Ì just bought an Epic M

[Stephen Williams]

It’s early days & this is what I really like:-

 

1) Build quality is first class, well above expectations-

2) The PL mount is the best made mount I have ever seen, quite a work of art.

3) The camera boot’s up quickly in aeound 7-8 seconds.

4) The camera camera does not get very hot, therefore the Red Brick batteries last several hours.

5) Touch screen menu’s are very easy to navigate.

6) Redmote again very quick & easy to use.

7) The HD video out is high quality

8) The 2k images at 300fps are far better than I expected.

9) The camera ISO matches my light meter, so setting the stop is very quick

10) Small & light

11) HDRx

12) Being able to View footage (in proxies) from Redcine-X or Premiere Pro with no transcoding on a cheap laptop.

 

I must add that all the people at Red HQ have been really helpful, camera shipped the day the money arrived. Really most impressive.

[Phil Rhodes]

Ah, so it's finally the camera they promised us four years ago?

[Stephen Williams]

Ah, so it's finally the camera they promised us four years ago?

 

I think it's better!

Without Red One there would not be Epic , Alexa or the F65. 3 Great cameras all under $100k,

[Keith Walters]

Ah, so it's finally the camera they promised us four years ago?

I think it's the camera George Lucas said the HDW F750 was about 15 years ago!

Or about 75% of the camera Panavision reckoned the F900 was a couple of years after that....

[Guest Stephen Murphy]

I used it for the first time last week on a shoot and while it is a FAR better camera then the RED one for me it just reaffirmed how much I prefer what Arri is doing with its digital cameras in both design, business practice and picture quality.

[Brian Drysdale]

I think it's better!

Without Red One there would not be Epic , Alexa or the F65. 3 Great cameras all under $100k,

 

Are you getting a BNCR mount for your old lenses?

[Stephen Williams]

Are you getting a BNCR mount for your old lenses?

 

Hopefully, nothing BNCR is approved yet. As the 24mm - 135mm Ultracam lenses (Ex Contax Zeiss) cover FF35 they will be very useful. I have ordered an approved Nikon mount from Optitek that I will use for FX & 2nd Unit plates.

My Cooke Zooms cover 5K 2:1 when cropped 16 x 9. However I do need lenses with full coverage. I do a lot of product shot work & was hoping to take stills from the motion for print. The 75MB Tiff files look quite impressive!

[Brian Drysdale]

Hopefully, nothing BNCR is approved yet.

 

Pity about the IMS having problems for RED.

[Keith Walters]

I used it for the first time last week on a shoot and while it is a FAR better camera then the RED one ...

I'm sorry; how is that even possible?

How can you improve on absolute perfection? :P

[Stephen Williams]

Are you getting a BNCR mount for your old lenses?

 

Hi Brian,

 

I just heard from Jarred the Visual Products BNCR mount is good to go, It's Sunday & they are still working at RED!

 

From the tests I have done Full 5K is way better than 4k & that's for an HD finish. I really was not expecting that to be the case.

 

Best Stephen

 

Just bought it on Ebay!

[Keith Walters]

From the tests I have done Full 5K is way better than 4k & that's for an HD finish. I really was not expecting that to be the case.

Careful, Jim will be wanting to use that for his signature line :D

 

I want to see this 18-Stop HDRx thing in action.

Do you have the facilities for that?

[Guest]

So how does this camera compare to the Alexa in price and picture quality?

 

Why are episodic TV shows in North America all hot for the Alexa vs the Epic?

 

R,

[Keith Walters]

:D

Why are episodic TV shows in North America all hot for the Alexa vs the Epic?

 

R,

Because, as with all the other "alternative" cameras they use, the output video is 1920 x 1080 more or less WYSIWYG, which you can record onto media that can be played back instantly in just about any modern production studio in the world. To have any chance of success, the product needs to basically be a "live" 1080p TV camera with the option of higher resolution and/or inexpensive Semiconductor storage and low-cost PC non-real-time "rumination" for people who can afford to wait.

 

And because the producers of said episodic shows don't really give a rat's arse about future-proofing, which I personally think is pretty dumb, but I guess they can't be expected to worry about a product's residual value in 50 years' time, for the benefit of future generations of rapacious sharmarket whores not yet even born yet. :)

 

And because they're almost universally be going to be renting the equipment anyway, and the actual camera makes up only a relatively small component of the rental cost, and the lenses and other accessories used are all going to be much the same, and cost about the same.

 

And because they similarly don't give a rodent's freckle about stories of people starting out with $30 and selling watermelons out of their pickup at the county fair or whatever it was people did in those days, or the overheated spoutings of their gaggle of flannelmouthed rabid largely clueless fans, no, they just want something they:

Know. Will. Work.

 

But you knew all that, Richard :D

[Stephen Williams]

 

I want to see this 18-Stop HDRx thing in action.

Do you have the facilities for that?

 

HDRx is enabled, you choose ho many extra stops you want on the second stream, it works. Redcine X can show the 2 streams adjustable with a slider bar. It looks like + 3 stops is the way to go.

[Stephen Williams]

So how does this camera compare to the Alexa in price and picture quality?

 

Why are episodic TV shows in North America all hot for the Alexa vs the Epic?

 

R,

 

I went into a rental house to check the FFD on the Epic, it was 100% spot on as I thought. They have a couple of Alexa's & are up for a test. I think the record to prores is the main reason, however if they edited with Premiere Epic would be just as easy.

[Brian Drysdale]

Hi Brian,

 

I just heard from Jarred the Visual Products BNCR mount is good to go, It's Sunday & they are still working at RED!

 

From the tests I have done Full 5K is way better than 4k & that's for an HD finish. I really was not expecting that to be the case.

 

Best Stephen

 

Just bought it on Ebay!

 

People seem to be liking the old glass on these cameras.

 

Is there something about the mathematics involved with the conversion using the 5k that makes for a better finish than the 4k? You would've thought the extra 1k would give a subtle rather than a "way better" difference.

[Keith Walters]

I think the record to prores is the main reason, however if they edited with Premiere Epic would be just as easy.

Yeah, but that's the same old same ol' same ol': This assumes that a producer's editor-of-choice/production house of choice, is actually prepared to shell out for new software AND scale the sometimes very steep learing curve, just so said producer can use a camera which when it's all said and done, may not work all that much better than what he's already using, at least for what he's doing.

 

I went into a rental house to check the FFD on the Epic, it was 100% spot on as I thought. They have a couple of Alexa's & are up for a test.

Sorry, what does FFD mean?

Is it one of these TLA's :D

 

FFD Financing for Development

FFD Free Form Deformation (computer animation)

FFD Fitness for Duty

FFD Fast Flash Disk

FFD Front des Forces Démocratiques (French: Front of Democratic Forces, Morocco)

FFD Fit For Duty

FFD Foundation Feature Data

FFD Full Field Development

FFD Flame Failure Device

FFD Focal-Film Distance

FFD Focus Film Distance (radiography, distance between the X-ray source and the film)

FFD Fractional Factorial Design

FFD Feed Forward Driving (Mitsubishi)

FFD Functional Flow Diagram

FFD First Field Dressing

FFD Fast Failure Detection

FFD Five-Finger Discount (slang for stealing)

FFD Flint Fire Department (Flint, Michigan)

FFD Fixed Flexion Deformity

FFD Finger Floor Distance (measurement used in spinal assessments)

FFD Fraction of Faults Detected

FFD Flash&Flex Developer's Magazine

FFD Fargo Fire Department (Fargo, ND, USA)

FFD Forward Flight Deck

FFD Farm Fresh Droppings (sound crew)

FFD FlashFiler Database (Turbopower Software file extension)

FFD Form Format Definition

FFD Fitchburg Fire Department (Fitchburg, MA)

FFD Fraction of Failures Detected

FFD Feedforward Decoder

FFD Funnel Floor Drain (plumbing)

FFD First Floor, Down Productions

[John Sprung]

..., however if they edited with Premiere ....

