REDCINE - Secondary color correction / sharpness?

[Greg Voevodsky]

Will Redcine have secondary color correction and sharpness controls? If not, any chance of adding those?

I was playing with "the 2 girls smoking" in photoshop and noticed that applying the unsharp mask with 100-150% and a 1 pixel radius suddenly brought both girls faces into much sharper focus and now you can even see their strands of hair. (I know the focus was on the lighter - usually its on the actors eyes). I'd like to see this feature somewhere.

[Graeme_Nattress]

Sharpness may be a very subtle parameter of the demosaic algorithm. However, if you want to add any obvious sharpness, best do that yourself in your NLE or DI - same with secondary colour correction really.You've got to be really careful with any sharpness you add as it can make even the best digital cinema images look videoy and nasty.

Graeme

[Greg Voevodsky]

Thanks Graeme. I have shot 35mm film and if I were doing film work per say, would not want to change much with Reds wonderful image for narrative. However, video with sharpness and long depth of field - "reality TV" - makes nature footage on the Discovery Channel HD breathtaking... it might not be "Thelma & Louise" jumping into the Grand Canyon.... rather it feels like you are there. Keep up the great work. I love the new stills today.

Question Graeme? To me it seems like the RED codec is a huge HUGE BREAKTHROUGH... and the real money, and real break through for us filmmakers is to see - the RED Codec on Blu-Ray or HD-DVD or RED-DVD made in China (they are looking for an HD codec).

Am I wrong? Satellite, the net, Apple, Avid, would or should love to use this codec and burn it on DVDs or Blu-Ray DVDs and have nearly lossless pictures without artifacts! I'm excited to have the Red code but to screw it up going to mpg 4 - scares me... i want lossless or close!!!!

[Chris Kenny]

The only variant of REDCODE we've heard much about so far (REDCODE RAW) is completely unsuitable for use as a distribution codec, and it's likely other variants will be as well. The things you want in a "digital negative" codec or a codec used in editing workflows are very different from a things you want in a distribution codec.

[Jannard]

That's why the REDCINE converts to any codec you have loaded on your CPU.

Jim

[imgentertainment@mac]

Now I know with everything REDCINE is in a state of development and will change. I can guess how the program handles the image and be way off. But what I am wondering is are we going to see a batch type handler in this program. Can we batch jobs, Secduel jobs, and even something like apple Qmaster or Render Man that we could spread the processing work over a couple of machines. I don't know i'm just thinking something on the lines of apple's compressor with fancy menus and functions but RED so something that we have only dreamed of.

Just stuff to think about

[Graeme_Nattress]

Bath processing yes, distributed processing probably not. I don't think the processing will be so slow that the network + other overheads will warrant the extra effort. Also, pretty hard to make a movie file over a network, whereas still images are much easier to distribute.

Graeme

[Anders Holck]

Graeme, what internal fileformat are you planning for Camera to record in: QuickTime, sequential frames, MXF?

[Graeme_Nattress]

Not fully decided upon, but you're thinking along the same lines as us :-)

Graeme

[hominid]

Hi Graeme,

Since the footage from this camera should work very nicely with digital compositing programs, have you considered using the EXR format for storage.

It's nice because it's a floating point format and can contain many user defined channels in addition to the RGB data. Your camera could also theoretically store additional metadata using this format.

I mention it only because it's a popular high dynamic range format used in VFX work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEXR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEXR)
http://www.openexr.org/ (http://www.openexr.org/)

Cheers,
Pete

[Graeme_Nattress]

We like EXR and shoud allow you to export to it from the REDCINE. However, it's not suitable for in-camera use as it doesn't have the compression ratios we need, nor does it support RAW.

Graeme

[hominid]

Thanks Graeme,

Good to know, I just didn't know if EXR could fit into the workflow somehow. I figured the ability to store extra channels might have been useful to the camera internally.

Cheers,
Pete

[Barend Onneweer]

I'm not sure what the camera would record into the additional channels (untill RED records Z-Depth that is...) It seems to me that recording RAW in 12-bit would hold everything that the camera can possibly see, with the option to add metadata. REDCODE RAW will probably downsample to 10-bit - which will cause a bit of a loss in color precision.

And OpenEXR files are a lot bigger than RAW, so to keep the recording module 'lightweight' (not 8 drives) RAW would be the best option.

Obviously when exporting fron REDCINE, OpenEXR would be a very welcome option - although in theory 12-bit would be significantly better, since you'd be able to underexpose up to a stop or two (preserving a lot of highlight detail) and still have decent bitdepth in the shadows. Then you could set the 'white point' (1.0) in REDCINE and have all those 'overbrights' to play with in the composite.

So I vote for 12-bit compressed RAW :-)

Bar3nd

[Anders Holck]

Remember that we are talking 10-bit log. compared to 12-bit lin.
I seem to remember that 10-bit log is actually closer to 16-bit lin. in fidelity, so the difference should be minimal.

[Graeme_Nattress]

10bit log can cope with 12 bit lin with minimal "critica" loss.

Graeme

[Barend Onneweer]

Yes, and I do trust Graeme on guarding the image fidelity. I carefully used the words "in theory" in my previous post.

Bar3nd

[omen]

Graeme, what workflow would you recommend to avoid using n-amount raids ?

If using MacPro 3Ghz with internal dual-drive raid,
what would be the optimal codec in your opinion
(picture quality and production speed kept in mind)
if the material is not cinema oriented ?

[Graeme_Nattress]

Hard to tell until we're fully finished REDCODE. I don't want to give you information that's not accurate.

Graeme

[John Allardice]

Graeme,
any current plans for a separate 64-bit version of the software, ( I assume the rendering woulfd be faster)

[Graeme_Nattress]

64bit? Main advantge of 64bit code is ability to address vast amounts of memory, and although 4k files are big, they're not that big. Speed is an issue for 64 bit, but again, if processor extensions are used for accelleration or the GPU, where does 64bit help? Again not much. It's nice to say 64bit will make things better, but really, the differences can be marginal or non-existant depending on what kind of code you're running and what you're doing. So, we'll look to see if making the code 64bit is in any way advantageous - the problem being that legacy code (for instance, most of quicktime) is not 64bit.

Graeme