The Red Epic and why being tiny is cool

I’m a big fan of big cameras. A large camera has a certain look when handheld. The picture looks like a picture from a big camera. The same is true for Steadicam. I used to do a lot of Steadicam operating and there was definitely a sweet spot for weight. Too light and the camera and steadicam get thrown around by even a light breeze. Too heavy and your back will be aching all weekend.

The modularity of the Epic allows the camera to be stripped down to almost nothing. For my HDRx test at S&O Media last week I took off almost every accessory apart from the camera’s side handle. This allowed the camera to be used as an in-car minicam; amazing for a camera you can legitimately shoot a feature film on! All it took was a simple suction pad and magic arm and the camera was secure enough to shoot a little test on. 

 The 5K EPIC, so small you can stick it on a dashboard

 The other week I shot a little commercial job on the Epic where I had the excellent Jonathan Iles operating for me. Jonathan has a top of the line GPI Pro 2 Steadicam and got some lovely shots for us. He said of the Epic: “The camera is the ideal weight. Not too big, not too small.” Jonathan and his assistant Jason Iqbal broke down the camera slightly by removing the 19mm baseplate. They then added the focus and iris motors needed for Steadicam as well as a Wevi video transmitter, all attached to the camera’s top mounts. Jonathan barely broke a sweat and was in his vest almost all day. This same setup but with the original Red One would have been a back breaker, believe me!

The original 'full fat' RED

One important thing to note about the Epic on the Steadicam is its HDSDI output currently only supports 24p. Do make sure your monitor and transmitter kits are capable of the pure progressive p signal rather than psf. This, Red assures, will be added in future camera updates.

The Red Epic and HDRx Part 2

So HDRx as I wrote in my last entry is one of the key selling points of the new Red Epic. Last week I spent the morning at S+O Media to have a quick play with the camera’s High Dynamic Range function. I thought a good and simple test for the Epic’s HDRx would be an unlit in-car shot. We grabbed one of the very nice Optimo 16-42 short zooms that S+O Media has and one of their car kits, and popped it in the front of my VW Transporter van. 

I’ve uploaded three videos and I’m sure you’ll immediately notice my poor grade on them; I’m not the most experienced colourist. And yes that’s me in the video. Don't panic if you can't hear me, there's no audio. The videos are just examples of pictures. But just so you know...I wasn't talking to myself!

First up, below, is the standard footage with no HDRx. I’ve processed the footage in RedCine at 250ISO; there is a little more highlight recovery you could do on this footage, maybe half a stop extra. There is pretty wide latitude in the picture without HDRx, although as I’ve set the camera to such a low sensitivity there is a serious clip in the highlights. If I were shooting this without HDRx I’d likely rate the camera at 800 or 1600 and bring up the dark areas of the picture, protecting the highlights. Setting the camera to 1600iso and then processing the footage as such, would have given another three stops in the highlights that could have been rolled off in the grade. But this test isn’t about that. The lens was set at T8 and at 16mm, you’ll notice how wide the 16mm is on the Epic, it becomes a real wide-angle lens. The camera was set to 1/50^th of a second shutter. 

 Red Epic 250iso No HDRx from Benedict Spence on Vimeo.

 The second video, below, is a blend of 50/50 A-Track (50^th of a second shutter) and X-Track (the HDRx Track). We set the camera to give four stops protection; so the HDRx frames are taken at 1/800^th of a second, or 11.5 degree shutter for you to film people. Immediately you can notice the strobing of the HDRx track. This is especially noticeable because of the speed of the car and for me it’s the least attractive feature of HDRx. However, on slower moving subjects it is far less noticeable and many people have commented on how much they like the combined regular and high shutter frames. Currently in Redcine-X there is a simple HDR slider, from 100% A-Track to 100% X-Track and anywhere in between. The Foundry who are very well known video software engineers are apparently working closely with Red to develop More Normal Motion Blur (MNMB). MNMB will blend the HDRx frame with the standard frame to produce, as the name suggests, a more normal looking image blur. With HDRx enabled, and even with my poor grade, you can see the extra highlight detail. Look at the white vans that go past.

Red Epic 50/50 HDRx Blend from Benedict Spence on Vimeo.

The third video is a combination of a split of two other videos. Firstly the original non-HDRx video, then secondly a video made from 66% HDRx and 33% normal footage. You can really see the difference on this video; look at the shop signs and clouds. The extra grading on the HDRx footage feels very different to the standard Red footage. The wide latitude means a very low contrast picture from the start - it’s definitely something I need a bit more practice with.

