Andrew Reid

Yes massive difference between 24fps and 23fps. In a patent you have to draw the line and define what standards it applies to. RED is saying that 23fps would be a burst mode for stills cameras but 24fps is a cinema standard. Do you really expect a patent lawyer to not bother with details like that?! "Ah 23, 24 all the same to me!"

I did indeed. The stills/cine separation thing was a bit of a damp squib though. It only allows you to separate exposure controls, not more exotic things like crop factor. Thankfully the crop feature can be assigned to left and right on the d-pad so it is very quick to set. That RED motion mount I showed you, I wonder how possible it would be to adapt it to L-mount, with a little control box for the ND? Probably not easy but probably not impossible either 🙂

The filter stack includes an IR cut which has a huge impact on colour balance. Some sensors let in more infrared light than others. Big effect on skin tones. So it is not just the colour filter array, but other attributes of the sensor design that have an impact on colour in RAW files. Dynamic range and noise do not leave colour balance or tonality alone, it all shifts. What about colour in highlights close to the clipping point? That differs greatly between chips, with different pixel size and dynamic range. And same thing deep in the shadows. Also saturation and contrast go hand in hand. It's hard to take one aspect like colour alone, isolated from other facts. From my own eyes I know for a fact that sensors have a different look to colour in RAW and grade differently, not all RAW files have the same tonality or colour depth. Tough to even match a CCD to CMOS let alone an Alexa and a RAW file from an A7S II.

Really weird. I had to restart the camera and put an L-mount lens on it before it started working. Now it is actually selecting 1/50 rather than 1/60, with the Sigma lens as well as with a manual focus Leica M adapter aka Billy No Lens.

1/40 I can get as well. Did you try 1/50?

Here is that well know low light test - Hanging basket in the dark, pioneered by Steve Yedbasket. I encourage you to open that one up and have a look at the grain, as it is quite nice for ISO 6400 from a 9.5K sensor in the dark with no crop. As long as you don't try pushing it in post by 3 stops that is! There is another very good test of RAW video and that is the famous bunny test sequence invented by Roger Sadknockers. I think you can all agree these shots are giving Mr Undone a real run for his money.

Yeah sensors have their own look in the RAW data. The filter stack has an effect. The CFA and pixel design makes a difference to colour as do better know traits like signal to noise ratio and dynamic range. I shot Digital Bolex and 5D Mark III at same time once, same uncompressed RAW output in 1080p at same frame rate. They looked totally different in terms of colour! And you do have to process RAW eventually, and not all cameras will handle similarly in post. 5D Mark III 3.5K RAW is a real step up from the 1080p and I encourage everyone to give it a go. It's amazing.

Nah on the Fp-L there is a specific minimum shutter speed in the Auto ISO menu you can select. So I selected 1/50 and it insists on 1/60, probably for NTSC countries. We could could with a PAL mode for stills!

He looks perfectly sane to me.

You said between 24fps and 9fps. 24p is cinema, and 9fps is a stills burst mode so yes there is a big difference.

That's the problem with LOG. It always has a look baked in and it takes serious effort to get the best out of it and tailoring to a particularly scene. Whereas with RAW it is so much easier to get it looking cinematic. Magic Lantern RAW on the 5D Mark III in 3.5K still ranks above 95% of the camera market in terms of just image quality. Will do a test later in low light and see if the Fp-L holds up at high ISOs because it is a 9.5K sensor. The most data at 24fps it can do is 7K crop at 30ms rolling shutter, but the pixel binned 4K from full frame 9.5K has held up really well so far, it doesn't really have any moire or aliasing and dynamic range is fully intact.

Native LOG gamut, I can get it looking a lot better but wanted to a quick and dirty look at the files with minimum of corrections. The DNG RAW just comes out lovely with no effort. Also I feel it has that "digs deep in the shadows" look that cinema cameras have whereas F-LOG and OM-LOG look like animated GIFs in the shadows, and too much in way of crushed blacks.

