I think Sony may have just made the ultimate DV Rebel camcorder. Check out this video from Hangman Studios and F-Stop Academy:
Image from fxguide.com
Red Epic HDRx in Action
RED came out of the gate strong with a message of the importance of spatial resolution. We were told that the RED One was an important camera because it “shot 4K,” and 4K is better. A more-is-more argument that I agree with only in part.
In the stills world, the obsession with resolution became the “megapixel race,” and only in the last couple of years has some sanity been brought to that conversation. Canon’s 14.7 megapixel PowerShot G10 was assailed for being a victim of too much superfluous resolution at the expense of the kind of performance that really matters, and Canon backpedaled, succeeding it with the G11 at 10 megapixels.
Why is more not always more? First, there’s the simple matter that there is such a thing as “enough” resolution, although folks are happy to debate just how much that is. But there’s also an issue of physics. Only so much light hits a sensor. If you dice up the surface into smaller receptors, each one gets less light. Higher-resolution sensors have to work harder to make an image because each pixel gets less light. This is why mega megapixels is a particularly disastrous conceit in tiny cameras, and why the original Canon 5D, with it’s full-frame sensor at a modest 12.8 megapixels, made such sumptuous images.
All things being equal, resolution comes at the expense of light sensitivity. Light sensitivity is crucial for achieving the thing most lacking in digital imaging: latitude.
What we lament most about shooting on digital formats is how quickly and harshly they blow out. Film, glorious film, will keep trying to accumulate more and more negative density the more photons you pound into it. This creates a gradual, soft rolloff into highlights that film people call the shoulder. It’s the top of that famous s-curve. You know, the one that film has, and digital don’t.
You know how sometimes you drag a story out when you know you have a good punchline?
When RED started talking about successors to their first camera, it was all about resolution. Who ever said 4K was good enough? We need 5K and beyond! Of course the Epic would be have more resolution. But would it have more latitude?
As the stills world’s megapixel race became the high-ISO race (now that’s something worth fighting for!), so too did the digital cinema world get a dose of sanity in the form of cameras celebrating increased latitude. Arri’s Alexa championed its highlight handling. And RED started swapping its new MX sensor into RED One bodies, touting its improved low-light performance and commensurate highlight handling.
Life was good.
And then Jim Jannard started hinting at some kind of HDR mode for the Epic. HDR, as in High Dynamic Range, as in more latitude.
The first footage they posted seemed to hint at a segmented exposure technique. It looked like the Epic was using two frames two build each final frame, and Jim later corroborated this. The hero exposure, or A Track, would be exposed as normal (let’s just say 1/48 second for 24p at 180º shutter). The X Track would be exposed immediately afterward beforehand (see update below) at a shorter shutter interval. Just how much shorter would determine how many stops of additional latitude you’d gain. So if you want four additional stops, the X track interval would be four stops shorter than 1/48, or 1/768 (11.25º).
The A Track and the X Track are recorded as individual, complete media files (.R3D), so you burn through media twice as fast, and cut your overcrank ability in half. Reasonable enough.
But could this actually work? You’d be merging two different shutter intervals. Two different moments in time (again, see comments). Would there be motion artifacting? Would your eye accept highlights with weird motion blur, or vise versa? Would the cumulative shutter interval (say, 180º plus 11.25º) add up to the dreaded “long shutter look” that strips digital cinema of all cinematicality?
RED’s examples looked amazing. But when the guys at fxguide and fxphd got their hands on an Epic, they decided to put it to the real test. The messy test. The spinning helicopter blades, bumpy roads, hanging upside down by wires test. In New Zealand. For some reason.
Thankfully, they invited me along to help.
But before I’d even landed in Middle Earth, Mike Seymour had teamed up with Jason Wingrove and Tom Gleeson to shoot a little test of HDRx. They called it, just for laughs, The Impossible Shot.
This is not what HDRx was designed to do. It was designed to make highlights nicer. To take one last “curse” off digital cinema acquisition. This is not that. This is “stunt HDRx.”
And it works. Perfectly.
Sure, dig in, get picky. Notice the sharper shutter on the latter half of the shot. Notice the dip in contrast during the transition. The lit signs flickering.
Then notice that there’s not another camera on the planet today that could make this shot.
I guess Mike should really have called it “The Formerly Impossible Shot.”
Read more at fxguide, and stay tuned to fxphd for details on their new courses, coming April 1.
Update
on 2011-04-19 21:35 by Stu
Graeme Natrress confirmed for me that the X track is not sampled out of the A Track interval, but is in fact a seperate, additional exposure. There is no gap between the X and A exposures, but they don’t overlap.
The just-posted first draft of the Red Epic Operation Guide has a few nice deatils about HDRx as well.
Epic Movie
I’m in New Zealand with Mike Seymour and John Montgomery shooting with their new Epic M. Anything more I could say about that is probably better expressed by this video, shot by John:
Mike has an ongoing thread going on reduser about his first Epic experiences, and is updating his Dean’s Blog over at fxphd. I’ll have some thoughts on the camera soon, but for now, suffice it to say that RED picked the right name for it.
I thought Mike needed a behind-the-scenes shot as nice as the one John got of me, so I grabbed this on our afternoon run:
Eschew “Experts,” Follow the Curious
I drank this tonight. But don’t call it the perfect Martini.
I’ve noticed something about my reading, podcast listening, and Twitter following habits lately — I’m not interested in hearing from “experts.” By that term I mean a certain type who seem to feel that they’ve crested the mountaintop of knowledge on a particular subject, and are now prepared to dole out this valuable accrual of information to whomever will politely listen. Experts tell you the “correct” answer, because they know.
