First impressions of RED One for wildlife shooting

[Alan Melville]

Steve, Don,

I feel you both make some very valid points, I too, to quote part of a sentence from Don; "feel we're at the beginning of a technological sea change in videography" unquote, I do believe one day we'll see a digi video unit that will leave us in awe of it, however it won't be tomorrow. I'm tipping, one day, we'll be able to shoot with a 2000mm lens at F22 at dusk, hand held, using exceedingly high speed frame rates and laser guided movement sensors to follow diving Falcons, eliminating all wing flutter whilst keeping the subject perfectly centred and exposed whilst it moves from a clear sky to low grass background...... (this is tongue in cheek you realise :) ) and any Joe average will be able to do it !!!! BUT will it be as satisfying or as much fun. I have a friend who is an international pilot, he said to me the other day,
" You know Al, all I am now is a Systems Manager" He starts a new job in 2011 with a small domestic airline so he can "fly" again, it's something to bear in mind.

Steve this is very true, quote; "I agree that they'll probably get there eventually, but as always there is never a free lunch, and those people who were so excited because they thought instead of spending £40k on a pro-level video camera they could get something as good or better for £2.5k have had to become a bit more realistic." unquote. Very true!

The Red may well be on the way but it may also lose the race, look at Foveon versus CCD they both got blown out of the water by CMOS, which incidentally, actually can't produce as high a quality image as the CCD...BUT...it comes in a much smaller package WITH far more "on chip" capabilities...and small wins!!!

But the most important thing amongst it all is...."being there" as Don said and that's what makes this whole thing tick.....Lauri is doing that with his project and ultimately this thread is an insight to his findings / queries / frustrations ( although in the case of frustration, he seems to have a noticeable lack thereof!!) based on what he's using for the project, agreed?

We use what we can 'till "they" develop what we need, so we live in hope and die in despair...LOL

It's been stimulating reading.

Al

[Lauri Kettunen]

Al,

Your post makes an interesting reading! I also believe there is still a lot of space for technical improvements so we have not yet seen everything. Saying this I still feel what we have now leaves us already in awe.

In the 90's when HD was only a dream of the future always felt bit sad that I was not able to create any prints from my footages nearly as impressive what my friends and colleagues did with their SLRs. Moreover at that time a cinema camera sounded like a dream never come true in wildlife shooting. Then HD came but was almost immediately bypassed by the SI-2K and Red One cameras. Nowadays when I color grade my footages, some of them shot 125fps, or make A3+ printouts of some frames, it's still hard to believe all this is practice now. And the next wave of Red Epic and Scarlet will be a step forward, and we are not far from that.

What comes to frustation, indeed, I haven't been frustrated with Red One. There has been a struggle between Birger (the manufacturer of the EF mount) and Red and this has caused some trouble for the EF mount users, but once got the Birger mount running have been very pleased with the system. The weight of the equipment is bit a problem, but not a major issue. Perhaps the experiuence with Canon acmeras affect my emotions; I always liked the Canon XL1 and XL2 cameras but was bit frustrated with the XLH1. For, the image was tinted to magenta and one had to be careful with color abberration. Getting the right tones was always somewhat an issue.

It would be interesting to hear what Meryem thinks. She has also a Red One and likely she is able to complement my findings.

[Dale Guthormsen]

lauri,

I really appreciate this thread. I have followed it all along. In the 60's I shot film in a bolex h16 (I believe that is ahat it was) . Bottom line was I could not really afford to shoot and edit the film and then have a master made, I was pretty young. when I got out of the military in 69 I still could not afford the game.
the digital revolution has been great for everyone, and it is still in its infancy in my book. I looked hard at the red one, and it is an amazing camera, but sense I am not really going to make a full time living with it the price was just a little beyond my point of diminishing returns.


Now with the red scarlet on its way, if it ever will happen, I am alrready tossing that around for my next camera.

A few years back I was talking about the xl2 and Meryem said something to the effect, in a year or so we will likly be talking about something totally different!! did she ever call that.