They did 2.5K before that on the Cinema Camera. It was when they introduced 3:1 compression in Cinema DNG that RED sued. Nothing to stop them doing 2K Cinema DNG uncompressed. It is quite a nice format and file sizes not too bad at that res. Sigma Fp does cinema DNG today. Blackmagic's response was to rip it out entirely, because they had the ulterior motive to sell us BRAW. Where are all the 5:1 compressed RAW codecs then if the patent doesn't apply to those? Yes It's not RAW though. It is debayered with white balance baked in. I don't think one or two cameras count as numerous? Not even Sony F35 had RAW and that was a huge oversight by Japan. I don't think it has hurt Blackmagic. It spurred them into doing their own RAW codec for a start. Plus Blackmagic cameras sell just fine and Resolve is really flying. Blackmagic make a lot of their money from broadcast as well, where RAW recording isn't really sought after. Neither of them ever had to worry about RED! Digital Bolex was always against any compression of any kind. They weren't even interested in doing 4K. AJA Cion was a lovely idea but ultimately didn't sell. Not because of the lack of REDCODE but because of other reasons. My camera company doesn't exist and I squarely blame a rich sunglasses salesman for that.

They did didn't they? They patented the whole thing. The entire video camera system with RAW recording.

Let's shoot some quick a dirty dynamic range tests Here's mine, on the balcony First is Sigma Fp-L in 8bit Cinema DNG RAW Second is OM System OM-1 in 10bit LOG 4K: A clear win for the Sigma Fp-L You will need a bigger effort to get the best out of the OM-LOG The Fp-L RAW seems to have that creamy RED EPIC / ALEXA look to me straight out of the can And it doesn't sacrifice a boat load of colour to achieve such a wide DR. This was in full frame mode to SD card. I am sure the external 10bit and 12bit is even better in the highlights.

It could be used at 1/50 with NDs for stills. That makes it pretty bullet proof as far as banding goes in 50hz PAL countries. They haven't got a flicker reduction mode in the menus though. It is a bit of an oversight. Camera always seems to select 1/60 indoors for me, even though I set the minimum Auto ISO shutter speed at 1/50!

Thanks. Probably doesn't help them much as this compression is designed for still images, rather than 24fps cinema. Yet it remains their best hope, that RED have infringed a Nikon patent, and then they can do a swap. Anyone know what date the trial is set for?

So RED patent was 2 days earlier than Silicon Imaging's and the work on REDCODE started in December 2005. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9245314B2 Covered on EOSHD previously during the Apple vs RED suit. https://www.eoshd.com/news/red-respond-to-apple-in-patent-raw-wars/ Apple tried to argue it was not novel and an obvious to combine the Presler patent with other work. The court decided otherwise. We are not patent lawyers so I can't say the court got it wrong. That bit is outside my understanding. From Graeme Nattress during the Apple trial: “I first met Mr Jim Jannard in December 2005. At that meeting, we discussed his desire to create the first ever digital motion picture camera that could record compressed digital motion video at cinema quality levels, including 4K. I was intrigued by the possibilities, because combining the ease and flexibility of post-production of digital video while maintaining cinema-quality frame rate and resolution would be a game-changer in the world of movie making. But I also knew that digital compression was highly disfavored in the movie camera industry… “To solve this problem, one key area I researched was the use of an image sensor with a Bayer-pattern filter. This was one of several unconventional avenues we explored at RED. At the time, such sensors were associated with lower-quality consumer-grade video cameras and derided as incapable of providing cinema-quality video due to artefact and resolution issues. In contrast, the industry consensus held that cinema quality cameras would need to utilize three sensors, with a prism to split red, green and blue light to each sensor. However, we believed that the benefits of a Bayer-pattern image sensor could be optimized if the image data remained in raw, mosaiced format for compression. We believed that such a data workflow could allow the raw digital files to operate as a digital negative, and world provide all of the post-production flexibility of being able to manipulate the original raw data.” “Immediately following my December 2005 meeting with Mr. Jannard, I began working on the design of RED’s first commercial digital motion picture camera that would become known as the RED ONE. This work would last all throughout 2006 and into 2007 when we commercially launched the RED ONE video camera. My title on the RED ONE project was Problem Solver, and it remains my title to this day.” “Paragraphs 22-28 of my 2014 declaration explain how we rejected…conventional thinking by implementing known compression techniques, such as JPEG 2000, in such a way as to operate on non-demosaiced Bayer-pattern image data, a type of image data these techniques were not designed to work on.” “Accordingly, my work on the RED ONE camera was based on a video image processing pipeline that did not include a conventional demosaicing step prior to compression.” “… The raw Bayer-pattern image data was then sent to a Xilinx processing FPGA chip for pixel correction and processing of the raw Bayer-pattern image data.” “… The pixel- corrected and processed raw Bayer-pattern video image data was then sent to Analog Devices compression chips, which utilized a mathematically lossy wavelet compression codec known as JPEG 2000, to compress the processed raw Bayer- pattern video image data.” “… The compressed raw Bayer-pattern image video data was sent to a memory device, by way of a SATA port, for storage as a raw data file that at one point in development was given a .JIM file extension in homage to Mr. Jannard and the new file type that RED had created.” “We referred to the above programing for the RED ONE cameras, and the resulting raw compressed data files that it generated, as REDCODE.”

