HOPE

[KETCH ROSSi]

Oh my... You miss guided soul... I do feel so sorry for you. Not knowing how to make RED images look like Alexa images... It's so easy.

Send me an ALEXA shot, And I'll match it perfectly.. send me a SONY F65 shot and Ill match it perfectly...
I've shot so many TVC's with mixed camera footage coming in these days, from Alexa, Phantom, Canons, Epics, ... and we grade them all up the same. I can pull RED back to any of these other formats...

I cannot believe that you have written this to be honest... ? I've never ever seen this super amazing ALEXA footage that people keep telling me about. I have a lot of it here now stored away in hard drives and it does not look any better than anything else. ?

paused...
ok, Im back...
I'm looking at a string of ALEXA footage right this second, just dragged it up in Premier and I have quite literally dropped a 5k EPIC file next to it... Same shoot, different cameras, different lens.... I'm now spending 30 seconds on grading it to match the Alexa footage. Done.. Perfect. now they are the same. Not very hard... I had to blur the RED footage 1 pixel... as the Alexa footage is no were as sharp... but over all... the tones are identical.
Colour temp a bit warm in the Alexa footage to start with... But hey, it's a colour baked Pro res.. what do you expect. , but still looks fine.

Now I couldn't get the Alexa footage to look as sharp or as clean as the EPIC footage, reason why is because EPIC shoots images 4 to 5x the size of Alexa standard output.

NOW!... If your not grading your footage at all... and just transcoding and using as is, or just using the ALEXA footage as is... not grading that either... Then Alexa has a nicer standard colour lut... But when you get into a grading situation, The EPIC runs rings around PRORES Alexa footage for colour and gamma range... Fact. Why... because one is 10 or 12 bit Prores at MAX res HD... and the other is 16bit, 12 milllon pixels RAW.... So of course to be fair to the Alexa you will have to degrade the RED RAW files to get them down to Alexa spec and look... But once again, so so simple to do.

It's so so easy to drag EPIC footage back to ALEXA spec... Almost impossible for Alexa to look like RED EPIC footage.

Ha ha, more and more I like your posts Mark, you save mine so much time form posting my self.. ;)


Only think I'll add...


For me ALEXA and other cameras out there VS. RED EPIC, is like comparing a man with ONE EYE ONLY, with a MAN with BOTH.


If I have a RED EPIC, I have TWO EYES, so I see with no compromises, if I want to see not as good, I simply close ONE EYE, and then its like been an ALEXA or every other camera out there...

But the only difference is that while the RED EPIC can be made to see as they do, they DON'T HAVE A second EYE to OPEN and SEE like EPIC does... ;)

[Mark Toia]

hahahhahaa... yep, thats another way of looking at it Ketch. :))))

I'm all with you Mark, but is Epic #2.... ?

Hard to tell through the jpegs and all, but that'd be my guess...

Yep... :)

[Justin Kirchhoff]

Thanks for your post, Mark. Everything Jon mentioned in his first post was disconcerting, knowing that it is so easy to change it in RCP or any other number of color grading programs.

[Dustin Cross]

The comparison most people do of Red to Alexa is based on the video tap to on set monitors. They just don't understand this is like comparing the SD video tap of a 35mm film camera to the video out on an SD video camera. The engineer tweeks the setting in that video camera so that signal looks the best it can and that is the best that image is ever going to look. Only an idiot would think the image from the video tap on the film camera is the best that film can look. That is what I see people do on set all the time.

A friend of mine just called me from a color suite. Mixed Red and Alexa shoot. On set they decided Alexa rec709 was way better than generic Epic, so they recorded rec709. So my friend graded some of the Red footage real quick and they were amazed at how good it looked. He then brought up some of the Alexa footage and show them their error. Even with Log-C Alexa is not a flexible as Red Raw.

I sometimes wish Red only had an SD output.


Dusty

[Maz Mawlawi]

Ok but to Jon's defense, the problem is agencies are highering producers and DPs who are not very technical and do not worry or think of color correction. In their mind they need to have the prettiest picture out of the box right away. It is so frustrating as we are constantly fighting an trying to educate those agencies and DPs that the Epic is a much better choice but they simply refuse to listen for now. (that is the same people who also are stuck in working in FCP and refuse to consider working in anything but prores...how can an industry based on technology be so technologically dumb??? ;) ) Redcolour3/redgama3 is a step in the right direction as far as look. maybe someone needs to have an Alexa preset look available for download so we can load it into our camera look and make those short sighted producers/DPs happy...

