Epic HDR

[Keith Walters]

That's why RED has their own army of engineers, and you're not one of them.

No, RED has their own army of engineers because Jim Jannard knows little or nothing about electronics, optics or software, and even if he did, he wouldn't have time to do all the work required any time this century :P .

 

I'm not one of them because

 

A. He would never have heard of me when he started the project.

B. He would never have been happy with my technical opinions, particularly when I turned out to be right.

C. I am neither a US citizen nor resident in the US, and I'm too old to apply for a Green Card and

D. I doubt the pay would be anywhere good enough :lol:

 

If it had been my project, you would be seeing a lot more of the bloody things by now on sets of projects that actually matter, and a damned sight more prime-time stuff than the current piddling slack handful.

 

Well as they say: "If you only hire Yes-Men, your results are pretty much guaranteed to be:'Yeah, right...'"

[Brian Langeman]

No, RED has their own army of engineers because Jim Jannard knows little or nothing about electronics, optics or software, and even if he did, he wouldn't have time to do all the work required any time this century :P .

 

I'm not one of them because

 

A. He would never have heard of me when he started the project.

B. He would not have been happy with my technical opinions, particularly when I turn out to be right.

 

If it had been my project, you would be seeing a lot more of the bloody things by now on sets of projects that actually matter, and a damned sight more prime-time stuff than the current piddling slack handful.

 

Well as they say: "If you only hire Yes-Men, your results are pretty much guaranteed to be:'Yeah, right...'"

 

Hehehe, I'm definitely saving this post. You are gonna eat these words a lot sooner than you think.

 

Later grandpa.

[Andrew Wilding]

 

 

If it had been my project, you would be seeing a lot more of the bloody things by now on sets of projects that actually matter, and a damned sight more prime-time stuff than the current piddling slack handful.

 

 

If ever a television is turned on in a bar, and a baseball game is on, the local couch-potatoe-athlete will, invariably, raise his head andfrom the depths of his drunken stupor, mumble; " if I'd been at bat, boy, I'd have sent that ball clear to the moon... Burp!"

 

It's very easy to criticize. It's much more difficult to put your fortune, your time, and your word on the line and try to actually deliver something.

Edited October 9, 2010 by Andrew Wilding

[Andrew Wilding]

I dont mean to be overly harsh. It just seems to me that any company that is at least attempting to raise the bar, so that we image makers can do our jobs better, shouldn't be needlessly torn to shreds. I welcome any techniques or attempts at raising the bar. Wether that means resolution, dr, color fidelity, what have you, I'm just glad that companies out there don't feel that good enough is good enough. I think even if you don't think Red has it's claims, you must admit,it that it's forced every company out there ton reevaluate there strategy, which can't be a bad thing for us. On top of it, there cameras, to my mind, are capable of amazing stuff In the right hands, and I think that they don't deserve all the name calling or what have you.

[Keith Walters]

Hehehe, I'm definitely saving this post. You are gonna eat these words a lot sooner than you think.

 

Later grandpa.

Given that Mr Jannard is actually three years older than me, I'm sure he'll be mightily impressed by the respectful way you respond to your elders :rolleyes:

[Keith Walters]

If ever a television is turned on in a bar, and a baseball game is on, the local couch-potatoe-athlete will, invariably, raise his head andfrom the depths of his drunken stupor, mumble; " if I'd been at bat, boy, I'd have sent that ball clear to the moon... Burp!"

 

Change that to: "If I'd been {shooting/directing/writing} that {oscar-winning blockbuster/Prime-Time TV series etc} it would have made TWICE {as much at the Box Office/as many Academy Awards etc}", and you've pretty much covered the entire posting population of RedUser/DVXUser, with a vanishingly small number of exceptions :P

 

 

But I'm not a barstool Umpire/Athlete, I'm more like a semi-pro player who retired before making it to the Major Leagues, if you like. And you'll find people like that rarely making statements like your couch potato, because they actually have some idea how difficult is to actually play the game at that level.

 

It's very easy to criticize. It's much more difficult to put your fortune, your time, and your word on the line and try to actually deliver something.

"Your Fortune"?