 

But nobody does. The few who got burned on FCP have gone back to Avid, which pretty much owns the town. Lightworks and Edius are the other niche players.

 

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Stephen Williams]

People seem to be liking the old glass on these cameras.

 

Is there something about the mathematics involved with the conversion using the 5k that makes for a better finish than the 4k? You would've thought the extra 1k would give a subtle rather than a "way better" difference.

 

I really don't understand the improvement in resolution at 5K, looking at a packshot of a toothpaste tube, all of the tiny lettering around the edge of the box was very sharp, it's something that I have never seen before. For HD delivery I really did not expect to see any difference at all.

[Brian Drysdale]

Iall of the tiny lettering around the edge of the box was very sharp,

 

Not so good for those TV actors, great for the plastic surgeons.

[Stephen Williams]

Not so good for those TV actors, great for the plastic surgeons.

 

It's resolution, so it does not look ugly like sharpening. As the DOF is minimal they don't have anything to worry about.

[John Sprung]

Not so good for those TV actors, great for the plastic surgeons.

 

No problem. Film has had that resolution forever. Just get out the diffusion filters....

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Keith Walters]

I really don't understand the improvement in resolution at 5K, looking at a packshot of a toothpaste tube, all of the tiny lettering around the edge of the box was very sharp, it's something that I have never seen before. For HD delivery I really did not expect to see any difference at all.

What do you actually mean: 4K vs 5K?

Are you talking about 4K vs 5K both out of your Epic, or 4K from something else?

 

And if it's out of the same camera, do you mean 4K windowed or 4K derived from the 5K area of the sensor?

 

I would imagine that going direct from 5K to 1080p is going to involve one less stage of interpolation than the 4K path.

 

Generally, the higher the source resolution, the more you can push the Nyquist limit with smart re-scaling software.

 

You could of course test this with your own custom resolution charts. You have the technology :D

[Stephen Williams]

What do you actually mean: 4K vs 5K?

Are you talking about 4K vs 5K both out of your Epic, or 4K from something else?

 

And if it's out of the same camera, do you mean 4K windowed or 4K derived from the 5K area of the sensor?

 

I would imagine that going direct from 5K to 1080p is going to involve one less stage of interpolation than the 4K path.

 

Generally, the higher the source resolution, the more you can push the Nyquist limit with smart re-scaling software.

 

You could of course test this with your own custom resolution charts. You have the technology :D

 

4k Windowed from the Epic V Full sensor 5K

[Keith Walters]

4k Windowed from the Epic V Full sensor 5K

Ah.

 

Well, here's the thing.

Unlike the case of a 3-chip camera, or one like the Genesis with RGB filter stripes, all of the pixels you see are 100% synthesized, by a complex computer program.

 

There is no straightforward "algorithm" for doing this; there is a basic De-Bayer routine which even I could write, and an enormous number of "fiddle-factor/massage" routines which work out the "best guess" processing for as many situations as the programming team can imagine, or get told about. (Much the same thing applies to MPEG and JPEG codecs).

 

While you would like/expect this to be completely scalable, so you could do the exact same processing regardless of the number of pixels windowed, (as you can with JPEG/MPEG) that would enormously complicate the software.

 

Bottom line, I suspect the de-Bayer algorithm has more-or-less "hard-wired" 5K and 4K versions, and they haven't put as much work into the 4K version, because in the real world there is not that much advantage in using it.

 

This would explain their occasional claims to the effect that "Build XXX" can now extract dramatically improved picture quality even from orignial RED One footage from years ago. Simply a case of successive refinement.

 

If they had unlimited programming resources, (as was available for international standards like JPEG and MPEG) they probably would have had an infinitely scalable system where you could select just about any number of pixels to suit your speed/storage constraints.

 

Since the software is not open-source, and the Epic is built to a price, I can't see that happening anytime soon.