HD For Indies

Some subjective notes on Red's IBC 4K footage - so in the Red booth they're showing it at 1080p, but in the D-Cinema screening, they had it on a 50+ foot screen running on a Sony 4K projector.

Some thoughts/commentary:

Shot 1:

What: an Oakley Time Tank watch, shot macro style

What makes it tough - it is an extremely shallow depth of field, it has some contrast challenges - shiny metal, detailed black surface of watch face, fine details in watch face and watch hands, shiny highlights.

What works: the extremely shallow depth of field shows off what is difficult/impossible for a smaller sensored camera to do - get this extreme depth of field. The dynamic range is broad but not impossible, but I personally watched Graeme Nattress abuse the crap out of it in post before I saw ANY noise AT ALL in the blacks. The watch face was totally blown to white at that point, the blacks were lifted very high, and THEN, FINALLY I started to see some noise in the blacks. Insanely clean as compared to other digital images I've seen. Also, by rotating the watch and leaving iris alone (and not buggering with it in post with windows etc.) you get a great revelation of dark to light detail - the highlights on the shiny metal bumps, the smooooooooooth contone on the rounded watch links, the fine texture of the watch links, the shadow detail as the watch face rotates away from the light....all good proof of image quality...plus the exellent sharpness of the image on the fine lines of the sweep hands, minute markers, etc. This really is one of the hero shots.

Shot 2: Joanne blows a bubble, Ted pops it

Joanne (Red employee) is blowing a bubblegum bubble against black, Ted is in background and leans up to pop it.

What makes it interesting: Ted is in background, so get proof of 35mm depth of field - he's out of focus. Good skin tone demo on Joanne. She has dark hair, so the black on black demo of shadow detail is good. Good detail in the bubble - you can see texture and thickness inconsistencies in the bubblegum. Ted leans in to pop it and travels in/out of focal plane. Smooth contone on bubble highlight. I defy anyone to call this a "plastic fantastic" digital image.

Shot 3: guy lights stogie

I forget this guy's name (apology, it's 3:15am, somebody clue me in and I'll update) - he's wearing a black shirt, against a black background, with black hair, and dark glasses frames. He lights up a cigar and you can make out the subtle details of the flame - the blues and oranges in the flame edges. You can see a LOT of detail in the smoke he puffs...all while simultaneously maintaining black level detail in shirt and his hair against pitch black background.

Shot 4: Models lighting cigar

Two (quite lovely I must say) models, one lighting a cigar for the other. Skipping over the allegorical ramifications, it is shot against a black background, and the left model is wearing a white patterned top that maintains excellent detail against the black background. The right model (with cigar) has darkish brown hair, shows good delineation between shadow detail of hair and black background. When lighter flame flares, can see blue in base and orange in flame - good highlight handling. Of course, their skin tones look excellent, soft smoooooth contone on the highlights on their shoulders, cheekbones, etc.

Shot 5: model 1 blowing bubble

What makes it interesting): dark hair shadow detail. Good skin tones. Detail in her white teeth. Smooth contone of highlight, yet visible detail in the bubblegum bubble.

Shot 6: model 2 blowing bubble

What makes it interesting: same stuff as shot one, but this one is blonder, and good detail in her blond hair as the light hits it.

Shot 7: rotating glasses

What makes it interesting: A pair of Oakley glasses slowly rotating with a soft matte box reflecting. Smooth, banding free image in the highlight, nice depth of field, nice greyscale representation.

Shot 8: Porsche 959

What makes it interesting, other than that it's a 959: It's a white 959 with lights shining on it, but including one practical light in the shot. Smoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooth gradations of white across the car, nice shadow detail while not blowing out the highlights. Subtle shadow details in background - a crewmember noticed an orange extension cable in the dim background that he figured would never show on camera....oops. The dynamic range in the shot is the big story here - the hood of the car has bright lights on it, but the underexposed lower portions of the car have good detail as well. The REAL kicker is that there is a practical light on set. Asking folks what they thought of the footage in general when they left the 4K auditorium, multiple DoPs (who are NOT affiliated with Red) pointed out that shot, and volunteered that it looked like anywhere from 12-15 stops of lattitude (their guessed range of numbers not mine let me stress) represented in that shot. I'm not a shooter so I can't vouch or give opinion on that, but these were qualified guys, and that's an impressive figure coming from their lips.

And again, for those that didn't read it earlier, the footage was NOT noise reduced - just some very, very simple color correcting - as Lucas from Assimilate put it (and he was techincal supervisor on the color correction) -

Something important for everyone to know - from the final 5K RGB images pre-color to the rendered images at IBC - with the exception of one shot (the girl blowing the bubble at the beginning of the sequence) the only color processes we did to the images were Lift (master) down, Gain (master) up, Saturation up, Lift (Blue) down. That's it. No shapes, keys, or secondaries. The RED team has done a very nice job with their debayer/matrix algorithms.


...which I think is indicative of the quality and cleanliness of the final images.

You'll really have to see them for youself in some decent environment to truly evaluate the quality, but I was VERY impressed.

As I said before, I think this DEFINITELY puts the Red camera in the same league as the other high end d-cinema cameras - the Panavision Genesis, the Dalsa Origin, the Arri D-20, etc. * I'd love to do some side by side comparisons on all these cameras and see where their relative strengths and weaknessses were...but have to wait until Red has a more finalized camera.

-mike

*(My apologies to those folks for not having said more since LA, my MacBook's spontaneous failure at the airport prevented me from finishing up my commentary on them before IBC started as I'd planned)