RED announced the specs for their 2009/2010 products: ranging from a fixed-lens 3k Scarlet at around $3000, to a 9k system that can shoot in stereoscopic 3D mode (two connected cameras at once, next to each other), to a crazy 28k (261 mega pixel) sensor ($55,000 just for the main unit). How big is a 28k image you ask? Here’s a comparison to a 1080p HD image. These are amazing specs of course, and the prices are extremely low for what these products will be able to do. There’s no question about that.

Here are my two problems though.

1. I am what the author and video professional Stu “ProLost” Maschwitz refers to as a “DV Rebel” on his book of the same name. DV Rebels are basically amateur videography artists, that take cinematography more seriously than normal camcorder owners. DV Rebels try to make the best with what they’ve got even if they only use dirt cheap hardware. In essence, is a lot like how computer geeks like to play with Linux, tweak it like there’s no tomorrow, and enjoy the challenges. The 3k fixed-lens RED Scarlet, possibly the cheapest RED of the bunch, will still cost over $3000 after you add an LCD monitor to it, the special kind of CF cards it requires, battery etc. I am sure that quality will be good, but if Canon comes up with a next-generation 1080p “geek” AVCHD camera for under $2000, similar to what I describe here (e.g. all features the HV30 has, plus gain/AV/TV full manual control, true 24p, DigicDV-4 half-inch sensor, 43mm filter size, fast lens up to 8x or 10x zoom, full 1080p at 24mbps, proper focus ring), I would go for that instead of a Scarlet. Simply because, it would be enough for my needs, and a good bump over the HV20/30 legacy. The RED will definitely change professional cinema as we know it, but I don’t think it will grab all the lower-end artist attention. I have a feeling that wedding professionals won’t care much about it either. In other words, Canon will continue to exist and sell well, but it will feel the heat and hopefully will upgrade their specs for a new market class that it’s between consumer and prosumer. That’s what I am waiting this January from Canon.

2. RED is a hardware company. And as with all hardware companies, their software sucks. RED has been under heavy criticism about their buggy software, and how they sell hardware where the firmware is barely stable. The early bird users end up losing their feathers and becoming guinea pigs, while some basic functions for professionals are missing. Their computer tools are not great either, and only few editors support their files (meaning that you might need to additionally buy the $1000 Cineform Neo4k to get your footage on your editor). Adding to the injury, if you complain about these problems, you end up getting banned from their online forum.

The only way I am getting the cheap Scarlet is if the complete package (with LCD, battery, CF card) costs up to $3000, if it has the ability to shoot 1080p in non-windowed mode (I don’t care about its 3k resolution at this point as I don’t own a super-computer to process it), and if the PC tools (compared to their Mac tools) are sane enough to let me process the raw image and export in an AVI lossless codec via DirectShow (so I can edit in Vegas). There are a lot of “if”s there, so there’s a better chance that Canon will release a hybrid consumer/prosumer “geek” (”DV Rebel”) camera that does everything I need in a more convenient fashion than RED can.

Discussion here.

Another DVXUser competition, Twilightfest, opened its doors for viewing and voting (free registration required). Because Comcast now has bandwidth consumption restrictions I will not be able to watch all films, so I limited my viewing to films shot with the HV20 (4), RED (3), AVCHD HF100 (1), and HPX-170 (1) cameras.

From these four HV20 films I watched, the “Calls From The Führerbunker” was probably the best. It had good direction and cinematography, beating out the rest of the HV20 films that actually used 35mm adapters. The also HV20-based “Mr. I” film was not too bad either, but it was strangely under exposed (it felt underexposed rather than “dark”, which I am sure it was the intention of the cinematographer). I was indifferent about the third HV20 film, dubbed “The Box“, while the fourth one, “Pain Container“, I didn’t like.

The HF100 film “Benjamin Merrymeadows and the Curse of the Four-Holed Button” was amateurish and silly, while “Broadcast“, shot with a RED One camera, was the best of the three RED-based films in the competition. Finally, I watched the “Cold Calls by John Whalen” (shot with the HPX-170) because it had so many comments in the forum. And indeed, it was amazingly good. This film was the only one that I wanted to have more of, and wasn’t feeling ready in clicking “fast forward” on the media player. That was amazingly well done and clever. Most of the films in the competition used the Panasonic DVX and HVX cameras, as usual, but as I said, I didn’t watch any of these, so some gems might be among them.

