Enter the Dragon - 20-Stops of Dynamic-Range

Oh no scarlet owners... the tech looks beautiful but I giggled at 'this pretty much closes the door to any scarlet owner to go dragon'. Happy new year everyone.
 
How many of the stops can be effectively used is anyone's guess - from the picture though, I'd say 16, or 17 stops.
 
Last edited:
After reading a dozen pages, not one person had commented on the noise beginning at 13 stops, which is pretty severe. I would have mentioned it, but it gets like Lord of the Flies over there once the drums start banging.
 
Just remarkable. It'll be very interesting to see how much of that range is indeed usable, but wow, what an exciting time it is for cameras. That level of dynamic range opens up imaging possibilities that have never existed before.
 
Looks like quite a few Scarlets will be hitting the used market after the trade-in program kicks in.
 
mail4joeg said:
After reading a dozen pages, not one person had commented on the noise beginning at 13 stops, which is pretty severe. I would have mentioned it, but it gets like Lord of the Flies over there once the drums start banging.
Click to expand...

Yeah, gets a little wacky: "Every nerve in my body is tingling like random blinking Christmas lights. "
 
It's not 20, it's 18. You don't count the first or last stop since they are absolute white and absolute black. Still, 18 stops should be enough:)
 
It's not 18 either until things are finalized and someone other than RED gets their hands on the camera. Regardless, fifteen to sixteen usable (which is likely where they land) is still impressive.

Hopefully they have another version of their Color Science to go with it, and have considered applying effort to more pleasant highlight roll off.
 
mail4joeg said:
After reading a dozen pages, not one person had commented on the noise beginning at 13 stops, which is pretty severe. I would have mentioned it, but it gets like Lord of the Flies over there once the drums start banging.
Click to expand...

You must have skipped the part about: "Don't look at image quality here... this is a dirty debayer with no black calibration, no offset correction and no processing on a special 21 stop DR Chart from DSC."
 
Chris Adler said:
You must have skipped the part about: "Don't look at image quality here... this is a dirty debayer with no black calibration, no offset correction and no processing on a special 21 stop DR Chart from DSC."
Click to expand...
I missed that bit. That would make it 19 stops. Amazing. Truly amazing.
 
18 stops according Jannard, that would translate to anywhere between 15-18 in reality, I'm just hoping for a high latitude in highlights :)
 
Stranden said:
I'm just hoping for a high latitude in highlights
Click to expand...

No sensor will give you good highlights. All respond to light linearly. All clip hard.

You must make for good highlight handling, when you shoot. Expose darker than you normally would, so that in post you have room to apply a curve to the highlights.

Unless your on-set monitor has a curve like that, it will look like you are way underexposing, but that's the solution for digital video, for all sensors.
 
This is a truly incredible feat! For me, the dynamic range goal is to be able to see the black text on a light bulb while the surrounding room looks normal more like how the eyes see. Right now my T2i simply cannot come even remotely close. If I expose for the text the room become black. If I expose for the room the bulb blooms and the text no longer exists. This dynamic range opens up a range similar to the human eye and will give you so much leeway in exposing and especially in natural lighting situations. However the upgrade cost I bet is going to be ridiculously high. It was $6,000 before. My guess is now it'll be $10,000 if not higher. So, we're looking at at least $31,000 before recording media, etc. I wish I could spend that kind of money on the camera, but I don't see it happening anytime soon. So, I will stick to my goal to go for the Black Magic Cinema Camera instead.
 
combatentropy said:
No sensor will give you good highlights. All respond to light linearly. All clip hard.

You must make for good highlight handling, when you shoot. Expose darker than you normally would, so that in post you have room to apply a curve to the highlights.

Unless your on-set monitor has a curve like that, it will look like you are way underexposing, but that's the solution for digital video, for all sensors.
Click to expand...

I was just hoping for it to hold more detail in the highlights, not for a smooth highlight roll off, without being an engineer or sensor expert for that matter I have a decent understanding of some cameras holding a great amount of information in the highlight for instance the shy indie guy, from Blackmagic(BMC). I understand that it often is to either expose for the highlights or shadows, and I hope to expose for the shadows. If I wanted "good" highlights I guess I'd have to shoot on super 16, nothing beats the warm bleeding that happens in the film highlights, lol.. :)
 
Yea I was going batty with all the n00b FB posts and Twitter posts last night about "usable 20-21 stops of DR ahh!" Calm down folks. It's awesome. The fact a sensor even sees that much without all the processing, black calibration, color science, etc. is amazing...but I hate it when folks don't read, don't think, and post threads with titles like this one.

I'm not crapping on RED here either, so nobody come and burn me alive. I really look forward to seeing some images from this thing with all the factors properly in place, and the pricing. Until then, lets not go around building more and more false hype that RED doesn't need. Sometimes it's the die hard legit fans and owners who make them look bad, sometimes they make themselves look bad, but all these posts with false information don't help and a lot of them are coming from folks who obviously just opened the thread, saw the image, and took that as gospel. Cut it out...

Jannard is confident 18 is a conservative take on the image, but I'll believe it when I see it. I'm one of those guys who thinks Epic's supposed 13.5 is bogus when you consider the noise. Even a SUPER SOLID 16 would be incredible. Time will tell...

Great job RED, can't wait to see further testing :)
 
I'm surprised there's not more noise from Scarlet owners. Seems like every thread (on this forum at least) from a user debating a Scarlet purchase makes the case for Dragon being a big selling point of Scarlet. Even if RED where to give a credit equal to the full Scarlet price on a trade it towards Dragon, that's still looking like a $20k+ upgrade.
 
Red announced that there will be a Scarlet Trade-in program for Dragon, then there will also be some Scarlet "Battle Tested" (used) units hitting the market soon after. If the Red One's (Used) were $4,000, can you imagine the Scarlets? Probably $999 (Pure Speculation). LOL
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top