A remarkable post on ProVideoCoalition about the fact that the Red camera people forgot that their cameras also shoot HDR video! Unbelievable.
A few days earlier a couple of guys had posted footage they made/shot/converted into HDR footage and it was interesting but it suffered from that hyper real look that puts me off of still photo HDR images. It’s just too much. But the Red footage is different. It just seems to have a lot of latitude. A lot. In fact the article claims they can get 18 stops of exposure. Wow.
Now it’s true that the Red One camera can not shoot this way. They used the Epic to shoot the footage, a camera which happens to shoot in 5K size. That’s about 30 times the size of a miniDV format image so it’s a significant jump in resolution, don’t you think.
The image is also flat (low contrast) which says a lot about their intent. This isn’t footage that’s intended to be show, but graded (processed for color correction) and shaped. This is a post-production format which is a perfect example of what I’ve been saying we’re all going to be doing – shooting in a really high resolution format (at least 4K), post-producing in that format or one slightly smaller, then compressing it down to a much smaller format size for distribution using lots of different formats for different distribution uses.
Notice this is a dialogue between the Red people and the Alexa people, with a glance over at the HDSLR group. (Canon just announced their radically large CMOS sensor and God knows what that means.) Everyone really seems to like the Alexa and we need to include it in the future watch process as Arri develops it more (even though it’s price point is way too high for us).
So in the end it’s not about HDR, it’s about a hugely extended exposure range that far exceeds the abilities of film in a file format that we’re slowly getting close to accommodating (faster machines and larger faster drives). You can see how the process builds, how the thinking unfolds and we all start agreeing on the production pipeline. You can still buy in at different price points, which modifies your particular version of reality, but we’re really discovering the future of media unfold in a continuing discussion. Cool.
And tape? What tape?http://www.red.com/