I tried to emulate the look of Metallica’s new music video. Most red colors stay viewable, but everything else pretty much crushes to yellow (except the sky which is more or less blue depending on the shot). These videos are very low contrast, so it’s very difficult to get them right with digital camcorders. You would need a RED or a film camera to get this look right.

Before

After

I’ve used Magic Bullet’s ‘Curahee’ template but with lowered contrast, color corrector had a gamma of 1500 with the midtones and high tones leaning towards yellow. Finally, an unsharpen mask of 0.200 with a radius of 0.100.

The producer of a National Geographic TV show says that he used $150,000 cameras on the following police chase video, but if you look closely (look at 00:12), these are at least a bunch of HV20s mounted in the car. Their rolling shutter effect itself is giving them away too. Regardless, it’s great to see these little gems appear on TV. Discussion about it here.

In other filmmaking news, check this music video (password: andy), shot with the Nikon D90 DSLR. The best D90 video I’ve seen so far online.

The most widely used delivery codec today on the internet is h.264. There are at least 10 encoders out there from different vendors, but which one is the best? I tried MainConcept (via Vegas Pro 8.0c), SonyAVC (via Vegas Pro 8.0c), Apple’s h.264 (via the latest Quicktime Pro), and x264 (via the latest ffmpeg).

The maximum profile/level is used by the user interface offered. For example, if an encoder only supports the “main” profile I would use that, even if it goes against another encoder that supports the “high” profile. Same goes for CABAC and CAVLC — I used the best options an encoder or its UI can offer me. What I am comparing here is *end-user solutions*, not how the encoder itself could perform tweaked if the sun was black and the moon was red. The source file is a 4 second uncompressed Quicktime 720/30p progressive file. The machine used is my usual 630-P4 3Ghz with 3 GBs of RAM (more specs were given before in this blog). All encodings used 4 mbps CBR, 1 pass, at 720/30p. Quality is compared using a Perceptual Diff utility: I compared frames 1 and 41. Frame 1 is stationary, Frame 41 has lots of motion in it.

A note on Quicktime

I tested both the .mov and the .mp4 h.264 exporting options from Quicktime, just in case they are internally configured differently. Please note that a lot of the quality loss shown below for Quicktime, is because of the gamma change Quicktime applies to these files. In the past, you could go to the video track “properties” with Quicktime, and change the “blend” to 100%, in order to get the original color look back. I would have tested that kind of exporting too, but it seems that the latest Quicktime Pro has this feature broken (it used to work a few months ago with an older version).

So I had to do it manually: I played with a lot of gamma values on PaintShopPro and when I gave it a 0.75 gamma (making it darker, as it was supposed to be), the pixel difference went down to 18,826 and 31,794 points for frames 1 and 41 respectively (down from about 200,000 points). So if Apple stops adding that dithering crap by default, they can deliver a pretty good result by default. “Defaults matter” as users whine and whine.

A note on x264

I used the following ffmpeg switches for the x264 encoding: -me_method umh -subq 5 -coder 1 -trellis 1 -g 300 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -level 41 -rc_eq "blurCplx^(1-qComp)"

I did try to further optimize the x264 encoding like this: -flags +loop -coder ac -refs 5 -loop 1 -deblockalpha 0 -deblockbeta 0 -parti4x4 1 -partp8x8 1 -me full -subq 6 -me_range 21 -chroma 1 -slice 2 -bf 3 -b_strategy 1 -level 41 -g 300 -keyint_min 30 -sc_threshold 40 -rc_eq blurCplx^(1-qComp) -qcomp 0.7 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -i_qfactor 0.71428572 -cmp 1 -maxrate 4000k -bufsize 4M, but the video file produced was not readable by Vegas’ MainConcept h.264 reader, and therefore I could not take PNG screenshots off specific frames in order to carry out the comparison. FFdshow and Quicktime could read the file btw. I don’t have all day trying to find needles in a haystack, so if anyone knows which switch creates the incompatibility, let me know and I will update the article.

Update: It’s the -g 300 that created the problem. I removed it, but the resulted video is not frame by frame identical to the original. Some of these “advanced” switches do something really nasty to the video in terms of timing. Because the frames I get at position 1 and 41 are not identical to the original, there can’t be pixel comparison.

Update 2: Now, get this. Using this pretty optimized command line: -me_method umh -subq 5 -coder 1 -trellis 1 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -deblockalpha 0 -deblockbeta 0 -parti4x4 1 -partp8x8 1 -qdiff 4 -level 41 -rc_eq "blurCplx^(1-qComp)" I got over 55,000 pixels of difference. However, it seems that x264 uses a different gamma than the original file, just like Quicktime does so above. So when I changed its gamma using the “Color Corrector” Vegas plugin to 0.925, I was able to get the “true” quality that the encoder is capable of. And that comes out to 16085 for frame 1, and 19597 for frame 41. In other words, if both Quicktime and Ffmpeg were to fix their gamma problems, they are pretty much identical in quality (it’s just that x264 is way faster).