This static state of expertise is sad and uninteresting to me, because it is the opposite of curiosity. It wrongly defines education as a goal rather than a process.
You may have noticed over the years that I often culminate a big, nerdy Prolost post with a disclaimer that I am not an expert. This is more than just covering my ass, this is an honest description of how I feel. What I try to do here is describe my current explorations, in their current state, and share with you the questions I’m asking myself and the new and ever-changing discoveries I’ve made that caused me to ask them.
“I write to find out what I think.” Search for that quotation and you’ll find attributed to everyone from Stephen King to Joan Didion. It is the first answer I give whenever anyone asks why I keep this blog. If a thought or idea is floating about in my head, the exercise of forcing it into a cogent essay will either cure it into discrete form, or prove that it had none. This does mean that for every post you see here, there is probably one or more that was abandoned due to my failure to wrestle form from the chaos. There are also ideas very important to me that I haven’t written about here yet, because I’m still herding the cats into roping distance.
But sometimes it works exactly as I hope. When I sat down to write about Canon’s release of the 7D, I posed the question, “Is the APS-C format good enough for filmmaking?” I explored the pros (it roughly matches Super 35 film) and the cons (the sexiest stills lenses are still optimized for full-frame), and ultimately found an answer—yes. You can actually see me talking myself into buying the camera. I wrote “You got me Canon. I’ll probably buy a 7D,” and then half a page later, “Pre-order your 7D now. I sure did.” That’s actually true—I got to the end of the article, went to Amazon, pre-ordered the camera, and then came back to press the “publish” button.
This exploration that I conduct in public here on these pages is an expression of my curiosity, and I am drawn to others like myself who share their journey rather than announce their arrival at a knowledge destination. Here are some examples.
Anything from fxguide is good, but the Red Centre podcast (renamed “The RC” in the same way that Kentucky Fried Chicken is now just “KFC”—better not to admit/claim that your chicken is fried or that your digital cinematography show is biased toward a particular camera) is a standout. Mike Seymour and Jason Wingrove strike a perfect balance of tech and art, and distill festering piles of controversy into deliscious 90-proof facts.
I’ve always enjoyed Merlin Mann’s appearances on MacBreak Weekly, as well as his talks and writing about productivity, but lately, as he’s been working on his book, he’s been sharing his curiosity with the world with an almost unnerving honesty on a new show from Dan Benjamin’s 5x5 network called Back To Work. There have only been four episodes so far, so go listen to them all. I’ll wait.
By the way, Dan Benjamin and Leo Laporte (MacBreak Weekly, TWiT) are similarly gifted podcast hosts precisely because they nurture a healthy and perpetual curiosity.
Here’s a left-fielder. I love coffee. So does Mark Prince, AKA the coffeegeek. His website and far-too-infrequent podcast have helped me tremendously with my coffee journey, and although his shows have dwindled to a trickle, his most recent episode is not only terrific, it turned me on to James Hoffman’s blog at jimseven.com. James’s beautiful site is full of great, nerdy coffee exploration. I was delighted to see that his Cappuccino recipe is almost identical to my own (down to the controversially cool milk temperature), but was I was even happier to read his admonition that “I’m not going to label this ‘the perfect cappuccino’ because that sort of thing makes me angry.”
What’s the best camera? What’s the right setting for the 5D? Do you transcode to ProRes?
I appreciate a good cocktail, especially a Martini. A decade ago, when I started drinking them in earnest, what I then called a Martini I wouldn’t even call a cocktail now. Over the years my taste careened from vodka in a glass (AKA not a cocktail) to undiluted gin, to the well-balanced twist on the traditional concoction I had this evening. Which, if you’re curious, was:
- 2 oz. Hendricks gin
- ½ oz. Sutton Cellars vermouth
- 1 dash of Regan’s Orange Bitters
- Stirred vigorously and at length, served up with a twist in a chilled cocktail glass.
I never order a Martini with a twist. I love olives, especially gin-soaked olives. But tonight I had an amazing, fresh Meyer lemon, freshly picked from a friend’s tree, just sitting there half-demolished from contributing to other drinks. I was overcome with curiosity about how its rind might taste in my drink.
It was delicious.
If you’d handed that drink to me ten years ago, I may not have known what to do with it. I was wrong — dead, stupid wrong — back then about what makes a good Martini. I wonder if, ten years from now I’ll think the same of my present-day recipe. My point, and I thank you for your patience, is that it doesn’t matter. I’ve been enjoying my Martinis the whole time. And I’ll continue to enjoy them, because I’ll never stop being insanely curious about how to make a better one tomorrow.
Do you see what I’m getting at here? No matter how much you know, you’re probably doing it wrong. There’s no victory, so enjoy the vector.
I’m just a dude on a journey. I’m no expert. Want a little piece of advice?
Tough.
Color Correcting Food with Colorista II
My friend Pete came by with some Canon 7D (UPDATE: Oops, it’s the 5D Mark II) video and stills. We sat together for about an hour grading the video to match the stills, which had been professionally shot and processed by photographer Eric Wolfinger. We used After Effects CS5, Colorista II, and the DV Rebel Tools scripts from The DV Rebel’s Guide.
What I find interesting about this session is that it provides one answer to a common question: “Why doesn’t the video I shoot with my DSLR look as good as the stills?” Setting aside numerous technical issues, a big part of it is that stills shooters, as a rule, color correct their shots before letting the world see them.
Here’s the session:
And here’s the before/after: