HD For Indies

This is my continuing coverage, analysis, and footage from my Red One shoot in Spain.

On Saturday, we got up and were ready to shoot. After last night's rearranged shoot (Mont Juic instead of Font Magica), we were itching to get what we wanted - some really gorgeous shots.

You can see the photo gallery of production stills here.

Today I want to do something a little bit different from what I've been doing - I had been posting source 4K TIFF files, completely flat and raw and unmodified. The benefits of such are well explained by Stu Maschwitz here, but not everybody is up to speed on that.

I've fielded a few complaints about the look of the Red One footage in Comments on prior posts, my favorite being that it simply looked like higher res HDV. Bwahahahaaaaaaaa.....let me show you how not true that is.

First up, let us take a look at an image from the same sequence I posted the other week:

B001_C002_071013_00306_flat


Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 4K resolution, 16 bit 48 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

For those of you just joining this game, these images are best viewed with your monitor set to Adobe 1998 - that's gamma 2.2, white point of 6500 Kelvin. If you're on a Mac, and you haven't done it yet, now is an excellent time to use the Advanced calibration options in System Prefs/Displays/Color/Calibrate/Expert Mode (on).

This is the ungraded, flat, optimized for transfer to DI version of this frame. And yes, it looks utterly flat and uninspiring. And yes, there appears to be a dead pixel at 2833 over, 167 down. Drat. I could paint it out, but that would feel like cheating.

For those interested, it was shot with a 16mm Ultra Prime lens, f2.8, with ND0.9 and 1.2, ISO 320, I processed it at 5600 Kelvin, 0 Tint, and I think 0 Exposure since Jendra nailed the exposure so well (perhaps because I convinced her of the rockingness of the false color exposure tool? :D )

EDIT - DO NOTE - this was shot with not one but TWO ND filters - a 0.9 and a 1.2 - so OF COURSE it looks flat!

But take that same 4K TIFF file and apply some aggressive Curves and Hue/Sat in Photoshop, and voila:

B001_C002_071013_00306_graded


Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 4K resolution, 16 bit 48 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

For those of you who felt the original images were flat and uninspiring, there you go - that's more like it.

EDIT - to answer those asking, Photoshop changes were as follows - I applied this curve:


....then pushed the master saturation +47. That's it.

Some are complaining (even one guy on the CML, but not indicative of the overall tone there -EDIT - I misrepresented this before, is why I'm rephrasing now) that you should be able to just shoot and get good results straight out of the camera, that all this post software nonsense is gobblygook, and that finished images should fall out of the camera like manna from heaven (after you stand around and tweak on it on set).

For starters, I heartily disagree - the more specific a look you create in camera, the less likely you'll be able to change it later...with a traditional electronic camera. The Red One is really most analagous to a digital film camera - you have a LOT of room to push it around in post, so notes from the DoP in the field are important if not essential to get your dailies the way you want them...if you shoot it like a film camera, not tweezing all the knobs on set.

This is an essential distinction between the Red One and a lot of other electronic cameras, especially the workhorses of the HD world, the Varicam and the F900. While you CAN shoot with those cameras in default modes, if you REALLY want to get the best results from Varicam/F900, you need to have (or be) a DIT - a Digital Imaging Tech. A DIT can get deep into the menus and tweak all the color parameters to get the optimal results off the sensor head, through the DSPs and color adjustments, then recorded in a compressed (and usually shrunken, excuse me, prefiltered) format to tape. INSTEAD...Red One records all of the image that hits the sensor, unaltered (colorwise) but in a compressed format, and any adjustments you make to white point, gamma, saturation,tint, etc. are all recorded as metadata. It is akin to the difference between making a Curves adjustment in Photoshop, and using an Curves Adjustment Layer in Photoshop - the former you're married to your choices and will further degrade the image to make changes, in the latter you can change your mind without damaging consequences.

SO...all that said, some folks are still cranky about wanting to be able to shoot with the Red One and get pretty images immediately, such as out of the HD-SDI to tape for some workflows (like live production).

