From hdforindies: Want more stills from a Red? I got more stills from a Red

[R Fogg]

More stills from the offhollywood shoot posted
http://www.hdforindies.com/2007/09/want-more-stills-from-red-i-got-more.html

[Roberto B]

odd.. that red footage.. what did it happen on your red alert offhollywood?..

[Ralph Oshiro]

Maybe I'm blind but . . . they shot SHINY WHITE cars in DIRECT SUN, and I don't see any loss of detail in the highlights.

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

Maybe I'm blind but . . . they shot SHINY WHITE cars in DIRECT SUN, and I don't see any loss of detail in the highlights.

I saw those cars and I gotta say they just looked underexposed to me.

[Fix]

It may look underexposed, but take them into post and play with the curvs.. what you get is a powerfull good looking image (if you do it right..). Expose like this with HVX200 and you will have mosquito running all over after tweaking. These carshoots can be manipulated and look like film with ease, They have no burnouts and tons of info in the lower curves.

Its kind of ironic. Jim made a post about this for a while ago but he dident meantion to much about grading. He did warn every rockies though. This is a professional camera, and with it you have to do alot of grading to make good result. ALOT of footage from Red will look like crap in the time to come. I have a strong feeling that many (of all the thousands) who bought this camera will not be satisfied. Not becasue of the camera but because of lack of skill.

IMO I have seen enough. You can fake 35mm analog quality with a REDONE. Thats my juice.

[Álex Montoya]

Well, I don't know.

Take a look at this one.

http://www.hdforindies.com/uploaded_images/offhollywoodcarshoot/Images/9.jpg

It looks properly exposed and there is detail in the car AND in the tiny asphalt bit that is in shadow (bottom of the image, a bit to the left).

TO ME, that's smucking amazing.

[indierider]

here are the facts.
I bracketed a test shot first thing when we got there. we brought it up on a macbook pro and knowing that we are now shooting rawfiles and going into scratch at offhollywood, we went with the 1 stop underexposed. I was playing it safe. I wanted to hold the sky and the car because I knew that with all these white cars on the road I really needed to have the sky there to cut them out, if the sky clipped the white the cars would get lost. I had a new never shot with camera, a bunch of professional stunt cars drivers and a profession Camera car company all working for free on a holiday weekend. I wasn't about to risk over-exposing anything. If we had had the histogram working it would of been better exposured for sure. When shooting shiny white things in film you normally underexpose i went with what i know, I know more now, and i have learned so much from Mike Curtis over the last week. Thanks for the knowledge mike cant wait to work together in the future with you. Sorry about the underexposure everyone but the fact of the matter is this...we are gonna have a great piece when this thing is cut. I'm loving the grading people are doing so far Devildodo's burnout pic is my favorite so far.
Paul

[Kevin Halverson]

Well, I don't know.

Take a look at this one.

http://www.hdforindies.com/uploaded_images/offhollywoodcarshoot/Images/9.jpg

It looks properly exposed and there is detail in the car AND in the tiny asphalt bit that is in shadow (bottom of the image, a bit to the left).

TO ME, that's smucking amazing.

It is a very telling image. Look at the shadow angle under the car, this is the mid day sun and its not like they have 100 yards of silk overhead, this is the worst of the worst conditions.

The amazing thing is doesn't look like absolute crap, in fact it looks really good.

WOW!

[Seung Han]

Two simple things you can do in Photoshop with little knowledge of cc grading (which I have very little) to simply snap the picture out of the raw flat look that has been mentioned before after you download the TIFF file.

1) Set 'Auto Levels'

or

2) Set colorspace to 'Adobe 1998' (Jim's suggestion)
This one does not change the data on the file.

Me, personally, like many others, am pretty impressed by how malleable these images are. You can really punish them, and they hold up extremely well. I am not a tech person but I think it is evident if you compare these images with other images from digital cameras that there is a ton of information on them...ready to be manipulated to be like the image in your mind's eye :usd:

[Mark L. Pederson]

tomorrow morning we shoot fashion models on a real set, on a real commercial for an asian cosmetics company as a TEST - side by by side with 35mm - high end commercial - well lt - well production designed - HOT models .... I will try to get permission to post a few 4K TIFFS on Monday -

[Gordon Prince]

- well lt - What do you mean here? Misspelling or what? We're not native english speakers. The most part in this forum is not, but you're forgetting sometimes with your slang. I would like to see you in our position.