Red Epic HDRx/No HDRx split screen from Benedict Spence on Vimeo.

Finally the forth video, just for your benefit, is the HDRx track. It’s four stops underexposed from the original A-Track and brought up to 1600ISO, It’s pretty much noise free on the original ProRes transcode too. This is to show you what is possible if you were to expose like this in the first place, although the shot is still a stop underexposed after this processing.

Red Epic 1600iso from HDRx from Benedict Spence on Vimeo.

The conclusion here is that HDRx is a very powerful tool. While it’s not perfect and in its current state some won’t want the shutter effects that are created by it, like everything with the Epic it’s a work in progress. There will be all sorts of tricks over the next few months to make it work perfectly. I’m sure there are ways for an experienced colourist to work with the footage to make it really sing; I’m looking forward to seeing what people come out with as much as I’m looking forward to using the function myself. My feeling is that getting in on the ground floor and understanding how the technology does and doesn’t work, is essential for using it to it fullest extent.

For the time being please enjoy the fact that we shot a video, completely unlit, from the inside of a moving car. If that wasn’t enough, the camera managed to keep hold of both the interior and the exterior without a problem. And this was with the camera set to four stops protection… It goes to six!

Benedict Spence has been working as a lighting cameraman for nine years and a director of photography for the past three. Ben will be dishing the dirt on his experiences with Red’s new Epic–M, on behalf of broadcast and crewing facilities company S+O Media.

The Red Epic and HDRx Part 1

One of the most exciting features of the new Red Epic is the HDRx function. High Dynamic Range shooting has been around in the stills world for a while. Generally it’s used for landscape shots, where a number of exposures are combined into a single frame. The end result is often quite surreal depending on how the image has been processed. On the Epic the HDRx function is not designed to give the same extreme HDR look as with stills, but more as additional highlight protection. For this two-part blog I went into S+O Media to play with the HDRx function of the Epic - I’ll be posting the results of that test next week, but for the time being here’s how it works.

For every frame the camera records, it immediately takes a second at a higher shutter speed. Both frames are recorded separately but contained within the same file. The normally exposed frame, or A-track, can then be combined with the underexposed X-track. For example, you might shoot a scene at 1/50^th of a second shutter or 180 degrees for you film people. If you then wanted to dial in three stops of highlight protection, the X-Track would be running with 400^th of a second, or 22.5 degree shutter. You can dial in up to six stops of highlight protection using HDRx, with the camera's natural latitude quoted as being 13.5 stops, the six additional stops should give you an incredible 19.5 stops of latitude.

The Arri Alexa does a slightly similar trick but built into the chip. Its Dual Gain Architecture means that the Alexa chip contains both high and low sensitivity pixels, allowing it’s high latitude.

Currently there’s a very simple system within RedCine-X, which is the free one-light grading software that Red supply. A slider controls the blend from the A-Track to the X-Track; you can dial in the amount of X-Track you want to include.

I personally don’t expect the camera to be used in HDRx mode all the time, and there are shutter artefacts which come from the use of HDRx, especially the stronger flavours. But in situations where you don’t have total control of the scene, or where you want the option of holding detail in difficult to control highlights, it’s an amazing tool and one that’s only just starting to be used. Burned out clouds in the background of your scene? Not any more! Switch on HDRx and you can dial in the whiteness.

My next blog will include a video example of HDRx on the Red Epic; where we put it to the ultimate test... A car interior shot with no lighting!

Benedict Spence has been working as a lighting cameraman for nine years and a director of photography for the past three. Ben will be dishing the dirt on his experiences with Red’s new Epic–M, on behalf of broadcast and crewing facilities company S+O Media.

The Red Epic: lens coverage and FOV.

As well as having a 5K sensor, the Epic also has a slightly-larger-than-S35-sensor. It’s something which you need to be careful with when selecting your lenses for a shoot, not only to make sure they cover the full 5K sensor, but also that they’re giving you the field of view you expect.

Generally the larger the sensor a camera has, the larger the field of vision is for the selected focal length. For example on a 2/3” broadcast camera, a medium sized chip, a 25mm lens is a fairly long lens. For a Canon 5D with its full frame sensor, a 25mm is a wide angle. However, if you’re used to working with the Alexa or Red Ones then be warned that your 18mm lens will give you the field of vision closer to a 16mm lens. At the longer end the same is true; a 100mm lens on an Epic will feel more akin to an 85mm lens. It’s worth noting that the depth of field will feel different too as the Epic’s larger sensor gives the camera a slightly shallower focus for any given lens.

