This episode of Film Riot's brought to you by The National Campaign Against Drunk Driving.
Today on Film Riot we continue our epic journey. These epic puns are getting pretty bad huh?
Yeah you really need to stop.
I'm gonna stop. Welcome to Film Riot, the show that takes adding the effects and techniques
of your favorite Hollywood films. I'm your host, Ryan Connolly. So, Thursday, I showed
you how the Red Epic works. Today, I'm going to show you my post work flow, then after
that I'm going to attempt to get my 5D to look as good as my Red footage, or at least
try to get it to come close.
Okay, so I'm going to do this quick, since I really want to get to the 5D versus red
stuff, plus this is surprisingly simple anyway, so first you have your redmeg. reader, which
acts just like any other card reader, you pop in the red meg and it connects to your
computer. Now I'm going to open up a program that you can get for free at Red.com called
RedCine-X.
This is where you can handle all your red footage and do all your converting.
Now if I were shooting in two k I could just bring all of my footage right into Adobe premier,
and start editing without the need to convert, since Adobe handles the Red Codec natively.
But like I told you Thursday, I'm shooting in 5k because of the crop factor. So inside
of RedCine-X I will select the red mag drive and the clips I want to convert, drag them
into a bin and I'm ready to convert.
Just go here to create the specifics you want for your conversion, and you are ready to
go. Now I am running on an IMAC, so the conversion takes a bit long for me, but once it's done,
I am ready to edit, and the reason I am showing you this is because I put up some short raw
5K files for you to download, if you would like to take and convert and mess with them.
The quality of this camera is amazing, it just blows me away, but since the video you
are watching is so compressed you can't really see the full quality. So if you would like
more a hands-on look, go to this link, download the file, and there you go. Get some hands
on experience with Red Epic footage.
It's like Free film school, up in this mother lover, hold on a sec. Okay lady girls and
manly fellows, I would assume that for most of us the goal is feature film, that means
theaters player but that is eventually. So for now we're all just Internet based film
makers, meaning our work is compressed and shown, on places like YouTube, and no, the
red epic is amazing you really can't see it's full potential on YouTube.
So, with that in mind, I'm curious to see how much of a difference shooting on the Red
instead of the 5D will make when you have to compress and deliver for the web. So, right
now, I'm going to put these babies head to head and do my best to make my $2500 5D look
is good as the 55,000 Red Epic. Let's do this.
Now, before we start, I just want to clarify. When you look at the images from these cameras
uncompressed, there is no contest. The Epic blows the 5D out of the water, but that's
not what we're testing today. We want to see how close the images come when compressed
for the web.
So, with that once again clarified, so we head the comments off at the pass, let's jump
right into our first image. The first thing I did was set up a simple scene, with dramatic
lighting. I wanted to give a good amount of bright to dark areas, and with this first
one, I wanted the majority of my image and actor to be underexposed.
The reason for this is that underexposing is usually where a lower grade camera start
to break down and sure enough in the 5D clip, you can see a lot of ugliness happening in
the dark areas like on Josh's shirt and hair, but now when we switch over to the Red Epic
footage, it's smooth as a baby's bottom ... or Josh's bottom.
Crazy.
He shaved it.
No, I don't.
Next, I came in a bit tighter and lit a bit differently for each camera to try and make
each one look as good as I could. I thought With this one, since I used a lot more light
from the 5D this time, the 5D came a lot closer to competing with the Epic, but still not
close enough. Detail in the Epic far surpasses the 5K and that detail will definitely come
in handy when color grading, and still there is some ugliness and banding happening back
there in the dark areas of the image for the 5D.
Now the final thing that I did with this setup was to come even closer to see as much detail
on the actor as I possibly can, because when I looked at the 5D footage first, I was like,
"hey. That looks pretty darn good", but then I switched over to the Epic footage and I'm
like," oh". The footage from the 5D is not fully sharp, and since it's compressed inside
the camera and scaled a bit, we kind of get this milky look from it on the actor's skin,
but the Epic is a totally different story.
Super sharp and tons of detail. For my final test shot, I went outside to get a lot more
light from that little hovering devil I like to call the sun. Cameras like DSLRs do a lot
better with a lot of light pumped into them, so I figured this would give my little DSLR
That Could, the best advantage I found that this image was the closest to the red, of
all four, but still had the same lack of detail and dirtiness, in the dark areas, and the
epic was silky smooth all the way through.
The thing that's funny for me is that I won't really know the outcome of these tests until
this episode is released online, since what we are wanting to see is the comparison of
the two once they've gone through all the compressions, including the final one that
YouTube does when we upload it, or the Revision3 Player, the Mio.
They all have like a little extra to your quality. But now we take a little break, then
we're going to check to see if there's rolling shutter on the epic and add some color correction
to these tests. The police will be out in force nationwide from August 19th to September
5th in the National Effort to Crack Down on Impaired Driving.
Don't put yourself and others in danger or risk, with terrible repercussions. Drive sober
or get pulled over. Each year, nearly 12,000 people die on the road due to impaired driving.
That would be the equivalent of 30 jumbo jets crashing each year. and that's ridiculous
which with that in mind, if you drive drunk, it's just.
I think you're a douchebag. So, the next time you're drinking and you're like "ah I'm gonna
drive". Stop and be like, "Oh, you know what, Ryan Connolly thinks I'm a douchebag", and
feel bad about yourself.
Record number of state and local law enforcements and highway safety officials across the nation
will be taking part, and looking for drunk drivers, day and night, and making the roads
safer for the rest of us who are not douchebags, so do yourself a favor. Drive sober or get
pulled over, which should also be "don't be such an a-hole that you're putting other people's
lives in risk because you're selfish a-hole." That's a little harsh.
But you know what? I don't care. Because I say it with love.
Logo. So, here we go, first, we have the original image from the five b, then the corrected.
If you color correct smart, you actually can hide a lot of the issues with this image,
especially in the dark area, but you have to be careful how far you push your image,because
it will start to break, which is not the case when it comes to the epic, here is the epic's
original, and then, corrected.
and color grading Epic footage is like vacation compared to working with 5D footage. There's
so much more information and room to move that you can really dial in the look you want,
so much easier, but I was trying to get these two to look very similar, it was just so much
easier to get the red there than it was to get the 5D.
But moving on, we have the original 5D footage, and now the corrected and again, correction
really helps save the image and now, if we take the Epic's original and slap some color
correction on it. And now compare the two, once I have both images corrected, they come
far closer to matching up, I am actually surprised how close I was able to get my 5D footage
to the red epic's footage.
I mean I can still see a huge difference but I'm guessing that once on the web these examples
will come even closer. Why does this matter, you might wonder, well for those of us that
aren't making stuff for theater. It's encouraging to see how close we can get our sub $5000
gear to match up to a camera that cause over $50,000 more and now, for the the final thing
we're going to test today, which is the rolling shutter issue on this camera.
The 5D is terrible with rolling shutter and I was curious to see how much of an issue
it is on the Red. So first, as you see before here is the 5D's nightmare rolling shutter.
And now with the Red Epic! There isn't much, but it's definitely there. I personally found
this really interesting, so I thought I'd share, especially since a lot of people think
that the /red has no rolling shutter issue, which, as you can see, is not true. Though
it's very little as compared to the 5B, it's still enough that you need to be aware of
it when shooting.
Well, peeps, we're done and out of here, but you can follow me on Twitter if you want and
our Film Riot Facebook page for more lovin' from the oven. And I'll see you on Thursday.
So until then, stay safe and watch good films. Oh my God!