MYTHS.

“RED doesn’t do good skin tones”.
Tony Pratt of Park Road Post showed footage from The Lovely Bones with film intercut with RED footage. All the scenes were “skin tone scenes”. He challenged the audience to tell which was which. Between the presentations, he confided that whenever he actually gets an answer to that question, most get it wrong.

So if Park Road Post can get great skin tones from Build 15 and Build 16 footage, why can’t others? Here are some possible answers:

1. You committed to RGB space for grading without a proper white balance first. If you are off a significant amount in WB, it will make it very difficult to get back where you want. This has been discussed in Post #2 of this thread.
2. Early RED color science was not as exact as it is now, which meant that some work was necessary (as opposed to none) to get great skin tones. Today’s new FLUT™ Color Science (see Post #11 above) makes it extremely easy to get proper color, including skin tones.

“RED footage is soft”.
Sorry, nothing could be further from the truth. Peter Jackson has compared RED 4.5K-RAW footage to 65mm film as recently as one month ago. If you have actually seen projected RED 4K footage, you realize how incredible this statement is. So why do some people say this?

1. They actually didn’t see RED footage but heard someone else say this.
2. They shot 4K footage and did a half-res debayer to 1080P (half-res throws away 78% of the recorded information) and did not “un-sharp mask” the RAW footage because _________ (insert another myth here).
3. They shot RED 2K footage (1/4 of the resolution) and expected it to be the same resolution as 4K.
4. They watched a bad film print.

RED 4K-RAW footage has 256% more measured resolution than a 1080P camera (assuming it actually measured the captured resolution). RED 4K-RAW footage has more measured resolution than a 4K scan of S35 film. Resolution is not something that the RED ONE is deficient at. Shoot a zone plate and see for yourself.

Jim Jannard – RED Leader

Words from Graeme…

This will get updated over time.

Regarding clipping and FLUT™ Color Science…

“Clipping can be a tricky subject – there’s strict mathematical clipping and then there’s practical clipping.

FLUT™ doesn’t allow anything that is not actually clipped (ie 12bit value = 4095) to actually clip. They will get crushed up towards 4095, might actually reach 4094, might in extreme circumstances get quantized up to 4095, but that’s it.

In practical terms, if you crush the highlights way way up, any detail left in them, assuming they are un-clipped and have detail to begin with, will get diminished, just like what happens in film’s soft clip knee. The histogram and right clip meter in the histogram are “practically” oriented. There are 9437184 pixels in your 4k image, and if just a few are clipping, then the bar on the histogram that represents that will be very very short, and probably not visible, even though it does exist.

With visual display of data over such a range of values, some manner of scaling should be used to ensure you can see a reasonable representation of that data, which means unless clipping is “significant”, and the white bar at the right is to help you see that, you may have small amounts of clipped image that the histogram doesn’t reflect. This is perfectly correct and normal as if it works the other way, you end up vastly under-exposing the image to save those odd pixels and ruin the over-all effect.

Hope that explains the histogram monitoring methodology for you.”

Graeme Nattress

Insane Specs

Mysterium-X at the heart of the brain
Massive 5K RAW resolution sensor
Records full resolution 100 FPS to postage stamp
Magic of FLUT Color Science and REDCOE
Incredible 13.5 stops of dynamic range

Go HERE for more info…
Listen to Post Pit and Digital Production BuZZ on the latest from the NABshow activities.. the CEO of RED will be here!

REDundead.

REDundead is a command line tool that recovers R3D files from drives and CF cards that have been formatted to the file system that has been corrupted. It does a great job of recovering the R3D files unless the drive was erased and then recorded onto again… but it might recover the remaining files.

Filesystem corruption usually happens when a drive is unplugged from the computer when the filesystem is being written to.

REDundead has saved many a project.

REDcolor vs. Camera RGB.

Camera RGB is the native color coming off the sensor. REDcolor is corrected Camera RGB matched to industry standards. The punchline is… use REDcolor.

1… 2… 3…

Shooting a RED camera.

1. Set up your camera
Load latest firmware
Do a Black Shade Calibration (lens cap on, T22)
Format media (CF card, RED RAM, etc.)
(If you are renting a RED ONE, do a “restore settings” to clear any previous settings that may be left over from a previous job)

2. Set up your project.
Select a project size like 4K 2:1, 4K 16:9, 4K Quad HD, 4.5K 2.33:1, 3K 2:1, etc.
Select a project frame rate base like 23.976 (default), 24 or 25.
Select a color space like REDcolor (default) or RAW

3. Set ISO/ASA and exposure Do tests before your shoot!
Set camera White Balance (or better yet, shoot a MacBeth, grey card or other white reference in the scene and set WB in post).
Use your light meter
Use the camera exposure tools
• Check your histogram.
• Stay inside the “goal posts”- Noise floor (left) and clipping (right) in RAW with Build 30
• Check “RAW Check”- Noise floor (purple) and clipping (red) in RAW with Build 30.
• Check “barber pole”- RAW with Build 30.
• Check “stop lights”- RAW with Build 30.
• Use False Color

RECORD.

Size matters…

EPIC format sizes:

5120 x 2700 • 5K Full Frame
4800 x 2700 • 5K HD
5120 x 2560 • 5K 2:1
5120 x 2134 • 5K 2.4:1
4480 x 1920 • 4.5 Wide
4096 x 2304 • 4K 16:9
3840 x 2160 • 4K HD
4096 x 2048 • 4K 2:1
4096 x 1706 • 4K 2.4:1
3072 x 1728 • 3K 16:9
2880 x 1620 • 3K for HD
3072 x 1536 • 3K 2:1
3072 x 1280 • 3K 2.4:1
2048 x 1152 • 2K 16:9
2048 x 1024 • 2K 2:1
2048 x 853 • 2K 2.4:1
1920 x 1080 • 1080 HD

RED ONE Mysterium-X format sizes:

4480 x 1920 • 4.5 Wide
4096 x 2304 • 4K 16:9
3840 x 2160 • 4K HD
4096 x 2048 • 4K 2:1
4096 x 1706 • 4K 2.4:1
3072 x 1728 • 3K 16:9
2880 x 1620 • 3K for HD
3072 x 1536 • 3K 2:1
3072 x 1280 • 3K 2.4:1
2048 x 1152 • 2K 16:9
2048 x 1024 • 2K 2:1
2048 x 853 • 2K 2.4:1
1920 x 1080 • 1080 HD
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