This is where all that metadata gets juicy. It just so happens that all of the controls that you have in Red Alert (and will have in Redcine when that ships) are exactly the controls, that work exactly the same way, in the same units, on the Red One camera itself. You've got controls for Kelvin (your white point temperature), Tint, Exposure, Saturation, Contrast, Brightness, then gain channels for Red/Green/Blue. (You've also got a curves editor, but I don't think that'll be available on camera). So what I did was do a quick tweak of the controls in Red Alert, which adjusts the image in the same way it would had I dug into the menus and made all those changes in camera - so it is entirely possible to shoot on the camera and get something immediately like this:

B001_C002_071013_00306_RedAlert Grade.jpg


Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 4K resolution, 16 bit 48 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

This was quick - I spent about a minute doodling with the controls, mostly Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation. You could spend your time (and everyone else's) and their money on set messing with this...or just do it later if you don't have to have it Just So on set. This is by no means a match to what I did in Photoshop with more robust tools, this was just to show that you CAN get a poppy image straight out of the camera (and better than this I might add, I just hacked at it for a minute or so).

BUT...the REALLY juicy bit is this - if I HAD hacked around for a few more minutes in the Redcine software (when it ships), I'd be able to save that look, put it on a CF card and load it back INTO the camera (or all the other cameras running on set) for all the footage they'd shoot until I changed settings again, either by twiddling knobs on camera or mouse click 'n draggin' in Redcine to load a new or modified look.

This was not my most successful in camera simulation, so keep reading...

Next up is a shot of the top of the church. The original from camera, which we could consider a digital OCN (original camera negative), is not terribly inspiring.
B001_C004_071013_02474_flat


Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 4K resolution, 16 bit 48 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

This was shot with an Ultra Prime as well at T4, I don't have notes on which one it was nor whether any ND filters were used. Eyeballing it I'd say there were, probably the same 0.9 and 1.2 if I had to guess.

...but put that that into Photoshop:

B001_C004_071013_02474_graded


Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 4K resolution, 16 bit 48 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

....and you can push it FAR, as you can see here. Would I want to push it that far? Not very often, but you CAN, and that is the important thing. Did I mention I haven't sharpened any of these? At ALL? Sharpening is just adding contrast to edges. Feel free to do so in Photoshop or metric equivalent.

I got this look by applying this Curve:



...and then going into Hue/Saturation and pushing the master saturation 34 units, then applying this custom push in the cyans (note the widened/tweaked range):



For those who want snappy right out of the camera, here's that option as well. All image adjustments (except for the watermark, obviously) were done strictly within Red Alert by manipulating the controls in the exact same way you could/would on camera. So you could be rolling this kind of color if you wanted to out the HD-SDI (just not at this resolution, of course!):

B001_C004_071013_02474_Red Alert Graded


Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 4K resolution, 16 bit 48 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

The big picture is this: Even though these source images look flat and uninspiring, in a way that is GOOD - that means you have a LOT of room to push them around in post to get them where you want to go. This means you are less concerned than you otherwise might be about clipped highlights or muddy shadows, and that if you want to add a lot of saturation, you CAN, without having the image come apart like wet Kleenex in your grading app in a sea of mosquito noise and blocking artifacts. Open that source 4K image up in Photoshop and start going nuts with it. Then open up an image from your camera and try to push it as far. See what I mean? Yep. Red One rocks. Or more specifically, Graeme's Redcode RAW codec rocks, since it holds up so well to this kind of knob flailing abuse.

Actually, that's a good place to stop for today, I need to head out.

Thanks again to all the folks who worked on this stuff with me, we dubbed ourselves Equipo Rojo España - "Team Red Spain":

Directors of Photography:
- Jendra Jarnagin
- Pol Turrents, who was also Mr. Connection to hook us up with all of our Spain resources, a VERY special thanks to him

Technical director: Mike Curtis, HD for Indies (me)

Production Manager: Oriol Bramona of Utopic

Red Camera Equipment: Steve Tammi of Otter Creek Productions

Camera Equipment: Service Vision

Production:Independent Film Academy, Utopic, and Service Vision

1st AC: Gabi Garcia

Data management & 2nd AC: Ivan Garriga

Red Postproduction: Utopic

We all learned a ton, and are continuing to learn as I dig through all of this. It is striking how much you can learn about shooting in post production of this camera..and how much (more than usual) you can alter the results of the shoot in post.

This is a good thing.

More to follow, keep checking back,

-mike

As always, I'm available for consulting on your projects, especially Red related projects

Labels: Red, Red Alert, Sitges, Spain