FS7: FS7 RAW woes & data distribution between: 12-bit RAW, 16-bit RAW, & 10-bit S-Log

yoclay said:
Hey Sam,
Nice to hear from you.
Not trying to discount what you have said, but I can assure you that after having graded a ton of RED footage over the years, what you see in that video is pretty much endemic of the problem which I see all the time with skin tones and RED color science. No LUT or look will yield the kind of dimensionality which is necessary for that face. The color information just will not reveal the blush in the cheeks for instance without the rest of the face moving along with any color correction you make. I constantly have to go into secondaries to do "facial reconstruction" as a result. Only the skin tone OLPF on Dragon has made a difference in this regard. So they are aware of the problem. The issue is ironically in the color science around the red layer and their choice of using a smaller pixel array. So it is partially software, and partially hardware. I truly feel that this is why the Alexa has done so well. They got the color science down when it comes to faces as well as using larger pixels for increased color sensitivity, and let's "face" it, 90% of films out there deal with human subjects. For me RED remains a great camera for other subjects, but not so much in this area of content. I even see the same problem in Gone Girl for instance. The faces just lack the kind of nuance and dimensionality that they would have had if they had shot Alexa.
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I agree. I've also worked with a ton of RED footage over the years and skin tone is often very odd. It can look plastic or wooden and there is an odd tonality to it that ranges from an odd pink to yellowish highlights. I also noticed it in Gone Girl. I don't know if they noise reduced the living daylights out of it or if it's just how the makeup reacts with the RED color science, but everyone had very plastic skin, Pike in particular.

So, there is something very odd going on with the RED color science in the red spectrum. Dragon improved on it, but something is not right.

It also doesn't help that RED can only output lossy compressed. So, you're always dealing with compromised tonality right from the get go, which just exaggerates any issues that already exist.
 
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Ben Scott said:
Maybe you need to work with better Red shooters then? I have never once had this when crafting a scene on MX.

The biggest problem I find with Red, and it is true for the FS7 as well, is that they are used on a ton of low to zero budget works, and often with limited and nasty green spiking cheap LEDs and often by people who don't know their camera or their craft yet. And because t goes online it becomes used as evidence of the shortcomings of a camera.


If you can't get lovely tones out of a Red then you are doing cameranating wrong or there is another external limiting factor.

I will see what I have by way of example R3Ds to post later, from a lowly Scarlet MX.


The skintone olpf thing was definitely a bit of a balls up by Red when changing stuff for the Dragon but just like ketchup being too thick to get out of the bottle, they have managed to spin it into a chief selling point with interchangeable ones including dedicated underwater ones now.
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I work on the high end of post production and see the problem even on big budget shows shot by well known DoP. So, it's not operator error. Red is not known for having good skin tones. Sometimes it looks great, sometimes it looks questionable. But it's not consistent and it doesn't look as good as what you get out of an Alexa. My biggest problem with skin on Sony cameras is that they do not lock saturation at .40 like Arri does, but that can be fixed in post. But at least Sony skin tones are clean, neutral and mostly accurate.

Needing to juggle multiple OLPF to get one thing or another right should be enough of an indicator that something is not right in the basic design that is being band-aided over.

And please, let's not drag out the old 'But [director X] shoots RED!' argument. I can tell you from personal experience that these are incredibly talented people, but that doesn't mean they walk on water.
 
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Arri definitely has 'out of the box' the most pleasing skin tones out there.

But there are thousands of pages on here with people complaining about Sony and their colour science and what it does to people.


It doesn't matter how high end you are or well known you are, if you're not doing it right you're not doing it right. There's a ton of people in between acquisition and delivery that are capable of screwing up the image. I have plenty of awful Arri footage and plenty of awful Red footage.


But this conversation was about Sony Raw and Red raw.
 
Ben Scott said:
Arri definitely has 'out of the box' the most pleasing skin tones out there.

But there are thousands of pages on here with people complaining about Sony and their colour science and what it does to people.


It doesn't matter how high end you are or well known you are, if you're not doing it right you're not doing it right. There's a ton of people in between acquisition and delivery that are capable of screwing up the image. I have plenty of awful Arri footage and plenty of awful Red footage.


But this conversation was about Sony Raw and Red raw.
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Well, maybe the next time you run into Cronenweth or any of the other big names you can impart some of your wisdom on them and explain to them what they are doing wrong. I'm sure they will greatly appreciate it.
 
hahahaha

I posted on here and on the Sony forums back in January about these issues. It's only now gaining a bit of traction. They have known about this since day 1.
 
"Nevertheless, when I overexposed and used 4K normal speed, I found that in my clip I could still achieve the typical “RAW look”, a clean and organic feel in the footage that I could easily manipulate color-wise."

Maybe should read.

"When I accepted the trade off of more colour depth and flex is less ISO and DR, re-exposed correctly, using a new methodoloy appropriate to the medium.. I was very happy"
 
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morgan_moore said:
"Nevertheless, when I overexposed and used 4K normal speed, I found that in my clip I could still achieve the typical “RAW look”, a clean and organic feel in the footage that I could easily manipulate color-wise."

Maybe should read.

