Colour Balancing

[Rick Darge]

Will all color balancing take place within RedCine or can we white balance like a traditional video camera in the field? How much tweaking of the image will I be able to do before I take my footage to a computer?

Godspeed

[Graeme Nattress]

You can white balance in the field by a) dialing in a colour temperature in degrees kelvin, or b) by pointing at a grey card.

In post, if you shot RAW, you can change your mind on what the white balance was with no penalty.

Graeme

[Evin Grant]

This is not true if you shoot Redcode RGB (1080i,P or 720P) or record off the HD-SDIs though. You will want to bake in a balance. Right Graeme?

[tj williams]

Then will we eventually grade raw or RGB in RED Cine? Or one of the partners? whats currently preferred?

[Jarred Land]

This is not true if you shoot Redcode RGB (1080i,P or 720P) or record off the HD-SDIs though. You will want to bake in a balance. Right Graeme?

correct... its just like if you shoot RAW or JPG's in your still camera, if you set the WB in RAW you can modify it in post.. in JPG you take a small hit.

[Chris Kenny]

Hasn't there been some discussion about recording RGB that's de-bayered but hasn't had any other processing done to it? Would this eliminate the RGB white balance penalty, or are white balance settings taken into account during de-bayering (and therefore "baked in")?

My intuition says this should eliminate the white balance penalty. The sensor has a native color temperature based on its physical characteristics, right? If you de-bayered to create an RGB image that matched the sensor's native temp, you wouldn't be losing anything by modifying from there, since that's what you're doing with a RAW image or with anything else anyway, right? I don't pretend to be an expert on the internals of RAW image processing, though.

[Zane Roach]

Stuart mentioned the possibility of "unprocessed" 2K back on DVXuser. This was not long before 2K dropped off the in camera specs though.

I'm hoping 1080p RGB will have a this unprocessed option.

[Tom Lowe]

You can white balance in the field by a) dialing in a colour temperature in degrees kelvin, or b) by pointing at a grey card.

In post, if you shot RAW, you can change your mind on what the white balance was with no penalty.

Graeme

I only shoot RAW now on my DLSR, and having this power for 4K moving footage is basically a dream. God, I cannot wait!!

[Rob Lohman]

Then will we eventually grade raw or RGB in RED Cine? Or one of the partners? whats currently preferred?

REDCINE is a RAW movie conversion tool. It's not meant for final grading. Do that in your NLE or specialist grading application.

[Blair S. Paulsen]

REDCINE is a RAW movie conversion tool. It's not meant for final grading. Do that in your NLE or specialist grading application.

Fair enough, we can't expect the moon and the stars but it does feel like one of the big features of the:

RedOne to RedCodeRAW to RedCine to "you pick the format" pipeline

is the power of having access to the RAW version of your footage in RedCine. The message I am getting from you Rob is that if I want to grade the RAW DCN that I will have to conform to an output format from RedCine that is likely to be a serious space hog like DPX, etc (high end post folks can probably list several others) for the final "online".

From an indie perspective there is a big desire to grade in RedCine for simplicity and cost savings. Perhaps we just need to be patient while the expanding power of the "desktop" (OK, workstation) tools make it possible to grade 4k and perhaps even digest RedCodeRAW native files.

Bottom line - the advantages of wavelet compression and an app like RedCine that can deal with it directly have the potential to be an extremely powerful combination. Yes, I know, first moon - then stars.

[Rob Lohman]

Export to REDCODE RGB or if you're staying in HD one of the many HD codecs. Then load that for grading. However, most high-end work is indeed being done on space eating image sequences. Doesn't mean that will stay the same when the camera is out.