Hmmm, obviously $3,000,000,000 dollars doesn't buy you much these days :lol:

Mr Jannard did not "put his fortune on the line". On several occasions he has mentioned other investors, including at least one person from Oakley. I'm sure with his Bank Balance he would have no trouble raising the necessary capital. It's the same old story; the only people banks seem to want to lend money to are people who don't really need it.

One of the credibility problems RED faces in the mainstream industry is that it all sounds too much like somebody's mid-life crisis and not enough like a serious engineering project.

 

Is he in for the long haul? Well, he's always going to SAY he is, and who knows, at the moment he may very well believe that. But he himself has admitted he has, if I remember it correctly: "the attention span of a ferret".

[Keith Walters]

I dont mean to be overly harsh. It just seems to me that any company that is at least attempting to raise the bar, so that we image makers can do our jobs better, shouldn't be needlessly torn to shreds. I welcome any techniques or attempts at raising the bar. Wether that means resolution, dr, color fidelity, what have you, I'm just glad that companies out there don't feel that good enough is good enough. I think even if you don't think Red has it's claims, you must admit,it that it's forced every company out there ton reevaluate there strategy, which can't be a bad thing for us. On top of it, there cameras, to my mind, are capable of amazing stuff In the right hands, and I think that they don't deserve all the name calling or what have you.

Now see; if you had a sustaining membership you could have gone back and toned down your original post a bit once you'd cooled down :P

"I dont mean to be overly harsh. It just seems to me that any company that is at least attempting to raise the bar, so that we image makers can do our jobs better, shouldn't be needlessly torn to shreds"

That is is not and has never been the objection. The objection is always where somebody claims (or implies) they have made some major technological breakthrough which has overcome some problem which has been holding up the entire industry for years, but upon closer scrutiny the "new technology" turns out to be just another re-hash of an already existing, limited technology. It might sound new and sexy to the average Net-spert know-nothing Fanboy, but if we think we've heard all this before, surely we're entitled to say so.

 

Also we strenuously object to people talking about proposed products as if they are already in existence/available and being used.

The damned Scarlet is probably the best current example of this.

 

you must admit,it that it's forced every company out there ton reevaluate there strategy, which can't be a bad thing for us

Really? You could have fooled me. Most of the big manufacturers seem to be turning out pretty much the same cameras they always have. Non-tape recording is becoming more common, but I don't think RED can claim credit for that.

 

That's another major objection by the way, this house-of-mirrors fantasy version of the TV and video production industries that makes us feel like we must have landed on the wrong planet (again) B)

[John Sprung]

you must admit,it that it's forced every company out there ton reevaluate there strategy,

 

 

Really? Panavision? The Genesis pre-dates the Red. Arri? The D-20 project started long before Red, and stayed on track through the D-21 and Alexa. Sony? The F-35 and 9000 PL? Sure, everybody looked at it, and bought a dozen for grins, but nobody changed their plans.

 

Or are you thinking of the consumer/prosumer range?

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[georg lamshöft]

It's multiple READINGS of the same exposure

you must admit,it that it's forced every company out there ton reevaluate there strategy

 

Alexa would have been called D-22 with on-board-uncompressed-recording and an optical viewfinder and would cost as much as the D-21, no arridigital-message-board and no shiny brochures - that's what changed. Let's see if that's a good thing. They're working since 10 years (!!!) on digital cine-style-cameras!

 

Back on-topic:

So the final dynamic range is limited to the range captured within the sensor, period.

 

Here's the technical data for a quite new interline-CCD used in the Ikonoskop or other single-chip-2/3"-HD-solutions:

http://www.kodak.com/global/plugins/acrobat/en/business/ISS/productsummary/Interline/KAI-02150ProductSummary.pdf

 

On one hand you have the read noise of 12 electrons - that's some kind of noise floor - everything that's below 12 electrons cannot be seen due to the internal processing noise within the sensor.

On the other hand you have the charge capacity of 20000 electrons - the sensels are like buckets collecting photons - once they're full, they clip, no highlight information whatsoever.

20000 electrons capacity-limit are 1666 times "brighter" than the 12 electrons from the read noise - it results in less than 11 stops (that would be a 2048 times ratio) of DR.