The flip side to this is that not all Cine lenses are designed to cover a sensor as large as the Epic’s. Some lenses will vignette at various stops and focal lengths, some will vignette heavily, some lightly. I’ve been testing various lenses with the Red Epic at S+O Media recently and S+O’s Ultra Primes seem to work fine, as do CP2’s and Red Pro Primes. The Optimo DP 16-42 has a very slight soft vignette and one of my favourite lenses, the Cooke 20-100, doesn’t work at 5k on the Epic. I’d expect the Arri Master Primes to work without issue on the Epic.

Luckily Red have already thought about this problem; if you get stuck with a set of lenses which give you issues you can switch the camera to 4K mode. This crops the area the sensor records so it matches the original Red One.

The point here is to make sure that you always test the camera with your favourite lenses before you turn up on a shoot. This is true for any piece of kit. I’ve heard rumours about Cooke S4’s, having trouble on the Epic, especially at wider focal lengths. I’ll be trying to do a test with them in the coming weeks so stay tuned.

Benedict Spence has been working as a lighting cameraman for nine years and a director of photography for the past three. Ben will be dishing the dirt on his experiences with Red’s new Epic–M, on behalf of broadcast and crewing facilities company S+O Media.

The Red Epic and exposing for RAW

I was lucky enough to work on a little commercial recently. I’m not allowed to name the client, but it was great fun. It was a studio shoot and we had the amazing Red Epic to work with. This was my first job with the Epic, I’d been playing with the camera at S+O Media for a couple of days and I made sure that I knew the capabilities of the current build and menus before I got onto set. I was incredibly happy with how the camera performed.

The look the camera produces is very similar to that of the original Red One; just that little bit cleaner and much “nicer!”. The camera responds to light in a very similar way and anyone who is comfortable with the Red One will feel at home with the Epic. This is however, quite different from most other video cameras.

One of the biggest selling points of Red’s line of cameras is also where the biggest confusion lies; shooting RAW. On a normal video camera the light will enter the lens, go through all sorts of processing to correct white balance, sensitivity and gamma curves and then be burned onto the camera’s tape or memory. The Epic works a little differently. The information comes straight from the camera’s sensor and is recorded onto the cameras digital magazine. The processing is then applied only to the monitoring outputs of the camera. The beauty of this is that the footage from the camera has huge scope for grading, things like white balance and curves can be changed once in the grade and anything you apply in camera on-set is done in a non-destructive way. Any settings you change on camera, white balance, sensitivity, contrast, saturation etc are saved as metadata attached to the video file. When you open the camera files ready for the grade, they will appear with this look applied, again this is only done in a non-destructive way so you can go back to the RAW at any point.

Even simple things like exposure are affected by RAW. For example the sensitivity of the Epic is often given as 800ISO, the same as the Arri Alexa. The truth is that the camera is somewhere between 200ISO and 1600ISO, depending on how you want the camera to behave. If you rate the camera at 200ISO you will need to feed it with a lot of light, you’ll find skin tones look glowing and beautiful but that your highlights clip sooner, as you have far less headroom. If you rate the camera at 1600ISO you’ll have a noisier picture overall but you’ll be protecting your highlights from clipping, allowing a film-like curve to be applied in post to roll off those white clouds or bright lamps in your shot. It’s very similar to pushing a film negative. If you rate the camera at 1600 you’ll be pushing the exposure of the image by around three stops. It’s testament to the camera that you can do that without it having a detrimental effect. It may not seem like common sense, but on a bright day exterior rating the camera at 1600ISO might be the way to go.

As a general rule of thumb if I’m shooting on location with a Red One I’ll rate the camera at 800ISO, but in the studio I like to rate the camera at around 200ISO. After shooting a couple of little tests on the morning of my recent shoot I rated the Epic in exactly the same way. Shooting in the studio means a controlled environment and the more light you can plough into the sensor the cleaner the final image will look, giving lovely high-key skin tones. Shooting 800ISO on location is simply a trade off on noise versus highlight protection. Like any camera the higher the sensitivity the higher the noise, but on the Epic a higher sensitivity more importantly means better highlight protection. However, shooting 200ISO you have to be very careful about the dreaded digital clip. A step towards the light and our beautiful model will suddenly develop a very pale complexion.

It might not be the most complicated of theories but it’s an important one none the less! I’ll be at S+O Media next week testing HDRx mode. I’ll post my findings here along with some stills and videos.

Benedict Spence has been working as a lighting cameraman for nine years and a director of photography for the past three. Ben’s dishing the dirt on his experiences with Red’s new Epic–M, on behalf of broadcast and crewing facilities company S+O Media.