Knee settings?

[GlennChan]

I'm curious about using the Red for ENG...

A- Can you record 1080/720 and simply drop that media into your NLE and start editing away? (i.e. skip the Redcine step.) Presumably this is the plan.

B- If so, what kind of knee functions will there be? (If any?)

From playing around with the Panasonic HDC20, it has a "high color" setting. It tries to add saturation/color back into highlights which smack up against the knee. In my tests + opinion, it doesn't work that well. With the feature off, the highlights do lose saturation but the image doesn't have funky-looking flesh tones.

I've had a discussion about this with someone else, and their opinion is that Sony cameras do this better. Sony's equivalent of high color is better. I haven't played around with this myself.

***To answer my own question, Graeme indicated that the user can put in his/her own custom gamma curves. So basic knee functions would be supported in that regard.

C- Any auto knee setting? (Camera automatically decides knee point and slope.)

Glenn

[Brook Willard]

A: Assuming your NLE supports Quicktime codecs, yes.

[Chris Gearhart]

No kneeing in camera.

[Rob Lohman]

I think you can set a knee in RGB modes (for ENG style work), but I'm not 100% sure (not my area of expertise on the camera).

The man with the answer to this question is Stuart. Let's hold speculation until he clears things up!

Thanks,

[Graeme Nattress]

Knee is just another way of thinking about the tone/gamma curve. Plan would be that you can think of it as a curve, or think of it as a knee. Either way, lots of control.

Although the way to get the nicest images, IMHO, would be to use a nearly linear tone curve, and then you'll never have an issue that needs a sticky-plaster fix.

[GlennChan]

Although the way to get the nicest images, IMHO, would be to use a nearly linear tone curve, and then you'll never have an issue that needs a sticky-plaster fix.
But isn't the problem with that is that the image will end up sort of flat-looking? (i.e. like raw andromeda-modded DVXs)

2- Sony and Panasonic cameras have some signal processing to compensate for the loss of color in the knee region. I'm wondering if Red has plans for anything like that.

[Graeme Nattress]

No. They don't look flat at all. They look like lovely images that you'd get of your DSLR and they don't look flat and they lack a knee.

Graeme

[SF Geek]

So Graeme, are the REDCODE RGB 720 and 1080 formats going to be able to load into say, Final Cut without any kind of conversion in REDCINE? You said that all you need is an NLE that supports quicktime. Would there need to be an update to the NLE?

[Graeme Nattress]

Assuming FCP supports Quicktime, that should work just fine :-)

Graeme

[Nick Shaw]

Although there is no guarantee of real-time playback from a REDCODE RGB timeline in FCP on a broadcast monitor unless AJA, BMD, Matrox etc implement REDCODE codec support.

I imagine with their close links to RED, AJA will be the first to support it. But I would also like to see support for the Matrox MXO, potentially allowing HD-SDI playback of REDCODE media on a MacBook Pro on set.

Of course if FCP 6 goes codec independent, none of this will be an issue!

[Anders Holck]

Hopefully Apple will bless (both Graeme and) the Recode RGB codec to get some realtime support inside FCP, although I doubt that.

Of course this all depends on wether the Redcode RGB codec will be freely distributable. If it is, a faster EFP workflow is feasible as you can just hand over a drive to the customer at the end of the shoot, and they can download the codec from the RED site.

If not we will still need to convert to another format before the client get's it.

[tj williams]

This is a big sticking point for me. Several posters on this site have preferred that RED Codec be sold or otherwise limited from being available to every post house

If the RGB Codec were not freely distributable to the post house. My day would look like this: 7am call Lunch download first mags to laptop 7PM Wrap 8pm back at computer encoding RGB into whatever my clients edit system will accept. Overnight rendering? Next day 7am shipping Fedex

If RED RGB codec were freely distributable then download to the laptop at lunch and at wrap while putting the stuff in the truck hand client a fire wire drive in a box.
go home.

Kind of a no brainer which is better for freelance shooters...Also pretty clearly in RED's interest to allow free download as the post acceptance will encourage sales.... Hey eventually like everyone they will have to encourage sales!!!

[Steven Parker]

Agreed, tj...

unless Graeme's amazing wavelets render really fast on a relatively cheap system (ie, nearly drag&drop) somebody's got an awfully long day ahead of them.

But Jarred mentioned in a previous similar thread that the initial RED demo footage wasn't rendered with 'supercomputers.' Hopefully it'll be a P2-type scenario - transfer/copy time only between hard drives into a QuickTime system and all is well... QT is pretty ubiquitous, despite it's gamma issues, and drivers/support for FCP shipped on CDs with the cameras. Seems easy to do at 1080/720.

Tho the P2 cameras missed their street date by about a year:sarcasm:

If I can find that previous thread I'll post a link, but you were a big part of it so perhaps you remember

[Graeme Nattress]

Not my code remember - I'm just figuring out how it all works. We have other people like Rob doing the coding. (Just making sure that credit goes where it's due. Rob is busting his gut on this and I don't want anyone to think otherwise).

Graeme

[Stephen Williams]

Several posters on this site have preferred that RED Codec be sold or otherwise limited from being available to every post house



Hi,

I think that is wishful thinking. I am sure post houses would be able to afford a camera if that was the only way to get the codec, then that could back fire as they would rent their camera for free and just charge to encode the footage!

Stephen

[Stuart English]

As Graeme suggested, Knee (and Toe and Gamma Slope) and Curves Editor are just alternative inputs to a Tonal Response Curve. Such a curve has the responsibility of mapping our (approx 12 stop) 12 bit linear sensor output to the 10 or 8 bit depth requirements of an NLE or a VTR based recording system.

So does RED offer Knee? And Knee and Slope or a Curves Editor?

RED ONE and REDCINE provide a Tonal Response Curve, the specific control parameters can be application / device specific. But however you control it, it is the same thing, and the resulting digital mapping data (a LUT) wil be device interchangable.

[Graeme Nattress]

Good clarification Stuart.

Also to add, the tone curve doesn't just map to a lower bit depth if needed, but can also be used to tone the image to make it take on a particular look.

Put that all together, and what you've got is flexible, intuitive and powerful.

Graeme

[Chris Kenny]

Does REDCINE let you create separate curves for each color channel? If you've basically got the functionality of Photoshop's Curves window (or a superset of that functionality), that would be great.

Also, can these curves (or, rather the LUTs generated from them) be uploaded to the camera, for on-set monitoring or recording in the RGB modes? I believe something about on-camera LUT support was mentioned a couple of months back. Is that related to this?

[Graeme Nattress]

Actually, it's more like Adobe RAW converter than Photoshop, where you have a single tonal curve for the image, rather than for R, G and B seperately. Why? Because REDCINE is not a grading app - it's a RAW conversion app. It may sound limited, but the "looks" you can create with this are wide and varied, and above all, it's really simple.

Yes, we're looking at the full loop of Camera -> REDCINE -> Metadata -> Camera here.

Graeme

[Chris Kenny]

Hmm... aren't there cases where manipulating the color channels separately would be desirable as part of the RAW conversion process? Say, if only one channel is clipping?

Round-tripping of LUTs from camera to REDCINE is great. Will LUT support on the camera be available on all outputs?

[Graeme Nattress]

I see your point, but I've not found so. I think such special cases would be far better treated in a more specialist colour correction application / environment where you could combine secondaries with spatial masks. That said, I'm doing some R&D in this area at the moment.

One of the key things about REDCINE is that it has to be really easy to use. Moving from RAW conversion, and controls beyond what you'd normally find in a RAW conversion app for photos (and these are getting very advanced now, way beyond the basics of RAW conversion, trying to compete with Photoshop) would probably scare 90% of potential users. The 10% that were not scared, maybe > 5% would be people with colourist backgrounds and access to high end tools.

Graeme

[GlennChan]

If you look at Photoshop's RAW conversion tool, it has a slider to let you put in overexposed detail. So in cases where one color channel is clipping (this goes hand in hand with white balance), you can sort of extract additional detail out of the highlights. At least, I *think* this is what's happening.

Normally when you white balance, you multiply one or two of the channels by particular numbers such that for a neutral color, r=g=b. One or both of these channels will now exceed unity/white. A simple and effective white balance algorithm will just clip these values off. However, if you can intelligently create missing data, then you can (in a way) get additional detail in the highlights.

[Graeme Nattress]

That's true enough Glenn, but Photoshop's RAW converter, for instance, doesn't balance R=G=B for white balance, but does some much more interesting and complex calculations.

In CS2, you can get some highlight detail back by just bringing the exposure compensation negative, but you'll also notice, that the colours of the highlights are not always right.

Intelligently creating detail in highlights is what R&D is about.

Graeme