 

This is a new sensor-design with a pixel-pitch similar to RED (5.5µm instead of 5.4µm), the charge capacity is directly related to the size/area of the photosites, like small buckets can contain less water/photons. They try to increase the fill-rate (the amount of light-sensitive area) but they're already beyond 70% in modern CMOS-designs (so less than twice the area/charge capacity is possible). Given a similar fill-rate, ALEXAs photosites are 2.3x times larger than RED - that's the trade-off between number of photosites on a given sensor size and "per-pixel"-quality!

 

But that's the theory, in reality much more effects lower the usable DR (electric interferences, even the temperature of the sensor affecting the noise floor) in the processing chain. One of them are the amplifiers and the ADCs. That's where the dual-gain-architecture steps in. By merging two outputs with different gains (and separate ADCs) they can increase the amount of usable DR within the theoretical DR (charge capacity/read noise) of the sensor itself! NEVER more! Not in one single exposure (crucial for video of course).

But this is really basic understanding, what happens in detail is the secret of a few state-of-the-art sensor-designers and manufacturers.

Edited October 9, 2010 by georg lamshöft

[Keith Walters]

I am perfectly familiar with how the Alexa and various other camera designs manage to squeeze a couple of extra stops (and that's all!) of extra DR out of existing CMOS technology.

 

They're all still a damned long way short of 18 stops!

 

The problem is, it would be very easy to convincingly demonstrate such a massive dynamic range using ordinary everyday lighting situations. Why are the only examples we see so limited and contrived?

It's not like it's some sort of new film emulsion where they only have a limited amount of footage available.

Something doesn't smell right....

[Sean Lambrecht]

Since we're (sadly) back on topic... how exactly is Redcode going to handle 18 stops? 16-bit tiffs in post for the combined streams?

[georg lamshöft]

With marketing...

[Keith Walters]

With marketing...

No. that's not an issue.

 

It's perfectly normal practice for image capture systems to compress the dynamic range of the original scene down to a much smaller ratio that can be conveniently handled by distribution systems.

The tonal range of everyday outdoor scenes can easily exceed 20 stops (that is a brightness range of over 1 million to one), but the range available from most distribution systems (Cinema Print, DVD, Blu-Ray Digital TV etc) is something less than 8 stops, less than 256 to one.

 

Your eye is perfectly comfortable with such manipulation, but the big problem (TOTALLY misunderstood by most people) is that you have to be able to capture the full undistorted dynamic range before you can compress and otherwise process it. If it gets crushed in the sensor, there is no way of recovering it.

 

So as long as the HDR system can cleanly and predictably compress the original 18-stop range to the 11 or so stops that RedCode can accomodate, that is not an issue. After all, that's exactly what negative film does. In real time. With no guessing...

 

Actually Jim Jannard himself has an excellent explanation for this in the following post:

The following post

[georg lamshöft]

They could use log - just like the ALEXA in ProRes but I thought the question was regarding linear TIFF 16bit? And it still doesn't resolve the "mystery" of doing HDR in motion at all.

[georg lamshöft]

I've just stumbled over the article on provideocoalition (was it already posted?).

 

So it is regular HDR - two SEPERATE exposures, one normal and one for highlight recovery. Great, they have trouble with motion rendering already (like all shutter-less cameras) and now they put two exposures taken at different times over each other just to claim superior DR?

[georg lamshöft]

SEPARATE, sorry...

[John Sprung]

Great, they have trouble with motion rendering already (like all shutter-less cameras) and now they put two exposures taken at different times over each other just to claim superior DR?

 

It depends how far apart in time. It should be pretty much a wash whether the short exposure/reading overlaps the long or immediately preceeds it.

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Tom Lowe]

I don't mean to sound negative, but I'm just highly skeptical that the engineers at RED have discovered a way to do something that was until now undoable.

 

You mean like Redcode RAW?

 

It's more clear than ever now that Epic X will spell the end for chemical film. As David mentioned, once digital can match and then EXCEED the capabilities of film, plus retaining all the advantages of digital, then it's game over. And that's what's about to happen. In a few years, only a handful of films will be shot chemically, and those will be done by a small handful of directors mainly for nostalgic reasons.

 

This HDR will probably take a little while to fine tune, but it does seem as if it's going to work, and that will be huge, for all of us.

