Werner Klipsch

Dear Jim, Regarding: "Single digital sensors need an OLPF (optical low pass filter) to eliminate aliasing. " Actually, all CCD and CMOS sensors need this, single or triple chip. Your are quite correct to avoid level-dependent "sharpening" For what it might be worth, might I also suggest you alter your statement about what this actually does and why you would want to avoid it until the end of the chain. You said: "Sharpening, unsharp mask, or OLPF Compensation (maybe a more elegant term) is necessary if you want to get back the original resolution of the sensor" It is just that nothing creates more engineer's teeth grinding than manufacturers claiming detail correction "restores missing detail" or "restores the original resolution"! It does no such thing. The best it does is give a comfort-zone illusion that the pictures are sharper, by drawing thin lines around certain parts of the image. Consider, you have two of your milk girls, one wears a pink dress, the other the same but with red pinstripes. Put through the spatial filter, both dresses will look just pink. The camera sensor only sees pink on both dresses. How could any electronic circuit possibly know one is plain pink and the other is striped. Or perhaps that it has tiny red polkadots? All the "sharpening" can do is make the outline of the dresses look sharper. Which is still useful, it will give the illusion of sharpness, but it assuredly does not really "restore the missing detail"! Another point you should raise, is that you have put a lot of time and expense to make a camera that restores the beloved shallow depth of field to cinematographers who want to use digital cameras. (Still surprises me, what a surprise it seems to be to some would-be "Hitch-Bergs" that anybody would deliberately WANT something to be out of focus :lol:) You are in front and the focus is on you. The girls stand a respectful 600mm behind you. You have put in extra NDs because you want focus only on you, not them. The sharpening circuit says "What is this? Why aren't these lovely ladies in focus? Has the Focus Puller gone to sleep? I had better sharpen them up before somebody notices! And, I had better sharpen up that bus in the background, and why are those spots on Mr Jannard's chin not sharper? Better fix those up as well!" So suddenly the depth of field has increased without you asking it to, and a couple of freckles and other minor blemishes on your face turn into nice strong black dots and crisp lines, and people on the bus suddenly want to offer you their seat :lol: Amateurs of course love the twin champions of tiny imager size and detail correction, and they get an awful shock when they discover how hard it is to focus a 35mm format camera on a moving target! By the way, commiseration on your recent QC troubles. Welcome to my world :rolleyes:

Apart from "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" I do not recall any Columbia big budget movies that used Sony digital cameras. There may well be a few lesser releases I have not heard of that were, but in general all Columbia (Sony) commercial movies are still shot on film. If Sony have made such a move against RED, this must be a very recent policy change.

My new years resolution was not to get involved in any more of these discussions. Fortunately, it is still 2007 :lol: I must confess I am rather confused about Mr Jannards recent statements on Reduder about detail correction with the RED. Actually overall I am somewhat confused about many of the claims made about how much resolution the Mysterium sensor has (well any Bayer mask sensor for that matter). Phil Rhodes insists that the absolute guaranteed resolution of a Bayer mask 4K sensor can only be 1K if we are talking about red green and blue, and not synthesizing any part of the image. I do not understand this reasoning. If you consider the Bayer sensor as being made up of sub-pixels, each with two green, one red and one blue photosite, then there will indeed be 2K of these sub-pixels across the sensor , and 1152 vertically. From this you can at least assuredly generate a genuine 2K 16 x 9 image. After that, with the extra detail information from the extra green photosites, I will allow that more useful detail information can be mathematically calculated and added to the base 2K 'no questions asked' to give a usefully higher resolution image. The D-20 does a good job of this, and I see no reason why the RED should not do as well or better. Where I and some of my colleagues have trouble is that Mr Jannard in some of his recent posts on Reduser makes the point that some people may find the RED images not as sharp as expected because they "do not add any detail correction". So, at which point does the synthesized detail above 2K stop being "enhanced picture information" and become "detail correction"? At the point where it becomes irrating perhaps? I would much rather the finer detail correction was derived from the original RAW data, rather than re-synthesized from already synthesized data, which is what would happen if the extra correction is done downstream.