That link is to the Presler patent I think? Yeah I remember this now. Was very interesting and a lot of controversy over the timing of RED's patent and the public reveal of the tech at trade shows. Did the SI-2K record Cineform RAW internally or was it a camera head, with separate recorder?

Of course there's a HUGE difference between doing it to 1 frame and 24 per second motion. In terms of a concept that is the difference between an SLR and a cinema camera. Patents are very specific so even slight differences in concepts and it is considered novel. I don't hear you criticising Sony for ignoring the need for compressed RAW codecs back in the early 2000s when they had a chance to do something about it. How many compressed RAW shooting digital cinema cameras were out before the RED ONE?

Come on, got to stay alive for the Panasonic GH7 with RED RAW but still no phase detect autofocus. Apparently RED Motion Mount was from a small company that could have revolutionised the industry. https://tessive.com/mechanical-shutter-comparison RED gobbled them up along with the patents. Which is probably why there is not a Tessive Time Filter and variable ND for the Panasonic GH6! Really nice technology once again being locked up on Jim's island away from commoners like us. Good job he was too distracted with sun glasses when the CMOS sensor was invented otherwise we'd still be shooting film! But again I have to ask... Where the fuck was Canon, Sony, Panasonic, Fuji etc. when Jim was all over the Tessive Time Filter? For price of a months worth of sandwiches at Sony HQ they could have bought the tech.

If there was a long line of compressed RAW cinema cameras before 2005 from Sony and Canon, then the RED patent wouldn't be novel. But there wasn't. I am not angry at RED any more. I am more annoyed at corporate Japan for failing us.

Well we'll see what the Z9 case brings. I can't see Nikon getting anywhere with it to be honest.

The novelty is they applied it to 24fps RAW video in a solid state recorder/camera. Yes they were. Otherwise the patent wouldn't still be standing. It wasn't broad at the time. Sony, Canon, Panasonic, etc. were all asleep and most top films were shot on film. Canon had MiniDV cameras at the time when RED were patenting a very niche raw codec. It's a pathetic showing by the corporations.

Stabilisation seems to work pretty well at first try. The camera feels pretty unbalanced with large lenses though. Also there is one major annoyance I am having... In stills mode mainly. To avoid banding with the electronic shutter in stills mode under artificial light I really have to use one shutter speed... 1/50 for 50hz PAL countries. So it really limits your exposure options for stills. Out come the NDs pretty much all the time. Not too bad for video as ND with 180 degree shutter is kinda default for most people. But I've had a lot of stills shots ruined because I used Aperture priority mode and something like 1/60 shutter or 1/250. Probably the worst possible camera for sports and event photography! For photography the Sigma Fp line will get a lot better if they progress to having a global shutter or stacked sensor in there.