[David Mullen ASC]

While I think Tom has been overly optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on what side of the debate you are on) about the dates for film no longer being the dominant media of choice for Hollywood productions (2011 is fast upon us and Epic isn't even out for general purchase), basically we agree that dynamic range is the last significant milestone for engineers trying to design a digital camera that matches 35mm film's performance in the broad strokes. And even if HDR is in the early stages, it's a major accomplishment and pretty much the final nail in the coffin, so to speak.

 

Now we can debate endlessly over the more subtle differences -- color and skintone reproduction, aliasing issues, motion artifacts, whatever -- and these are important issues still to be addressed, don't get me wrong, just as the fact that when color negative was introduced in the late 1940's, there was still decades of refinement to be had, and digital still needs a lot of refinement, but we are talking about the small brushstrokes between the big ones. The big ones were resolution, dynamic range, and sensitivity combined with practicality of shooting, recording, and posting.

 

Once we have digital cinema cameras with 15+ stops of DR and can easily be rated at 800 ASA and higher, and balanced to different color temperatures, and resolve detail at 35mm level or higher, then we are entering a new phase where it will be image improvement in the subtle ways that matter to cinematographers. It seems that over the next two or three years, we are entering that new phase, after which film will really become just a personal taste thing, not the technical gold standard for image creation.

 

On the other hand, the closer you get to a target, the more elusive it becomes, just as with lenses, how the last 10% of quality accounts for 90% of the extra cost. The last 10% of quality for digital cameras to really create the hard-to-define "beauty" of film images will be the hardest to achieve, and the most debated and argued over, just as DP's will argue over the subtleties between Fuji Eterna 500T and Kodak Vision3 500T, or a Cooke S4 versus a Zeiss Master Prime. So I don't think this debate is over by a long shot.

 

But now that 2011 seems to be the year that high dynamic range digital cinema images will be possible, it also seems to be the year where you can truly start seeing the final transition away from film. Now there are many other factors that affect the speed of such a transition, many non-technical (look at how the SAG / AFTRA conflict accelerated digital production for narrative TV), so I am hard-pressed to make a decent guess as to the length of the final transition. You have to figure that it will take all of 2011 for the Epic, for example, to be widely distributed, and again, the HDR function is still in its early stages.

[Dom Jaeger]

 

It's more clear than ever now that Epic X will spell the end for chemical film. As David mentioned, once digital can match and then EXCEED the capabilities of film, plus retaining all the advantages of digital, then it's game over. And that's what's about to happen. In a few years, only a handful of films will be shot chemically, and those will be done by a small handful of directors mainly for nostalgic reasons.

 

This HDR will probably take a little while to fine tune, but it does seem as if it's going to work, and that will be huge, for all of us.

 

Isn't reduser the site for waffle like this?

 

Since when did soundbites from a company's PR unit replace independent testing?

 

Up until now precious few serious features have been shot on RED, but somehow a product yet to be even released will make it "game over"?

 

Of course David is right that digital acquisition will eventually replace film as the dominant medium for major feature productions, but what I don't understand is the apparent relish some people display in pronouncing the death of film. Don't they realise this will reduce their options? Don't filmmakers want as many choices as possible in their range of tools to create their work?

[David Mullen ASC]

Well, optimistically, the idea is that film will continue to be an option even after digital cameras provide most if not all of the main image characteristics of film, not before.

 

But the truth is that transitions are never painless nor without some loss -- the loss of 3-strip Technicolor by the (then) inferior Eastmancolor, the loss of dye transfer printing by the (then, maybe still) inferior Eastmancolor printing, the loss of Kodachrome, the loss of many b&w stocks, etc. Hey, I still miss Agfa color negative! Options are always nice, but we don't live in a perfect world.

 

Truth is that even if digital becomes dominant, film will not disappear completely for awhile, and ideally, never disappear completely... but that's just being optimistic, that it can remain as a boutique item. The truth is that if sales drop low enough, it may eventually be too expensive to manufacture and sell at a profit. But we still have some years before that day comes.

 

But let's be realistic, few complex technologies remain in existence forever.

