This is an excellent digital camera theory primer.
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There seems to be a lot of concern about the footage coming from the RED One being soft. Discarding focal issues, this is pretty much the same complaint that used to come from photographers of digital RAW stills. The solution is that there doesn’t need to be solution. It is not that the images are soft, it is more that they haven’t been sharpened (digitally, in the camera). It is better that RAW footage is not sharpened before post-processing. Film has grain, which increases perceived sharpness. As digital images are usually low in grain/noise, they don’t carry this “advantage”.
Filters such as unsharp mask are used as a matter of course by stills photographers. And even though there are modern day digital equivalents, the technique originated as an optical process with the Germans in the 1930′s. Basically what they did was to use a negative combined with a soft (contact printed) positive as a mask, which was then used to increase the contrast of edges and details. The advantage was that it did not change the flatter parts of the image. This works well optically for our eyes, which is something Ernst Mach had a lot to say about.
Scanned film also looks soft, especially when you zoom in to 100%. With the proliferation of DI systems, techniques like Super 2k have become a popular way of getting better looking scans from 35mm film. Many scanning houses now offer this service. They scan at 4k, and then downsize to 2k, using a sharpening algorithm along the way (probably using filters such as sinc which tends to sharpen when scaling down). The images look punchier and the file size is relatively small. In addition to the sharpening, the perceived resolution is higher because all the extra detail of the pixels in the 4k image are blended into the pixels of the 2k image (see: sub-pixels). For transfers to video, manufacturers of telecine chains usually refer to sharpening in some sort of euphemistic jargon. It is all the same, of course.
The only problem is that while the sharpening process looks good, it’s absolutely horrible to work with from a visual effects point of view. Sharp spikes and artefacts appear in the grain structure, which are not visible on the run, but make it very hard to get a key or pull RGB channels apart. In these cases there are kinder ways to scale without the sharpening, such as lanczos or guassian. Sharpening has ramifications in post-processing and manipulation.
RAW footage ideally has the least done to it as possible, so you can do what you want with it later. RED Cine offers sharpening as one of the output functions, but basically you will be wanting to do the final sharpening when you are doing the final grade. There are lot of different sharpening functions, so the final “look” should be a consideration when deciding how much and what kind to wind in.
More reading on filters (pdf).
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The previous article, as illustrated in wood veneer*
*not to scale, and possibly completely lacking accuracy.
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I’m still hoping that people will be able to divorce themselves from a “Genesis mindset” when they are shooting on the RED. I’ve noticed at shoots with the RED that some of the crew still seem fairly derisive of the RED; as if it is at best a video camera, or at worst, a toy. (To whit, I’d be surprised if they could pick the difference between RED and film on a graded finished product, but that’s a different matter). Others are obsessed with the technical perfection they need to attain in exposure, vectorscopes, waveforms and manuals being poured over like magic oracles. A RED “technician” sits leg-roped to a MacBook, performing magic… and… er… copying files.
I guess new technology can be a tense affair, but as RED says, think of it as a digital stills camera. It’s basically the same, only moving. Some cinematographers are uneasy about this, but I wonder how much has to do with the technical overload that seems to be dominating the web.
Web hype leads to erroneous statements such as, “You can’t do anything without a vectorscope, of course.” Yet cinematographers can shoot film without a vectorscope (aka “safety net”), they do have familiarity of the stock, and know whether they can push the negative in case of an emergency. Negative does have more latitude than any digital format (film is quite arguably, a superior image capture format). On the other hand, the RED is not really a “video camera” either.
With a monitor/viewfinder feed coming out of the RED, you’d have to be a pretty blind to unintentionally over or underexpose something. When it comes to variance between shots, assuming that there could be at most a stop or two (ignoring accidents), they are mostly correctable in a grade.
The RED software doesn’t have a vectorscope, although it does have a waveform monitor. It also has an infinitely more useful histogram—just like a digital stills camera.
The parallels should not be ignored. Use the tool for what it is, not as something which has gone before.
And don’t believe the hype.
If you were wondering about (digital) exposure, you could do worse than this excellent run-down by Stu Maschwitz, with some log theory to boot. If you were ever wondering why video and film are so different this is a good start… Ignore all references to the RED camera and REC709, though, as it tends to muddle the threory.
Conclusion: they may not be film cameras, but they are definitely not a video camera. READ
EDIT: Having read the the subsequent furore over Stu’s article, and the comments at reduser.net, it looks like the digital film-scanning arguments of 15 years ago. Some people dig the theory, yet in other, analogue worlds, it doesn’t seem to be a requirement to know how to make a strip of film all by yourself, despite the fact that film is integral to the process.
Digital doesn’t have to be technical beyond a few basic rules. It would be a shame if everyone thought a RED camera had to arrive on set with a “technician”, like the Genesis does…
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I think some people are inventing jobs for themselves. Commercial photographers that have gone digital would have a giggle at some of the comments.
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