[Mark Toia]

Ok but to Jon's defense, the problem is agencies are highering producers and DPs who are not very technical and do not worry or think of color correction. In their mind they need to have the prettiest picture out of the box right away. It is so frustrating as we are constantly fighting an trying to educate those agencies and DPs that the Epic is a much better choice but they simply refuse to listen for now. (that is the same people who also are stuck in working in FCP and refuse to consider working in anything but prores...how can an industry based on technology be so technologically dumb??? ;) ) Redcolour3/redgama3 is a step in the right direction as far as look. maybe someone needs to have an Alexa preset look available for download so we can load it into our camera look and make those short sighted producers/DPs happy...

It doesn't really matter at the end of the day... A picture is a picture... but to be honest, i like my competition farting around within the Alexa. It keeps them of my tail... :)

[Stephen Wheeler]

Ok but to Jon's defense, the problem is agencies are highering producers and DPs who are not very technical and do not worry or think of color correction. In their mind they need to have the prettiest picture out of the box right away. It is so frustrating as we are constantly fighting an trying to educate those agencies and DPs that the Epic is a much better choice but they simply refuse to listen for now. (that is the same people who also are stuck in working in FCP and refuse to consider working in anything but prores...how can an industry based on technology be so technologically dumb??? ;) ) Redcolour3/redgama3 is a step in the right direction as far as look. maybe someone needs to have an Alexa preset look available for download so we can load it into our camera look and make those short sighted producers/DPs happy...

I agree with what you are saying Dustin. Working in rentals we have a lot of work come through that wants to just get a "finished" product out of the camera. I believe this isn't an issue of education all of the time but an issue of turn around times. If they need it finished and on the web or on tv in two days they may not want to deal with transcoding and intensive color correction. I know a lot of you may not think it's right, but clients want to tell you how they work and have you give them a solution or system that will fit into their work flow, not be dictated to on how they should work.

Instead of grading Epic footage to look like Alex in post, I would have been more impressed if some one had filtered and used in camera settings to get it to match.

[Gunleik Groven]

I agree with what you are saying Dustin. Working in rentals we have a lot of work come through that wants to just get a "finished" product out of the camera. I believe this isn't an issue of education all of the time but an issue of turn around times. If they need it finished and on the web or on tv in two days they may not want to deal with transcoding and intensive color correction. I know a lot of you may not think it's right, but clients want to tell you how they work and have you give them a solution or system that will fit into their work flow, not be dictated to on how they should work.

Instead of grading Epic footage to look like Alex in post, I would have been more impressed if some one had filtered and used in camera settings to get it to match.

Which isn't really too hard to do, and methinks gives much better results than a pure post-match.

Add a lowcon and some diffusion to the Epic and you are there by a far cry, that will also take off some of the "edge" to the RED footy that some dislike and gives more Alexa-like rollouts in the top . Hopefully without giving the more toneless skintones of the Alexa... (which BTW are the two parameters - not colometry - that made me guess that #2 was Epic)

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

I don't care what you say Mark - when it comes to insults. But maybe you are right, maybe most Red owners are just shitty photographers, and don't know how to correct their footage, but I does not help me when I want to rent out my cameras to people who would rather use Alexas, or when many of the world finest DP's (at least in Europe) don't use MX based cameras any more.

Maybe many of the Red shot films are made by people who have very different taste than myself, for example, I think both The Great Gatsby and the last Pirates of the Caribbean looks like shit, and I saw both Drive and Melancholia in Lumiere last year, and wow. Prometheus looks fantastic, and Alexa would not suite it, though.

I've not yet had time to test my cameras (a scarlet and an epic) for finding a look I like, but I'm confident I'll find it, but I'll probably need to do some research on lenses. Maybe I'll also find that my starting post in this thread is delusional, who knows.

Mark, can you make some Red footage look like the footage in Drive?

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

I still think (if we think of sensors as film stock) that a Dragon somewhere between the current Epic and the Alexa sensor would be great.