I will not be posting anything further on this forum. Most of the answers I seem to attract are from pea-brains and dreamers, so desperate that the Great Red Pumpkin will come and fly them away to moviemaking neverland, that if they are ever forced to dive into the cold river of reality, the hypothermic shock will kill them instantly, or out right nutjobs in complete conviction that quotes of never-ending streams of gibberish from a technical-word Thesaurus is really going to convince anybody that they are some sort of expert., rather than sounding like a bad Star Treck script. I am reminded of the old cartoons where the cartoon animal would jump in an elevator and we would see the floor indication needle rapidly climb up to the top floor. Then another cartoon animal would simply jerk the needle back to the ground indication, and the elevator would come crashing back down :lol: Thinking you can make the fantasy come true by hounding dissidents off discussion forums, is really the same thing you know. Now: "Your mother was an hamster, and your father smelled of elderberry!!" Quick! Quick! The thread is getting nasty! Please close it at once!

By the way, if any of the many clowns who have suggested on Reduser.net the notion of using cans of compressed coolant to keep the RED cool are reading this may I suggest this little experiment: If you have access to a capacitance mill, or a similar electrostatic charge measuring device, including a simple gold-leaf electroscope, try spraying some of your cooling gas onto that! :rolleyes: How much is a replacement Mysterium, Jim? :lol:

Look, perhaps I have the advantage over most of you that I can look at any camera, whether film, video, digital still or even the RED, or any VCR or any TV set or any computer, and I can visualize exactly what is going on in it. I know what is supposed to happen, and I also visualize what happens when things are not done properly. Not so much now, but in the past I did a lot of consulting work, just telling people how to make their products work. Because in a sad majority of cases, really good and clever and innovative design was destroyed by poor knowledge of basics. Like heat management for just one. Proper thermal management in compact systems is serious art. You need to start with sometimes dozens of thermocouples all attached to the devise like a patient under intensive care. You attach all these to a data logger, spend weeks doing all sorts of things to make the device heat up and cool down while you measure and record everything. Then you work up strategies to improve the heat management, (like heatsink transfer compounds, different alloys for heatsinks, fans and so forth). Then you rebuild the prototype and start again, until you get reliable results, within tolerance. When it is done properly, the device just works, and nobody realizes there was ever a problem. And I guess would-be engineers look at the result and think it just "happened". Most engineering does not get done that way. Mostly designers just slap in whateveroff the shelf heatsink they think looks about right, hoping for the best! This is really amateur-ish approach, and causes an unbelievable amount of troubles. Jannard has made it quite clear he did not know if there would be problems running the RED in Spain in the heat of summer. Yet it is not very hard to simulate the Spanish Heat and more. Perhaps I am just the engineer talking shop, but saying he has no idea whether there would be a problem, is like hearing someone start to tell you about their trip to New York, by telling you about the view from the Golden Gate Bridge :lol: This is serious stuff. To start with Soderbergh is not doing anything all that radical technology wise. plenty of feature films have already been shot with digital cameras and nobody has yet died as a result. So using a digital camera is not that awesome a risk. But using one that has not been tested properly FOR THINGS THAT CAN BE TESTED, is just plain silly. This is not somebody's short film flung together over a few days with a few vintage airplanes, this is a serious production that involves a lot of people's time and money. I've never thought the pictures from the RED were all that special, but I really thought they were more organized than this. I am just amazed. And if you are not amazed, you have no idea what you are talking about. Go forth and Pontificate about something you understand ;)

I am just amazed to read about the first day's on-set shooting with the RED 1st Problems in the Field at reduser.net. We are not going to see any pictures from the set "for obvious reasons" but what amazes me is that they are/were having big problems with keeping the camera (particularly the CMOS chip cool). "1. The Peltier cooling system is mandatory. 2. If you shoot in the extreme heat for extended periods, cover the camera from direct sun. Short recording times don't seem to present a problem. All day might depending on how much improvement we can find through our engineering effort. Bring a fan." I have a 1989 vintage SP Betacam that has Peltier cooling of the blue CCD! This was considered essential as the CCDs is least sensitive to blue light. Yet the Peltier junction went open-circuit sometime in the last 20 years and nobody noticed! My point? Sony sell cameras all over the world, so they design them for the worst possible case. With a Betacam that would probably be Death Valley or Central Australia or somewhere in Arabia. Of all the technical challenges that would facethe RED design team, heat management would have to be the most well-understood. How hard is it to heat up a test room to Spanish Desert temperatures? Yet here they are cooling the camera with bottles of cold water! On set experience is great, but you won't get the best out of a design engineer if you bake him along with the camera though! I might not be able to design a 4K CMOS sensor, but I am damned confident I could tell you how to stop the attached camera from overheating, or whether you could! All without leaving the comfort of my basement :lol: I will bet they're using that useless grey plastic silicone crap instead of old fashioned white heatsink paste. Oh the stories I could tell you.... :P

Look I am sorry, but I don't think his "ethical intent" speaks much more than a fold up pamphlet, far from "volumes". He had to tell us something because after making such a big noise about never missing a deadline, his schedule was delayed, but he told us as little as humanly possible as to what happened. Now after some technical details have been released, I don't see why he couldn't have given out more information earlier on and quietened his critics somewhat.

At last, an industry professional with credibility :lol: Why do I think that most of the films that get made with REDS (if there ever are any) will be like that?

And yours is not? Why don't YOU tell us all about your hands on experience with the RED then. What have you got to hide? Sigh. You do suppose a lot of things. <thread closing mode> One suspects your organ of supposition is located somewhere near your organ of evacuation :P </thread closing mode> (Sorry, my wife came up with that. If you don't understand it, I don't either, really. :lol: )

I think it is more the testament to the fact that there is no shortage of "digital cinematography" already out there that both never lived up to their manufacturers spiel and had minimalist impact on the industry when they did work. Success is not measured by what happens on the honeymoon, it is measured by how long the couple stay married, the couple being the industry and the manufacturers in this case. :lol: It is not enough that rivals can make a camera as good as or better than the RED, there has to be seen to be some financial payoff or there will be no backing.

No Spielberg definitely makes movies. I have spent many enjoyable hours watching Mr Spielberg's movies. All I have seen of the Jannard's product is the equivalent of a printed poster and a teaser in the cinema Building a complex electronic system is not at all like making a movie. It basically involves you hiring a collection of talented people, making sure they can all work as a team, not working them too hard, and accepting it will take as long as it takes without any bullying or aggressive behaviour. Every body has to understand rules of civilized behaviour, and everybody needs to understand something about what everybody else does. In this the requirement is software people who have some understanding of electronics, and electronics people who understand something about computer programming. Without that, you usually wind up with a total mess. If you don't have all this you are at the mercy of how enthusiastic your staff are, and many projects sink with no trace once they lose interest. Good software is not written by chain-smoking caffeine addicts, regardless of the stereotypes :lol:

Of course. What kind of discussion forum do you think this should be? Only when it seems reasonable that people on this forum might not know about them. If there is some radical -RED development and nobody here is talking about it, a brief link to the page or whatever should be OK, and then we can discuss it . Jannard doesn't advertise here; he isn't even a sustaining member! He has his own damned site where he can advertise all he likes for free! You can't really blame the management for denying him free advertising here :lol: Nobody stops Jannard from posting here, you'll notice.

Hmm. My English dictionary translates "Pedantic" as possessed of great knowledge that one wishes to impart, whether the receptors wish to hear it or not! Not wanting to be pedantic either, it's pretty clear most of the people here do not have the option! But it seems you have access to all the facts, but you aren't allowed to tell us any of them. Then exactly WHY do you invite possible torture and hard to resist attempts of bribery by telling us you have this information? Should you not have commented at all ?:rolleyes: "let me simply state that you're all crazy if you don't think that all these companies and plenty of others have seriously considered their options as to business relationships with one another, strategic alliances or even competitive shunning. " Well, you are right to a point. They would certainly have considered their options. But that's just a scarecrow you've put up to easily set fire to. What we are speculating about is WHAT options (if there are any) they might follow. I suppose you think nobody should invest in the stock market either, because we don't actually know what is happening in the company's boardrooms? Or commodity brokers should not speculate on the price of cotton next year because they don't know what the boll weevils are thinking :P "May I suggest that we close this thread before it degenerates further into yet another pointless RED discussion. Pointless in that it is based on people talking about things with which they have no real knowledge." Well that would completly destroy RedUser.net for a start :D

I think the problem is that the only photos available are the ones that RED and co have decreed release-able! We are never going to see a bad picture coming from them! We are supposed to be discussing the camera for the purpose of personal evaluation. This can only happen when cameras are in production for testing in private without strings attached. For an example, a while back we had a unauthorized picture through the RED viewfinder, which Jannard was not happy about. But that was much more interesting that most of the stuff RED released! As for your pictures, the place for those is on RED's own website.