 

But I agree that I don't share quite in the excitement over the prospects of film's demise as I do in digital's improvement. I love 35mm film, I don't have many issues with its picture qualities. However, I am excited by the idea of getting that much quality into devices that are 1/3 of the size & weight, for example, or cost 1/4 the amount to shoot, etc.

 

Look, ultimately most of us got into this business to become visual storytellers, the point is to make movies, not to use film stock or any other technology, high or low.

[Adrian Sierkowski]

For me, part and parcel of being a visual story teller is to use the medium which works best for what we're shooting, and I weep for the day I'm told the last rolls of film are being made.

[Tom Lowe]

... what I don't understand is the apparent relish some people display in pronouncing the death of film. Don't they realise this will reduce their options?

 

Digital cameras, especially the Red, have democratized filmmaking to a large extent. It has made it possible for people like myself, for example, to shoot high-quality films on very low budgets. Do you think most people can afford to buy an Arri 435?? Do you think that most people can afford to shoot and process entire chemical 35mm feature film? No way! But digital is affordable and now can essentially match the image quality of film. That is huge. Huge.

[Tom Lowe]

basically we agree that dynamic range is the last significant milestone for engineers trying to design a digital camera that matches 35mm film's performance in the broad strokes. And even if HDR is in the early stages, it's a major accomplishment and pretty much the final nail in the coffin, so to speak.

 

:)

[Saul Rodgar]

Isn't reduser the site for waffle like this?

 

Since when did soundbites from a company's PR unit replace independent testing?

 

Up until now precious few serious features have been shot on RED, but somehow a product yet to be even released will make it "game over"?

 

Of course David is right that digital acquisition will eventually replace film as the dominant medium for major feature productions, but what I don't understand is the apparent relish some people display in pronouncing the death of film. Don't they realise this will reduce their options? Don't filmmakers want as many choices as possible in their range of tools to create their work?

 

Of course, Dom. The thing is what RED sells is really the idea that any person with enough money to buy their cameras will be able to shoot footage that rivals and surpasses (or so they claim) the footage they cannot afford to shoot on film. Just like the DSLR makers did when the digital revolution started in the still picture world. Which is fine. They are, after all, running a business.

 

RED's pursuit of its niche in the market has never been a "giving you more options to shooting film," but rather an implicit and sometimes explicit "we are the future and film is dead." By that analogy, the new digital warriors are set rule this industry. Which is also fine, and quite possibly, true before too long.

 

Would Steven Soderbergh be able to continually serve as his own cinematographer if he always shot on film? Arguably all these guys who either cannot afford or are not capable of exposing film by themselves are drawn to this rivalry mentality, partly because it empowers them. Which is fine too. But most never get past that rivalry point.

 

Would Baraka or Koyaanisqatsi (to mention two movies that are almost purely if not entirely non verbal, visual narratives augmented by a soundtrack) be as impacting had they been shot on digital cameras by a single guy on the back of a pick up truck? Would the films by the great directors and cinematographers in history be as highly esteemed if the acquisition format had been digital while everyone else were filming their own "skeleton crew, low budget digital masterpieces?" Or would they be forgotten footnotes in history books? Impossible to know, perhaps.

 

What I am trying to say is that until the age of the blockbuster, and because film production tends to be more expensive, there used to be more care about getting it right, whereas digital is cheap so people can crank out a movie a year with very little financial burden.

 

Nothing wrong with democratizing the art and the experience of cinema, of course. But at what expense? Now almost everyone seems to be making an HDSLR or RED feature film, whether they are feature worthy or not. By most statistics, attendance to movie theaters is significantly down from 30 years ago, HDTV, BlueRay, home theaters and a million movie releases competing for fewer and fewer viewers are slowly choking it.

 

We shall see, as time goes on and digital takes over, whether (digital) technological advances in (and it inherent democratization of) cinematography and movie making mean actual advances in the craft itself, or they merely translate to more dross to sift through to find the true gems.

 

There is a great picture somewhere on the net (that I can't sadly find now) that depicts the curve of historically and / or artistically significant photographs proportionally diminished when digital pictures arrived. In other words, the more accessible digital photography was to the masses, the percentage of significant photos proportionally plummeted.

 

Is this what awaits cinema?

Edited October 16, 2010 by Saul Rodgar