[R Fogg]

I think that translates to "well lit"

[Mark L. Pederson]

What do you mean here? Misspelling or what? We're not native english speakers. The most part in this forum is not, but you're forgetting sometimes with your slang. I would like to see you in our position.


sorry -

I type too fast while I am talking too fast while I am working too fast -

that should have read "well lit" as in very good lighting -

what is you native language?

[MikeCurtis]

Paul (indierider) - glad to be of service, I'm glad what I had to share was instructive. I learned a lot from you and the shoot as well, glad to share and share alike.

VERY much looking forward to learning more about the camera, as I work with the footage, combining that with my 15-20 years of pixel pushing and histogram tweaking, and my rapidly increasing knowledge of camera systems, I think I'll be able to get some really excellent results out of these cameras.

In that part of the brain that develops gut innate senses of better and worse, I'm starting to feel a theory/gut sense developing of what is going to make the best exposure, have the least noise, and work the best for maximum lattitude in post.

So far, I've been on the sidelines giving advice, but not in charge of anything - my role is to note, record, advise, answer questions when asked.

We're looking forward to having a big brain dump before I go back to Austin, we'll have a lot of good info on what works right.

Did I mention my goal is to be as knowledgeable as possible about Red and Red workflow...and to be for hire on how to get best results?

: )

Written at 1:30am after a few smug beers after a great day, so forgiveness please.

-mike

[MikeCurtis]

Plus, these things are cake to work with once you wrap your brain around it. I've been on sets, but always in a post super/vfx supervisory capacity, but I've been pinch hitting on setting up/tearing down Offhollywood's Red Ones.

These things are totally easy to work assemble/configure once you understand the concepts - it is an infinitely customizable erector set, awaiting you to build the rig that is best for any given user/situation.

We've been going out with a maximally built kit, tonight I started messing around with how to reconfigure to drop weight yet still deliver needed functionality.

That you even have that choice here is pretty amazing stuff.

That a camera assembly novice such as myself can tear down and rebuild in short order speaks volumes for the work the Red team (and big kudos to Matt Tremblay in particular) has done their job exceedingly well.

For obscure techie reasons, we had to swap out one camera for the other out of a fully assembled rig - rods top and bottom, LCD, shoulder and base plate mounts for on sticks conversion to handheld with handgrips, matte box, follow focus, battery pack, etc. etc. etc.

That it took me 10 minutes to carefully dissasemble 6 and rebuild #7 says a LOT. I know pixels, but I didn't know beans about matte box assembly, proper PL lens mounting, etc. But Red's system is VERY intuitive and flexible.

Rockin'.

Things that rock about the Red:
-image quality - you've seen the detail
-lattitude - excellent/awesome
-the body - a small tank with LOTS of outputs, and clever/correct/modern outputs
-the physical infrastructure - the erector set cage modular flexibilty - big or small as needed
-the concept - basically everything that a traditional DIT does (think Varicam/F900 paint box/matrix tweezing) can be deferred to post. Wow.
-the post - bag $100K decks - just use a Macbook Pro on set like we did.
-the workflow. hours of footage in your cargo shorts if you needed to. Offload to a laptop. Record 4K to something you can hide in your mouth and still carry on a conversation (hope you never need to - border crossing situation etc.)
-and of course, the price. Technology is only as valid as its price point, and by that standard Red is incredibly valid.

-mike

[Brook Willard]

You must've had a fun day, Mike... :)

[S. Um]

Thanks for sharing your experience. Would love to see the models shoot. Also, would love to see what Red can do in a minimal run and gun setup. (Actually, I think Jim showed us some of that from the race track - but let's see more!)

[Alvise Tedesco]

...If we had had the histogram working it would of been better exposured for sure.
Paul

Sorry for my ignorance, but what a histogram tells you more, compared to simply checking zebra levels to protect highlight in that particular situation (white cars, very sunny day)?

