the lens. So while a 4x5.65 will certainly cover the optical element, I don't know if it'll cover the ~114mm front hood.

[Joe Aurili]

I still don't quite get the reasoning behind it, but it we be nice to avoid placing another attachment on the camera, if there was a way. Won't the ND need to be of superb quality to not degrade a 4k image?


Basically that would be negative gain in video, although usually you are limited to -6db at the most, which is only one stop.

Besides, I don't see what the big problem is with using an ND filter, plus your image will be a lot more consistent if you keep the sensitivity the same and control exposure outside with ND filters and inside by controlling your light levels. Squashing and pushing your signal up and down to handle extremes in exposure would lead to a less consistent image in terms of noise.

[Hans von Sonntag]

I still don't quite get the reasoning behind it, but it we be nice to avoid placing another attachment on the camera, if there was a way. Won't the ND need to be of superb quality to not degrade a 4k image?

This is the reason why good filters are pretty expensive. Also it makes sense to keep the lens with the attached filter in shadow, hence the mattbox, flags.


(Originally Posted by David Mullen ASC View Post
Basically that would be negative gain in video, although usually you are limited to -6db at the most, which is only one stop.)

I found that using negative gain (eg. -6db) on SONY HDCAM 750P degraded the picture visually. It created slightly more noise than 0db. Does make sense if you consider that some sort of electronic circuits have to manipulate the signal to achieve the loss of one stop. Of course I am talking here about 3 CCD sensors, might be different with CMOS.

Hans

[Brian Broz]

From what I have seen on the F-900 and Canon XLH1 (2 very different beasts) running -3db gain hurts your latitude.

Regarding filters, is there any advantage to shooting with solid color filters such as the Antique Suede, Maui Brown etc? I assume not, as we'll be shooting RAW. (I just shot a low budget commercial with the Antique Suede in a basement and loved it). If you are shooting RAW and want to drop in a Twilight or Skyfire Grad...is there any point? or simply add ND Grad to bring down the highlights and then add color in post? (Forgive the simple question, but I have never shot with grads on a RAW DSLR).

To most camera people it's easier to drop in a filter than try to replicate that look in post (especially if you can't attend the color grading session).

[tj williams]

My current zoom lens ends in 105mm I'm still using a ring so I have confidence that my current matt box (Petroff 4/5.6) will accept the 114mm end. (gott get out the old measuring stick) I'm with Ibloom/an David on a complete set of grads. In an earlier posting I believe, negative gain was discussed and red team said NO. I've had the same experience with negative gain on Sony. Also worth mentioning that not only are 6by6 filters a bit more money but the clip on matt boxes usually are 4/4 or 4/5 This makes the 4/5 size the most appealing from the standpoint of use on zooms/primes/Steadicam. I do also have a 4/4 clip on and have rented aditional necessary filters for jobs requiring a lot of steadi or hand held on heavier cameras. These smaller boxes tend to leak light more readily on the lens and therefore will not be acceptable in heavy backlight. Seeing as how the red only weighs 9lbs for the body the additional weight of a better box in 4/5 won't be a problem weight wise. Also Red has now published a picture of the 15mm 60mm light weight adapter which looks quite solid and well designed. It's probably important for folks getting the 17/50 lens or using other wide lenses to have a wide angle hood on their matt box so as not to vignette on the hood.

[Hans von Sonntag]

From what I have seen on the F-900 and Canon XLH1 (2 very different beasts) running -3db gain hurts your latitude.

Regarding filters, is there any advantage to shooting with solid color filters such as the Antique Suede, Maui Brown etc? I assume not, as we'll be shooting RAW. (I just shot a low budget commercial with the Antique Suede in a basement and loved it). If you are shooting RAW and want to drop in a Twilight or Skyfire Grad...is there any point? or simply add ND Grad to bring down the highlights and then add color in post? (Forgive the simple question, but I have never shot with grads on a RAW DSLR).

To most camera people it's easier to drop in a filter than try to replicate that look in post (especially if you can't attend the color grading session).

I haven't used colour filters for a long time since I am a big fan of digital grading. I like the idea of an untouched and non-manipulated (digital) negative. This way you have more options. As I mainly shoot commercials with clients everywhere options are a vital insurance... This said I feel inspired by this thread to skip my own dogma and rent some funky filters. Still I always insist to attend or even do the grading by my self (as I direct and/or shoot the film anyway).

You cannot fix or replicate everything in post... The Polas are the best example. You have to know how to use both, filter and digital grading.

Hans

[I Bloom]

My feeling with HD is its best to do as much as you can color wise before the image is compressed. REDCODE is definitely a different animal in terms of sampling and compressing all three channels roughly the same way and with Wavelet instead of DCT. But it remains to be seen how much work we will want to do pre-compression even on these images. I did see some compression artifacts in one frame grab that was up earlier, and then they took it down (these could be wavelet or JPEG, I wish they released tiffs, anyone still have that image of the plane in the grass?). They don't bother me too much but once you start bending the image around that compression might start rearing its ugly head, wavelet or not. Plus I think we are only dealing with 10 bits here. Thus posturization is likely to become a problem in which case ND grads are tottally neccessary for landscapes etc. We'll have to see.

I'm surprised people are so down on BPMs. Its for making highlights glow of course.

IB

[Bruce Allen]

I'd say use color filters to try to make sure that you get as close to your look as possible while still making sure that a good spread of values are captured by the R,G,B sensors. So overboard filters are not necessary but subtle warm / cool tints are nice as always to minimize quantization when doing CC.

Of course, as a total "DV-kid" / "do-it-in-post-oholic" I'd have to say that the day I put a colored grad on a sky and stopped complaining about "lack of latitude" "blowing out the sky" and "necessitating sky replacement" was a very happy one. I expect to continue using grads with Red, depending on project.

Varicons / digicons etc are interesting and might be highly useful too.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com