What Should RED Do?
Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 6:06PM 
With a week to go before RED's big announcement of revised Scarlet and Epic specs, there's a temptation to speculate on what wonders Jim has in store for us. Instead, I'd like to present a roadmap that I would like to see RED follow for mitigating some of the confusion that surrounds their raw workflow. Specifically, as you might imagine, regarding color.
The RED One shoots raw. No color processing is baked into the footage, you do that yourself in post. The best aspect of this feature is also the worst—you can process it however you want. So people do—everyone a different way. This flexibility provides a lot of power, and more than enough rope to hang yourself. While the RED One, as comparatively affordable as it may be, is professional equipment that expects a professional post pipeline run by knowledgeable personnel, Scarlet is likely to be a much more accessible camera. Upon its release, thousands of new customers will be shooting raw and processing it "however they like," which will all too often mean not getting the very best images the camera was capable of capturing.
Part of the brilliance of the Panavision Genesis camera is the Panalog color space it uses. Panalog packs the substantial dynamic range of the Genesis into a 10-bit image that can be recorded to tape or disc, and dropped directly into a video post pipeline or a film DI workflow.
RED needs their own Panalog. And they almost have it, as they have created a RED Log transfer function that does a good job of safely storing the full-range raw signal in a 10-bit file. But even when using RED Log, there are still a dozen other settings that can radically affect the image. Panalog, on the other hand, is more than a predefined curve. It's a color matrix as well, and most importantly, an exposure guideline. Rather than give you a hundred ways to screw up your images, Panavision instead suggests one very reliable way to shoot with the Genesis, and only one flavor of results. Your mileage may vary and of course you can branch out from their guidelines, but the camera rolls off the truck with an exposure cheat sheet and a recommended workflow that every post house understands. This is what RED needs. This is what RED Log must become if the diverse range of Scarlet customers are to avoid shooting themselves in the feet.
Here's how Panalog works. The Genesis, like all digital cameras, records linear light energy at the sensor. That signal is then converted to Panalog, which involves both matrixing the colors (to the native white balance of the sensor, no choice) and remapping the light values to a logarithmic scale. Log, as you may remember, is where exposure changes are represented by a consistent numerical offset. This has many advantages for color correction, and has the side benefit of being perceptually uniform on most displays. Shadow detail is preserved unquantized.
In other words, it's an efficient package, and it looks nice. It throws nothing away, you can view it intuitively on a monitor, and you can drop it right into an color correction suite—set up for either video or film—and get right to work.
10-bit images have pixel values ranging from zero to 1023. Panalog maps the camera's "black" to 64 and its brightest signal to 1019.
Panavision recommends the following exposure guideline: Put 18% gray at 36% on your waveform monitor. This will create a Panalog value of 382 in a 10-bit file.
This simple recommendation, combined with the Panalog curve and the low noise floor of the Genesis's sensor, comprises the true might of the Genesis/Panalog combo.
The rest of the values shake out like this (remember that waveforms max out at 109%):
You have five solid stops both over and under 18%. You are holding up to 600% scene illumination, or just over five stops over 18% gray.
This, in my experience, is awesome. You can safely expose one way for your entire shoot, indoors and out, and never risk noisy shadows or egregiously clipped highlights. If you're in an uncontrolled setting, you can safely underexpose by a stop or so to try to hold onto a highlight. You can transfer these images straight to film, and all that highlight latitude will fill the print's ample shoulder, resulting in a film-like overexposure characteristic.
Is it as good as Kodak color negative scanned to Cineon log? No. But it's the best thing going in digital cinema.
It's good that Panalog works, but it's also good because it's not a moving target. None of this information has changed since the introduction of the Genesis in 2004. Meanwhile every single RED user out there is figuring out their own workflow. Their own ISO rating, their own exposure rules of thumb, and their own favorite RED Alert settings. And then starting over from scratch with each new firmware build. It's a digital cinema Tower of Babel.
What RED needs to do is hone RED Log into a strong and consistent enough colorimetry that we can default to it 99% of the time. RED needs to publish exposure guidelines for RED Log and build tools into the cameras (such as a false color mode) to aide us in hewing to them. If I hand someone an R3D file and ask for it to be transferred RED Log, there should be only one way to do it. Don't dispense with the infinite flexibility of RED Alert, but give us a solid default setting that faithfully represent the best of what RED's cameras have to offer.
You've built an amazing camera RED, and you're about to build two more. It's time to show us how to use them.
Reader Comments (21)
I dont know 'bout all that fancy Red stuff, I just wanted to say that I like the pic of you chimping.
Aw shit, is that what that's called?
http://www.sportsshooter.com/special_feature/chimping/index.html
Wow... all I do is chimp. I have like 10 pictures... after I took 4500.
On another note...having real production rules actually written by the manufacturer.... would be awesome. Written in conversational english... like the guide.... "If you are doing this, then do this... and here's why..."
Be cool to be able to share presets too...over our phones.. and into the camera.
Oh, jeeze, I do that constantly. Well, at least now I know what to call it. I even make the Ooo!-Oo! noises, especially when I managed to nail a really sweet explosion that actually stayed in frame.