The probelm is when to jump in for me!! A scarlet with ability to attach ef lenses would be fantastic. If I win the loto/ max this week, a red one would have to do, eh?

I agree the red one is not that expensive for what you get. Seemed to me when I priced the whole kit out I would spend around 29 grand. I had it at the time but I bought an xlh1 and a sail boat instead.

[Meryem Ersoz]

Originally Posted by Lauri Kettunen

It would be interesting to hear what Meryem thinks. She has also a Red One and likely she is able to complement my findings.

I generally find myself agreeing with most of your findings, Lauri, which is why I have not chimed in too much on your thread. The sound of me sitting back and nodding and enjoying the stills that you're posting is not very loud.

I moved to the RED ONE because I was tired of the trickleware business model, as much as any other reason. And never felt perfectly happy with the other options.

I, too, moved to RED ONE based on frustration with other available digital cameras - same issues, CA with expensive lenses on an XL2, not enough resolution to shoot beautiful mist as cleanly as I would like.

I think the improvements that we will see in the next generation will be even more impressive.

There are drawbacks to the RED ONE. I still struggle with the weight on days when I'm not feeling energetic - have to work up a head of steam on those days - and while the camera was relatively inexpensive, the add-ons are not.

But when you see how far and how fast the development has happened, you can't help but be in awe, as Lauri says - every time I turn around, it seems that I am getting a new camera via firmware upgrades...most recently, 4.5K shooting with an 11mm lens with their new color science is extremely fun for landscapes.

They are still enabling features and adding surprises. And adding improvements in the post-processing. It's still fun to me, to post-process my RAW images with such an extraordinary degree of elasticity, adding looks and messing around. I don't tire of it.

But I think everybody should shoot with whatever camera makes them happy. We live in such an age of abundance of great cameras to the point that I have lost interest in comparing this choice or that one.

One advantage to RED ONE - the knowledge set that I have gained from shooting and post-processing RED ONE footage has made me a better user of all cameras, generally. It is simple to use, difficult to master.

Or, to put it another way, learning to pull focus on randomly moving objects (wildlife, kayakers) at T1.3 in S35 in 4K on a 5.6'' screen has made me a better operator of my Canon HV10...

And as a sidenot to Steve, by the way, there's nothing "wrong" or troubling about images that result from shooting in 2K - you will get sharper, cleaner results by shooting the exact same image, the same way in 4K and downsampling. Downsampling always enhances quality, so you'll always get the best results from starting with the maximum resolution. I can get great images in 2K - for archiving purposes -- future-proofing, which is one of RED's advantages -- it just isn't always the best choice. For some of the over-cranking functionality, it is sometimes the only choice.

[Lauri Kettunen]

Originally Posted by Meryem Ersoz

One advantage to RED ONE - the knowledge set that I have gained from shooting and post-processing RED ONE footage has made me a better user of all cameras, generally. It is simple to use, difficult to master.

Or, to put it another way, learning to pull focus on randomly moving objects (wildlife, kayakers) at T1.3 in S35 in 4K on a 5.6'' screen has made me a better operator of my Canon HV10...

Meryem, I find this a rather interesting comment. You put in words something that I had also subconciously also discovered. The full manual control to the camera without any sort of hidden automatic settings together with the same in post have been helpful in learning to get the most out of cameras. As you say, it takes and has taken an effort an effort to learn to master modern equipment.

Thinking the other way around, I feel nowadays bit lost with my DSLRs as they can't be tweaked to show what is really going on on the sensor. Instead the ISO setting adjusts the preamplifier before the AD conversion and also the ISO setting affects in-camera noise reduction. Have to confess I'm not a fan of systems that are meant to make things easy and simultaneously block full manual settings. For, the very best results are typically obtained when the user has a chance to control what ever he or she finds important. So, in my view, too often the other side of the coin that is meant to help the user to make better images implies one has no real chance to learn what is really going on inside the camera and to make the best possible images. Forced in-camera settings easily imply there is less space for adjustments in post, and as a wildlife shooter feel that often one needs all the adjustment space available to reproduce what the eye has seen.

