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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POSTSCRIPT (to the last post): I have since tried to re-create this “look” in Apple Aperture (v2.0) but found I couldn’t “overwork” the dials as much as you can in Lightroom. Aperture seems to have very safe limits, even when you ignore the sliders and type numbers up to their highest value. I do think Aperture has a more “pure” approach to image processing… and the new RAW 2.0 conversions are very nice. But I think Lightroom handles shadows more delicately (it won’t crunch them as suddenly); plus it has curves. The tint wheels are too small in Aperture, I wish they were bigger as you can’t be very precise on such a tiny scale! The other thing that bugs me in Aperture is that you cannot reorder the modules, so that the processing happens in a different sequence. Lightroom also has this limitation, but it seems to be somehow less apparent, or maybe I need to get used to the tools…
If I wanted to go the full monty on rescuing highlights, for example, I would prefer that it did this before it went through the Levels adjustment (which is pretty much your last chance to change the shadows and highlights, contrast, etc).
I have read online that Aperture works in float, although the user manual seems to have no reference to this. If true, a float pipeline would mean you couldn’t end up clipping an image in the whites or blacks – information would be preserved module to module, so if you did two contradictory adjustments (say, brighten in one module and darken in the next), the detail in the image would not be adversely affected. In most Apple products, this means 32-bit float, and they have it implemented (and documented) in Core Image, Motion, and Shake.
The trouble with Aperture is that you don’t get far into the processing chain to see that it is not working in float, at least module to module. If you crank the contrast up in the Enhance module, but try to pull the highlights down using the quarter tone controls in the Levels module, you will see that your image has been clipped. In fact, I would say that one would be best off not to touch a lot of the controls in the Exposure and Enhance modules, and try and get it all done in Levels, so that you are not losing too much detail in your image.
Maybe I don’t know enough about the Aperture processing chain, but it would seem to be a little better if you could “optimise” the order the modules worked. Because working in float can have ramifications on speed, it would be nice if you could define the bit-depth that you want to process at, switching say, from fast 8bit to create a rough “thumbnail” look, to a more refined float-based render for your final image. It means a bit of a coffee break, but at least you would have the option. This is a similar way to how you would use Shake, but for some reason Aperture doesn’t get the stable-mate’s bit-depth goodness.
Of course, Aperture does a lot of other stuff quite well. The difference between Lightroom and Aperture (or C1, Bibble, et al.) is becoming the modern equivalent of shooting Kodak or Fuji.
I like both.
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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.