I'm loving to play with those tiff in Photoshop. Shame I don't know how to use it, so I don't know if there's really much more than "auto levels", "auto contrast" and so on. Well, it doesn't matter. Average motion film market in Italy is small, provincial and reserved, I never entered it (Nevertheless, always been happy with my more independend jobs with DVX/HVX+M2).
Thanks to the leader of the rebellion and all of you (I read a lot here, unfortunately not so easy to write in english..) I see new ways to follow up!

[Emmanuel Cambier]

A Histogram is necessary in order to know if you are crushing your shadows or not, wich zebras won't tell you.
But don't get me wrong, we NEED Zebras to know exactly what part of the image is clipping, wich a histogram won't tell you.

Histograms and zebras are definetly the tools you need in order to shoot proper images with the RED.
I don't think I would use a light meter while shooting but it could come in very handy during scouting and preparation when you don't wanna bring the camera with you.

My 2cents

Emmanuel

[Mark L. Pederson]

we didn't take the time to even try the zebras or false color - we now have mastered getting a "perfect" histogram by using FALSE COLOR - our images we are shooting now are WAY better than the car stuff we shot -

[Stu Maschwitz]

odd.. that red footage.. what did it happen on your red alert offhollywood?..

Exactly the right thing. (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=4187)

-Stu

[Michael Schrengohst]

we didn't take the time to even try the zebras or false color - we now have mastered getting a "perfect" histogram by using FALSE COLOR - our images we are shooting now are WAY better than the car stuff we shot -


Re-shoot!!

[Stu Maschwitz]

we didn't take the time to even try the zebras or false color - we now have mastered getting a "perfect" histogram by using FALSE COLOR - our images we are shooting now are WAY better than the car stuff we shot -

That's great to hear, but there's nothing wrong with the images on Mike's blog—they look exactly as they should. I brought them into my film grading pipeline and they behaved perfectly and produced some really lovely corrected images. And that is all that matters.

People are going to have to get used to the fact that the images they shoot with RED One are not meant to "look good" without some serious post-processing—in fact, as we discussed here (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showpost.php?p=76735&postcount=4), the best RED One images are often the ones that "look" the worst to your eye.

-Stu

[Mike Prevette]

That's going to be so hard to convince people of on set. A few years of HD and they have forgot what a video tap looks like. I can't wait to see the LUT system put into effect for the monitoring.

_mike

[David Battistella]

we didn't take the time to even try the zebras or false color - we now have mastered getting a "perfect" histogram by using FALSE COLOR - our images we are shooting now are WAY better than the car stuff we shot -

Mark,

Are one or two of those stills posted anywhere? Is it possible to post a DPX, as Graeme Natress suggested(they are much faster in pshop than tiffs).


Thanks so much for the updates, it's so generous and considerate.

David

[Mark L. Pederson]

That's great to hear, but there's nothing wrong with the images on Mike's blog—they look exactly as they should. I brought them into my film grading pipeline and they behaved perfectly and produced some really lovely corrected images. And that is all that matters.

People are going to have to get used to the fact that the images they shoot with RED One are not meant to "look good" without some serious post-processing—in fact, as we discussed here (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showpost.php?p=76735&postcount=4), the best RED One images are often the ones that "look" the worst to your eye.

-Stu

Thanks Stu -

Everyone at Offhollywood is a fan of your work - so, your compliment means a lot - thanks!!

What I should have said was "we are now getting great images more CONSISTANTLY than our car shoot" - and we got TONS of great stuff on that shoot, but we did under-exposed some stuff - I think we were just paranoid - worried about the sun -

It takes a bit to get use to "shooting for the best dynamic range" - but once you do - post is FUN!!

The FALSE COLOR feature on the camera works fantastic for setting the exposure for best dynamic range -

[Mark L. Pederson]

Mark,

Are one or two of those stills posted anywhere? Is it possible to post a DPX, as Graeme Natress suggested(they are much faster in pshop than tiffs).


Thanks so much for the updates, it's so generous and considerate.