Yeah my wife just calls it "Annoying" hahhaa
As for the RED, i love the flexibility and diving into the cam and seeing what i get. however i agree with you wholeheartedly that there needs to be some corralling of concept and execution for rules of use to nail the sensor between the eyes and be somewhat foolproof as you've laid out the Panalog workflow.
That being said as RED prepares to enter the speculated Pro-sumer market with Scarlet there's gonna be a ton of "what do i do with this and how does that work?" that doesn't happen with the HVX world. so it's gonna be interesting to see how it all shakes out and i'll be smoking the crack right there with everyone else as it happens :)
as always your descriptions and explanations are on par with brian greene and his quantum outlays.
....and RED has a false color overlay for exposure and coupled with the histograms works pretty nicely to see how your data is hitting the sensor...
build 17 beta has some nice GUI options for user pref and setup as well.
I would love to see something like this from Red. We're dealing with Red footage at work and it's not been all that pleasant. Too much guess work involved. If Red really wants to break out to "the masses" they are definitely going to need to streamline their workflow.
So Jason, can you set up your own false color configs in build 17? Can you monitor in RED Log?
Because the RED One Rec709 false color mode I've seen encourages you to put 18% gray at 45% Rec709, and that'll have you clipping before 100% scene illuminance!
http://prolost.blogspot.com/2008/02/digital-cinema-dynamic-range.html
Hi
Try SI2K it has histogram and false color both monitoring their variation of the log curve - never had problem in exposing.
Also way better SNR and dynamic range and I dont mind the 2/3 sensor with S16 lenses.
-Kaspar
NB! I own two of them so not exactly unbiased (both the second one after playing with red for a week)
In regards of ISO, Jim has already stated that the native sensor is at 320, somewhere in between 250-500 is acceptable. Some people dont follow this guidelines and it isnt RED fault. And i saw some "guy" who expose the footage on ISO 100 which cause the footage to lose its dynamic range, again it's not RED fault. If they want to do their own exposure ISO based guideline, it's up to them. It's not like Jim dont tell us about it.
I agree some of the post that u mentioned but others like RAW being the worst aspect is highly subjective IMHO.
Stu, build 17 did include RedSpace in it's false color as well as Rec 709.....no RedLog though.Worth checking out.
I really don't understand why Log is preferred...I know it packs more visual data in compared to Lin..but as far as I know 10 bit log would be comparable to 12 bit lin. The best thing Red could do is implement 12 bit log.
Build 16 has red space viewing mode as well. The important point to know is that we can view RAW too. And that will be your ultimate guideline to check if your RAW files is clip on the highlight or not and be seen from False Color or traffic light indication. Which from build17, they put another raw traffic indication for highlight clip. We can switch between RAW and RedSpace to check.
It's different from Genesis Panalog workflow. What Stu wants is one way or bullet proof way if i understand his post right.
yeah, as said above build 17 does add False Color tracking to your preview mode (RedSpace, REC 709....)but no REDLOG.
i still agree there should be some modicum of, "do this this way and be solid" Genesis style instructions for the RED.
I'm not sure of the 18% recommended position for REDSpace will have to check into that.
Do this and be solid. We can start from ISO, there are lots of people out there who dont follow Jim recommendation. Simple thing and they dont follow. So what are we trying to say ?
While I agree with argument that there should be one set-up and profile for RED that could be defined as reference, I am the opinion that being able to access RAW debayer, and colour matrix is great thing.
There is great benefit to the quality and richness of the image graded on transfer to the look that is close to the final look as it is possible to achieve with limited tools available to matrix settings.
That is in comparison to straight Red Log transfer and grade to the same look. If you compare histogram - you will find that RAW corrected image stands much better colour.
Is see RAW as something that is here to help us be more creative with image and look. With digital projection, cinematographers will be able to show images that are superior to those ever produced on film.
So I guess I will post here instead of reduser then...
http://prolost.blogspot.com/2008/02/...mic-range.html
http://prolost.blogspot.com/2008/04/...ming-soon.html
You mention underexposing by 2,5 stops consistently in one of the posts above.
Have you come to any conclusions regarding exposure for filmouts with the Red One in these tests?
Stu,
Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
Question I posted on Reduser:
If you are grading Genesis Panalog footage for TV, would you just start grading until it looks good, or would you use some sort of a inverse lut to get closer to a video space before you start grading?
Hi Jörgen, and welcome.
I never did continue those tests, because it was right in the middle of new firmware builds coming out for the RED One that seemed to substantially change the camera's performance.
But the math still holds—if you shoot in Rec709 and use the false-color exposure guidelines, you leave yourself very little highlight latitude over 18% gray.
Hi Twester,
Yes, you absolutely can just start grading, and I believe many productions do. Panalog images look a lot like flat telecine transfers—low-contrast, low saturation, good highlight and shadow detail. Ripe for color correction.
What I would tend to do do is add a mild s-curve as my final grading layer and grade under that.
And in fact that is exactly what I did on a recent series of commercials I just finished! I hope to be able to post them here soon.