Don't Panic

So hey, that RED One camera is in the hands of its first customers, and there has been an explosion of traffic, images, enthusiasm and confusion about it.

Mostly confusion.

Shooting raw is a new thing for a lot of people. Even those of us who are used to shooting raw with DSLRs aren't accustomed to seeing our images with little or no post-processing—when you open a raw file in, say, Lightroom or Aperture, the software tries to make the image "look good" for you (non-destructively, of course), and lets you tweak from there. But RED Alert, the beta software that ships with RED One, doesn't do this. Nor should it, but it RED Alert has enough controls to daunt many new RED One owners.

In truth, RED Alert is probably hurting matters by offering too much control too prominently in its UI. Most RED One shooters would be better off setting white balance and nothing else (consistently per sequence), and then selecting between a hard-coded preset for either Rec709 gamma (for video post) or log (for film-style DI post). To do any more tweaking than that in Red Alert is to simply muddy the waters and cause downstream confusion.

Many people, for example, feel the need to correct for underexposure in Red Alert. I've seen people apologizing for underexposed test shots. Don't—underexposing is exactly what you should do, within reason, in order to hold highlight detail. If you look at the "offhollywood" test shots on hdforindies.com, you'll see that the exposure is all over the map. That's fine! That's a very easy thing to correct for in post, and holding onto those troublesome highlights is worth some inconsistencies from shot to shot. Remember, the dynamic range of a digital camera has nothing to do with how much overexposure it can handle (because no digital camera can handle any)—it's all about how much you can underexpose. In other words, as you try to hold onto that highlight detail, how much can you underexpose that car before it reveals nasty noise, or worse, static-pattern artifacting, when you brighten it back up in the DI?

I only wish that Mike and company had transfered every single one of those shots with the exact same RED Alert settings—it would be so much more illuminating.

Graeme Nattress, author of RED Alert and chief image nerd at RED, started a thread on RedUser.net in an attempt to guide people's initial use of RED Alert. I joined in and added this:

I would appreciate it if people posting example images would differentiate between attempts to simple "develop" the RED One image into a workable video form vs. attempts to make the image "look good."

The reason being that some people will be looking at these images for proof of RED One's empirical qualities, i.e. dynamic range, highlight handling, ability to hold detail in saturated colors, etc. These people will be disappointed to see a clippy, crushy image that has lots of sex appeal and "looks good."

And of course, some people will be looking at the first RED One images off the line and hoping that they "look good." But that should not be the case unless the images have been color corrected. While RED Alert has some color correction controls, it's not a color grading station, and the ideal RED One workflow would most certainly not be to make permanent color decisions early in the process.

Remember that an image that shows a broad dynamic range will look flat and low-contrast. An image that shows good highlight handling will probably appear underexposed. And an image that shows good color fidelity will appear to have very low color saturation! I urge new RED One users to learn to love underexposed, low-con, low-saturation images as they come off your camera, for they contain the broadest range of creative possibilities for you later.

But also maintain your love for the rich, saturated images that you may ultimately create from this raw material—and hope/beg/plead for tools to allow shooting with RED One under a non-destructive LUT that is included with the footage as metadata, so that you can preview your image as it may ultimately appear, record that nice flat raw image, and later have the choice of applying your shooting LUT or some other awesome color correction.

And then I went and listened to the fxguide podcast about Mike and Jeff's first day with the camera, and felt tangible pain as these incredibly sharp guys verbalized their near-terror at the learning curve that lays before them. Guys, it's so much easier than you think. Don't stress out about what to do with RED Alert—the less you do, the better. And so much more the better if you do the exactly same thing to every shot.

Next time: What do do with all these flat, low-con, underexposed and uneven—but consistently processed—images! The good news? If you've read The Guide, you already have a leg up.

Two Days, Two Rigs

Eric Escobar hit me up to DP his latest short, Sex Positive, last weekend. It was a two-day shoot, the first of which was a standard-def affair using my venerable DVX100a. The second day we shot with the prototype M2 rig seen here earlier.

Having the back-to-back experiences of using the DVX100a, with its ample manual control, familiar ergonomics, and dual XLR input; followed by the Canon HV20 with its barely-adequate controls but oh-so-lovely 1080p24 images, was a great education in what's terrific and what's still sorely needed in the DV Rebel's arsenal.

The M2 rig is experimental, so I won't review it except to say that both Eric and I would jump at the chance to use it again. He wants to shoot a feature on it, and I can't blame him. It worked well and we are channeling our feedback on its finer points directly to Redrock.

Enough typing—how about some pics? Here are two color corrected frames from day 2. In the second, that's day 1's footage playing on the TV in the background. Both of these frames happen to be made with that amazing Nikon 50mm f1.4 prime.

More later on the experience, the rig, the cameras, and our post path!

Redrock Gets It

(Click for a larger image. Sit down first though.)

Redrock Micro, maker of the popular M2 35mm lens adapter, is showing a new compact handheld rig at Cinegear Expo in LA today and tomorrow. Unless you snapped a photo of it at the show and put it on your blog today, the above is the first publicly shown image of the thing.

Sorry it's got my drool all over it.

Of note: That's the Canon HV20 in there, mounted upside-down. Before you hurt yourself pondering it (like I did), that does not provide a right-side-up image on the camera's inverted viewfinder—hence the external jobby. At Redrock there are fans of external LCD displays and fans of viewfinders, and this rig is designed to support either.

We've seen some Frankenhoopty-lookin' HV20 rigs here on ProLost. It's wicked smart of Redrock to create a compact, DV Rebel-friendly system around the HV20. As my friends on TWiM pointed out in episode 59, the mini Canon has serious limitations, mostly in the area of manual control. But with a setup like this you're divesting it of much of that responsibility, basically just using it for its awesome little sensor.

If you're at Cinegear, check out Redrock at booth 30. Tell them Stu sent you. Then say, "Look, a blimp" and see what you can grab. I mean how much could that whole rig weigh?

I intend to find out.

HV20's Rolling Shutter

There have been some concerned comments on one of my HV20 posts about the camera's "rolling shutter" and the distortion it creates. There were even some links to some seemingly disastrous footage that caused one person to return his camera.

As the owner of a shiny new HV20, I'm not all that concerned about this shortcoming. Last I checked, I had no immediate plans to shoot a film entitled "a jiggly look at a lamp." I've uploaded some footage that represents about as kinetic a shot as I'm ever likely to shoot, and while the lampposts are leaning over a bit, I hardly call it a dealbreaker. You just need to follow the DV Rebel rules and keep your shutter locked at 1/48, as well as the age-old rules of 24 fps cinema about pans being motivated by an object in the scene. It also doesn't hurt that I properly removed the 3:2 pulldown from my clip before compressing it.

Here's a narcoleptic but awesome tutorial on how to manage exposure while maintaining the cinematic shutter speed of 1/48 (or 1/50 for PAL). (thanks to Farnsworth for posting this link on the Rebel Café.)

I should note that I'm not disputing the claims by the author of the most excellent Syntheyes software that the rolling shutter is problematic for 3D tracking—but I do plan on testing just how impossible it is to get a solid track from a "normal" HV20 shot.

Is the HV20's rolling shutter a flaw that you must be cautious of? Yes. Does it ruin the camera for the DV Rebel? No way.