[Lauri Kettunen]

So far haven't own any camera that has not eventually shown some limitations. One of the difficult items is to get beautiful shots of pure (mid-) gray images. In this sense Red One does better than the cameras I've had before, but still, I'm not yet completely satisfied and I guess this has to do with the limitations following from the sampling rate.

To get the best possible sampling rate one should 'exposure to the right', and this is what I always try to do. The difficulty is, in fact, one should not exposure completely up to clipping, but instead up to the point at which the highlights start to compress, i.e., up to the point that still retains linearity.

The image below of trees covered by icy snow on a cloudy day is pretty much like shooting a gray card while asking for a rich amount of gray tones. So, it really pushes a camera to its limits. In this kind of conditions the 8-bit HDV and DV cameras tend to generate images as if the trees were covered by bit dirty snow and this shot taken with Red One is the best (motion) image I've ever got of this item. But still, the amount of captured tones is rather small and when I open the flat image with the gamma curve tool the 12-bit sampling rate prevents me from getting as much tones as I would like to have.

It's going to be interesting to see next winter how the new Mysterium-X sensor in 16-bit Red Epic-X will manage in similar conditions.

Just in case somebody gets the idea that it's gray and dull here, attached here also couple images taken last Saturday under bright skies.

[Alan Melville]

Lauri,

I don't wish to hijack the thread but how did the Arctic Hare / Rabbit on the left hand side of the top right hand side frame get frozen in that position..................? :)

Al

[Lauri Kettunen]

Originally Posted by Alan Melville

but how did the Arctic Hare / Rabbit on the left hand side of the top right hand side frame get frozen in that position..................? :)

It's always exciting to learn that other people discover things that my eyes have not spotted at all. :-)

[Lauri Kettunen]

After posting the last images of trees covered by icy snow -I'm afraid there is no word in English for this kind of snow which is formed by moist when it condenses on trees on the higher parts of the hills while air masses move upwards along the hill and become cooler- had some discussion also on RedUserNet, and then Graeme Nattress, who is the main camera and post color algorithms developer at Red, contacted me.

As a Canadian Graeme was well aware of the problem of shooting snow and the difficulty of getting details captured of brigth pure snow. He explained that in this kind of conditions the human eye is very adaptive and is able to adjust the dynamics extremely fast. That is, when we move our eyes from one spot to another, the eye acts like a high dynamic range system quickly adapting itself with different levels of light. In my ears all this makes a lot of sense and is in line what I've elsewhere read of the eye. The conclusion was, it remains a problem to come up with photos that are alike of what our eyes see in such conditions.

Here's another image of swans that I shot last spring. This was taken early in the morning during the sunrise. The sun was on the left and everything appeared extremely bright. After a rather cold nigth when the sun came up there was a lot of mist in air for a moment above the water reflecting light beautifully.

Since last spring I've wondered how to color grade such an image. It seems impossible to get anything that resembles what I saw -beautiful bright white tones with slight rays of yellowish/reddish light. After discussing with Graeme, came to the conclusion that likely simply can't reproduce what I saw. So, tried another approach and tinted the image to come up with some delicate tones that created the impression of a bright morning. If you compare to the other frame without the slight tones, you'll see, I guess, what I mean.

Or, how is it in your eyes, does the latter version Swans-2.jpg without the tinted colors give you an impression of extremely bright light? In my eyes can't avoid thinking the latter one creates a feeling of a foggy morning as if the sun was behind the clouds.

[John Abbey]

I like swans2 better

[Dale Guthormsen]

Laurie,

I like the tinted version best. I am out all the time looking at waterfowl and morning and evening light is virtually never blue, as in picture 2. I have seen images close to your rendition of what you actually saw.

I think color correcting natural images is only good when it is done to emulate what it actually looked like. I have seen so many stills over done it is a joke, particualrly sunsets.
Often the lighting is very subtle.

good j0b with that!