David

There's a little taste in public folder of my iDisk -

Member's name: offhollywood

I haven't gotten official permission yet from the production company - but I'll leek this one out anyway - this was the very first test shot from today - we let Mike Curtis operate the camera - set up along side a 35mm on the set of a Asian cosmetics commercial - set the exposure using false color feature of the camera -

pop it in photoshop, auto levels, crush the blacks a bit .... yeah ...

as soon as I get "official" premission Mike Curtis will post a bunch more on his site on Monday -

[Mike Prevette]

Mark,


That still is fantastic! I don't think there is a 35mm shot in the world that can match that. I loaded it into AE and dropped it onto a SD timeline. At 25% i might add so it filled frame top to bottom. It was unreal. almost too good :] I can't wait for this damn camera.

What lens?

_mike

[David Battistella]

There's a little taste in public folder of my iDisk -

Member's name: offhollywood

I haven't gotten official permission yet from the production company - but I'll leek this one out anyway - this was the very first test shot from today - we let Mike Curtis operate the camera - set up along side a 35mm on the set of a Asian cosmetics commercial - set the exposure using false color feature of the camera -

pop it in photoshop, auto levels, crush the blacks a bit .... yeah ...

as soon as I get "official" premission Mike Curtis will post a bunch more on his site on Monday -

Mark,

Kind of you to reply and post. The shot looks great!
Many thanks.

David

[Mark L. Pederson]

Mark,


That still is fantastic! I don't think there is a 35mm shot in the world that can match that. I loaded it into AE and dropped it onto a SD timeline. At 25% i might add so it filled frame top to bottom. It was unreal. almost too good :] I can't wait for this damn camera.

What lens?

_mike

75mm Cooke S4 Prime

[Rick Darge]

Mark, I can't find a link to the still on your idisk. Is it still around?

[Mark L. Pederson]

Mark, I can't find a link to the still on your idisk. Is it still around?

should be - GO>iDisk>OTHER USER'S PUBLC FOLDER

member name: offhollywood

[Mike Prevette]

Having a look at this shoot in PS I did the old channel view and this is what I got. The blue channel takes a hit in the low detail areas much greater than any other channel. However on the skin or in high detail areas it looks great. So some variable compression seems to go crazy in the blue.


Stills taken down till Mark gets the OK.

[Steve Sherrick]

Okay, exactly what I'm getting Mike. This is what I was asking about in the other post. http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=4206&page=10

I'm trying to figure out exactly what to expect from this Redcode compression.

Good illustration of what is going on.

Steve

[Mark L. Pederson]

Before you guys go HOW WILD posting with that frame grab - please let me get the proper permission. They are going to say yes, I just want to be respectful and legal.

Thanks in advance!!

[Keith Alan Morris]

how do i find your idisk? what are the exact steps? i forget...

i promise not to post it elsewhere...

[Ryan Sims]

I'm on a PC. Will iDisk work for me to download files?

[Joel Kaye]

I'm on a PC. Will iDisk work for me to download files?

There's an XP iDisk utility application you can download from apple (google it) but the file failed to transfer for me.

[Ryan Sims]

Thanks for the info. Here's the link:
http://www.mac.com/1/idiskutility_download.html

[Mark L. Pederson]

I removed that image from my iDisc -

I am working on clearance to post 4 or 5 frame grabs from that shoot that are STUNNING - it may take a day or two - meantime, those of you that downloaded that frame grab - please keep it to yourself or you won't see anymore images from me ...

Thanks in advance!!

[Álex Montoya]

Tsk... Now that I had gotten the applet

[Álex Montoya]

Hey, Offhollywood, did you get the clearance?

[Mark L. Pederson]

Hey, Offhollywood, did you get the clearance?

doesn't look good at the moment -

fear not - we'll put some new wicked stuff up soon -

[Martin Drew]

There's an XP iDisk utility application you can download from apple (google it) but the file failed to transfer for me.

You can connect via a web browser too just use the URL:

http://idisk.mac.com/membername-Public replacing the word membername

M

[MikeCurtis]

we didn't take the time to even try the zebras or false color - we now have mastered getting a "perfect" histogram by using FALSE COLOR - our images we are shooting now are WAY better than the car stuff we shot -

: )

It took me a couple of days of "Yo Mark!" We REALLY need to get into that false color thing, I think that'll be important..."

Once I dug into it, figured out in a hurry it was THE DEAL. They've got it nailed now, and it is KEY.

-mike