DC Metro FCP UG

THREE important things to do to get the best image from a RED camera are:

1. Expose properly. “Stay inside the goal posts”.
With the new “goal posts” in-camera and the addition of FLUT™ Color Science, you now have a TON of exposure tools. USE them. There is no excuse to miss exposure and cut short the latitude available to you. If you do not clip RAW, you will not clip RED footage at ANY ISO.

So what is FLUT? FLUT is the brain child of Graeme Nattress. The “F” in FLUT stands for Floating Point and LUT stands for Lookup Up Table (LUT). More on FLUT in another post…

So, to put it all together simply:

FLUT™ is an underlying technology, designed to help you avoid clipping unnecessarily.
It works primarily through ISO and FLUT™ Control, but helps all RAW development controls.
Exposure works just as it’s always done if you need it.
The ISO and FLUT™ controls work together – think of them as “better gain.”

2. Set White Balance BEFORE converting to RGB space for grading.
Color science is based around White Balance. If you lock in a twisted (rotated) color matrix to RGB space for grading, there are no tools to un-twist the color. If you set 5600 and the real WB is 5000, you will only be off a little bit and probably not notice. But if you mistakenly set 3200 and the real WB you want to achieve is 7000, you will NEVER get there with any grading tool in RGB space. You will need to go back and re-white balance your R3D and try again. People who complain about RED’s color usually find out that they have made this tactical error. The easiest thing to do is hit AWB in camera and/or shoot a white or grey card in the scene and hit it with the WB tool in REDCINE-X or other app that uses the SDK.

3. ALWAYS do a full resolution debayer output for grading and finished work. Half-res ONLY for offline editing.