Must asy I love velvia images with great lighting!! Video like that would be to die for!!


dale

[Lauri Kettunen]

If you haven't yet seen Meryem's excellent summary, it's wortwhile to read it:

http://www.dvinfo.net/article/misc/s...010-event.html

The new technology will bring a lot of new possibilities into wildlife shooting .

[Lauri Kettunen]

I've had my Red One now for more than two years. During this time there has been several updates in the camera firmware and postprocessing software systems.

Yesterday I started to cut some footages I took of a Golden eagle eating a rabit in a snow strom in the end of 2008. At this time the Birger EF-mount was not yet available and therefore had temporaily a Nikon mount. As far as I can remember there was very little light available and I had to shoot all day with iris f2.8. Or in other words, setting the exposure was not a problem; just set the biggest iris and exposure time 1/50s and you need not to change the settings during the whole day.

I've opened these files every now and then to discover it was indeed a gray day. But yesterday, I got rather surprised when I opened the same files with the newest RedCine-X version and started to color grade the files. In less than a minute I was able to pick nice documentary style of colors, check for instance the red blood on the eagle's beak. As far as I can remember, with the old version of RedCine (and the underlying Red's 'Color science') did not manage to do the same.

Summing up, in raw files there is a lot of flexibility and when the camera manufacture makes an effort to squeeze the best out of the sensor, it definitely shows up. Of course, RGB-files can also be adjusted, but still, I would say, not to the same extent.

Below is the original image 'straight out of the box' based on camera's metadata, and the other one is the RedCine-X color graded version.

[Lauri Kettunen]

Recently have stabilzed quite a lot of footages. Although I never shot having camera on my shoulder, still when shooting flying birds, camera is running on a dolly, or when shooting aerials, the camera motion is not as smooth as what I'm looking for. This forces to use some stabilization. Since I'm editing 1920x1080 masters the 4K and 3K resolutions of Red One yield quite a lot of head space for stabilization. And it really shows up.

To stabilize an image some zooming in is necessary, and if a HD footage is stabilized and the result is a HD file, then one typically recognizes the outcome is bit softer than the original clip. So, all the headspace is wellcome. Here's a short 4second sample:

www.wildcine.fi/Sample.mp4

To see what I mean, compare the left and right hand side of the clip; The images were processed as 2K files and downrez to 1K. As a result there is no visible difference in sharpness/softness. The very same effect happens when 4K images are downrez to 2K or full HD.

Then something else. The Adobe workflow of Red R3D-files is finally what one can hope for. The latest update 5.02 of Premiere Pro makes it possible to color grade files in RedCine-X and then import the grading into PPro as metadata. This is a significant improvement and makes editig much easier. It's also pretty amazing that R3D-files can be edited in real time. The RedRocket card supports now real time debayering and if one does not have the card, one may still edit 1K files, copy the cut on the timeline to 4K and then only render in 4K.

It feels like it was not that long time ago when my first Canopus card made it possible to edit DV-files in real time at home. Now, the same is possible with 4K files. Would not have expected this five years ago.

Finally, I think this thread is coming towards its end for the very reason that it seems Red is not far from getting the Epics out. At that point I'll swap to the new camera as well. During the time I've been shooting with Red One much has been said and written about the camera. I've been very pleased with the camera. It has exceeded my expectations and it has been much better out there in the middle of nowhere --also in cold conditions. The camera is bit heavy, but should I say, lighter than what I thought. Perhaps the quality of the images has somewhat compensated the weight as after all can't say the weight has been any issue.

[Brendan Marnell]

1. The horizon visible in Image 1 locates the swans in a natural environment. Without a location, Image 2 invites observation of the birds as if they were posing in a studio.

2. Image 2 brings the eagle to life. From Image 1 it is imaginable that the eagle has just frozen to death and will be embalmed in ice overnight.

3. In mid-distance the left side is brighter but that's because it's nearer the sunlight. The trees in foreground show no difference to me in detail between both sides but that's partly because the dark/light pattern of conifer tops is strongly uniform.

Where can I now read Meryem's summary? I miss Meryem but I only have photos of White-tailed Eagles and a stag from lakeside Killarney to offer; no video until next year, hopefully