"When I accepted the trade off of more colour depth and flex is less ISO and DR, re-exposed correctly, using a new methodoloy appropriate to the medium.. I was very happy"
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Not really, the camera is marketed as 14 stop and the user should expect 12 bit RAW with 14 stops. If Sony marketed the camera extension unit as 12 stop 10 bit RAW output then it's a different kettle of fish and I'd expect the numbers of takers to be significantly less and at least those that did buy would walk in with eyes open.
 
Well, it probably does 12,000 ISO in STGamma mode (ive got no idea!), most likely unusable so I would never expect the specification on the box to match the reality.

I know Im not making friends by waffling on, but Seb (C5d) has again piled into a shoot (afaik) without actually trying the camera at a few different Fstops/lighting ratios

He then goes back 'over exposes' it and gets a 'typical raw look'. Well that isnt over exposed is it? - it is a correct exposure.

Maybe that exposure doesn't match a light meter or what the camera says on the box (or the ODY or onboard scopes?) or what Tstop you would use in Slog.. but it does deliver 'typical raw look, clean and orgain that I could easily manipulate'.. which is surely what we are all after.

*edit - I remember having a long chat with AC at his F5 workshop about shooting raw (some years ago) It was not clear at all the methodology required to ETTR, I think I walked away thinking that the camera needed to be set on EI 500

S
 
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starcentral said:
Now what did I do? :shocked:
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Well, the more people talk about stuff like this, the quicker it gets to the source (in this case, Sony). I am generally pro-business but people are people and, if if the particular setup finds it lucrative to cut corners, then many are tempted to do so. It happens in every industry too - from the MPG to HP to pretty much everything else.

PS. Sony Raw can probably be adjusted by the native camera software/signal processing. Presuming it has enough head room in its internal GPU, they should be able to redo the curve and the compression to make the final image more palatable in the higher dynamic range situations.
 
I'd really like to give Sony the benefit of the doubt on this.

What we really need here is for others to also do some tests and confirm their findings on this. Not to doubt Ben's experience, but it'd be nice to hear what others have experienced to this regard as well.

I haven't been able to personally test out the FS7 RAW with Odyssey so I'm just writing about stuff I actually haven't tested. It's really quite speculative on my part. I've seen a lot of online videos shot using the FS7 RAW without banding, etc.. so I'm only left with more questions to ask.

Anyone with this combo want to shoot a step chart and do some bracketed exposure as suggested by Sam previously? It'd be a great test.
 
Without commenting to much on this, I would caution upon laying blame to nefarious acts of profiteering and corner-cutting. I can tell you only so much as to how certain things happen, but I can state that this is not the way things went down here. Sony wants to make the best products it can, just like Canon, Panasonic and every other manufacturer.

I can also state that the history on this goes back a long time and it is far more complicated than any of you would know. Let's all hope that progress moves forward as it should. Everyone wants that, including Sony.
 
Mitch Gross said:
Without commenting to much on this, I would caution upon laying blame to nefarious acts of profiteering and corner-cutting...
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Did I conjure up the Volkswagen comparisons? If I did, it'd be only in a very general sense that not every product lives up to its specs. And that can be said about a lot of products ... or there'd be no need for the bug fixes. Or recalls. Or warranties. Ever.

As to why Sony chose this particular solution on this particular model, I only have guesses based on my business/marketing experience - the human factor, if you will - rather than on electronic engineering. Something went awry in an area where no complications were expected and, while this can be a user error, that user just happens to be a customer and that customer is always right. In response, Sony has to either issue some sort of a guide on how to alleviate this problem, i.e., how to shoot Raw, or, if a mere on-camera tinkering proves fruitless, adjust some parameters that will please those who bought the product but have been left less than content.

starcentral said:
This was just pointed out to me by someone on Facebook, Cinema5D made an astonishing discovery on this very same issue and also ran some tests and posted a video with some charts:

https://www.cinema5d.com/sony-fs7-raw-issues-found/
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Previous page?
 
Mitch Gross said:
Without commenting to much on this, I would caution upon laying blame to nefarious acts of profiteering and corner-cutting. I can tell you only so much as to how certain things happen, but I can state that this is not the way things went down here. Sony wants to make the best products it can, just like Canon, Panasonic and every other manufacturer.

I can also state that the history on this goes back a long time and it is far more complicated than any of you would know. Let's all hope that progress moves forward as it should. Everyone wants that, including Sony.
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It may not be corner cutting nor profiteering but it is most certainly market segmentation. If Sony wanted to offer a RAW upgrade for the FS7 then why is it not 16bit RAW like the F5? As the thread has highlighted 12 bit RAW simply isn't up to snuff and designed to make off board recording of limited quality. The Sony engineers knew exactly what they were doing when they didn't provide 16 bit RAW on the FS7 and I suspect they thought noise in the blacks would dither any banding and no one would be the wiser.
 
The idea that this is suddenly coming to light now is laughable.

The idea that Sony hadn't fully tested their camera before releasing it is laughable.

Mitch, you and I were discussing the glaring issues of Sony's raw implementation back at the start of this year.

If Sony wanted to make the best cameras it can it would have gotten input from working DPs on its camera menu system and it wouldn't still have a bug 1 year after release - one that was piciked up on in the first month of the camer'a release - that randomly sets the shutter to 300deg when you change another setting.
 
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