patrickortman
10-22-2008, 02:06 PM
I know some of this has been talked about in more technical terms before, but I'd like to share with you the results of a 2 day shoot I just wrapped. Because I learned a new trick.
In general, the camera kicked butt. It's awesome. It makes things look sooooo creamy and smooth and beautiful (and yes, once the client allows, I'll post stills).
But we had one "issue". Not a "problem". An "issue". And it had everything to do with the environment we were shooting in.
First of all, I do a ton of preprod for every job. I scout locations, figure out electrical issues, note the kinds and location of practicals, etc. But I goofed up on one of the locations.
I assumed that the location was using standard fluorescents in a number of fixtures. It sure looked to my eyes like it was. So, of course, I tested and tested before the shoot. And all was well in my tests- in a few of my tests I found I had to reduce shutter to 1/40th. But no big deal.
Day of shoot, I found out that these location fluorescents were not normal at all. The client's maintenance crew said they were some sort of low energy things. And they introduced a TON of green noise into the shot.
I'd never seen anything this bad before, it was as if green moss was attacking everything and everyone we aimed the camera at.
Now, we all know that people are saying the Red One is more sensitive to green than some other cameras. So, of course, this problem was a bit worse on the Red than it would have been on others. But on any camera this would just not fly. The picture looked absolutely horrible, even the client noticed and freaked a bit at first.
However, after a tiny bit of experimenting on set, the fix was easy:
1) Tweaking the shutter speed helped a bit. But not much.
2) Bringing in some lights to "punch through" the green helped a lot, but we still had a ton of green grainy mush in background areas.
3) Putting a nice IR filter (the formatt one) on the front of the mattebox helped a lot more.
4) And this one's new to me: using prime lenses instead of the zoom made the last bits of green yuck go away. Even in the background.
I'm not sure why. Maybe because the prime has fewer elements in it than a zoom?
Regardless, that gave us exactly what we wanted and expected from this awesome camera. And the client loves us even more now that they've seen us solve a little problem.
So, for what it's worth- another basic trick that you may or may not ever have to employ.
In general, the camera kicked butt. It's awesome. It makes things look sooooo creamy and smooth and beautiful (and yes, once the client allows, I'll post stills).
But we had one "issue". Not a "problem". An "issue". And it had everything to do with the environment we were shooting in.
First of all, I do a ton of preprod for every job. I scout locations, figure out electrical issues, note the kinds and location of practicals, etc. But I goofed up on one of the locations.
I assumed that the location was using standard fluorescents in a number of fixtures. It sure looked to my eyes like it was. So, of course, I tested and tested before the shoot. And all was well in my tests- in a few of my tests I found I had to reduce shutter to 1/40th. But no big deal.
Day of shoot, I found out that these location fluorescents were not normal at all. The client's maintenance crew said they were some sort of low energy things. And they introduced a TON of green noise into the shot.
I'd never seen anything this bad before, it was as if green moss was attacking everything and everyone we aimed the camera at.
Now, we all know that people are saying the Red One is more sensitive to green than some other cameras. So, of course, this problem was a bit worse on the Red than it would have been on others. But on any camera this would just not fly. The picture looked absolutely horrible, even the client noticed and freaked a bit at first.
However, after a tiny bit of experimenting on set, the fix was easy:
1) Tweaking the shutter speed helped a bit. But not much.
2) Bringing in some lights to "punch through" the green helped a lot, but we still had a ton of green grainy mush in background areas.
3) Putting a nice IR filter (the formatt one) on the front of the mattebox helped a lot more.
4) And this one's new to me: using prime lenses instead of the zoom made the last bits of green yuck go away. Even in the background.
I'm not sure why. Maybe because the prime has fewer elements in it than a zoom?
Regardless, that gave us exactly what we wanted and expected from this awesome camera. And the client loves us even more now that they've seen us solve a little problem.
So, for what it's worth- another basic trick that you may or may not ever have to employ.