The tests

Conclusion

In terms of quality, it seems that Sony AVC and MainConcept are pretty good here. x264 would probably fair better too if some of their optimization switches are not so incompatible with some decoders or if it fixes its gamma problem. Nevertheless, x264 is the fastest encoder. Quicktime quallity suffers by default more than x264 because of its extreme gamma changes. If Apple wasn’t doing that gamma change by default, it would fair much better, as my gamma test shows. Download the OpenOffice .ods spreadsheet file here.

This is a frame from my recent pampas grass video. The dramatic look was achieved using the Magic Bullet “Bronze” and “Aged” templates, a harsh “Sony unsharpen mask” (500/500), and the “Sony flare” plugin.

Before

After

In off topic news, JBQ bought us an acoustic guitar today.

Let me know which video you like best, the one above, or the one on my previous post.

Casual shooting
* A steady tripod, specifically with a fluid head ($120)
* A rubber band (info, $0.01)
* A bigger, extra, battery ($40)
* A spacious camera bag ($10)
* Enough tapes ($20)
* A polarizer filter ($35)
* An ND4 (0.6) filter ($20)
* A UV filter ($20)
* A petal hood ($15, fotodiox.com)

Special Interest (macro)
All of the above, plus:
* Tiffen 2x, 3x, 4x close-up kit lenses ($30)

Documentaries
All of the above, plus:
* A Canon or Raynox telephoto lens (make sure it’s specific to HD, $200)
* An HD wide angle lens (e.g. Canon WD-H43, the Raynox 7000Pro, $200)
* A white balance gray card (usage, $5)
* A shotgun microphone with windscreen support (e.g. Canon DM-50, $150)
* A lavalier microphone (e.g. the Audio-Technica ATR-35S, $40)
* Extension cord for the lavalier mic ($15)
* Tiffen Universal Dolly (to be used only on thick carpet, $50)
* A shoulder bracket (e.g. B&H sells one for $45)
* A reflector (e.g. the Westcott 5-in-1 Reflector Kit, $100)
* A focus wheel (DIY, or from Irvb, $40)
* A lens cleanser, blower, and brush ($20)
* A rectangle hood ($20, fotodiox.com)
* A lens hood ($20)
* [Optional] The Tiffen HDTV-FX3 filter (low-contrast movie look, $200)

Music videos
All of the above, plus:
* A steadycam (e.g. $170 Hauge MMC, or a DIY $15 one)
* 1000W Smith Victor KT1000 continuous lights (e.g. from Adorama, $130)
* A portable CD player for lip-syncing ($70)
* A clap, to synchronize the audio with the sped-up lipsyncing in post processing ($10)
* A 35mm adapter (e.g. TwoNeilHD, or JAG35Pro, with a 5m GG, achromat & condenser)
* Bogen / Manfrotto 293 Lens Support with Quick Release ($70)
* Actual 35mm lenses (price varies)
* Lens hoods for the various 35mm lenses (price varies)
* An external monitor: the Sony DVP-FX820 (NTSC) or DVP-FX870 (PAL) ($180)
* A female-to-female RCA adapter to connect the external monitor ($8)
* A DIY monitor holder (instructions, $7)
* A second, cheaper, tripod to hold the monitor and the monitor holder ($20)
* External monitor Hoodman H900, for when shooting in sunlight ($100)

[Alternatively, you can mount the monitor and monitor holder on the main tripod itself like this, above the camera (instead of on a separate tripod), but you will need the Shrig Rig ($125) for that, instead of the suggested 'Manfrotto lens support'.]

Short films
All of the above, plus:
* Rode Stereo Videomic ($250)
* Rode Boompole ($120)
* Rode Dead Kitten windscreen ($30)
* A second person holding the boom mic (beg someone)
* Good 3.5mm headphones, to evaluate audio during shooting ($60)
* Tiffen Steady Stick, or this trick, to be used as a small crane ($100)
* A smooth dolly (e.g. a DIY one, or the Glidetrack, $170)
* Car charging kit for external camera, mic, monitor ($70)
* A power strip for battery charging on location ($10)
* A folding director’s chair for the shots not requiring camera movement ($10)

Full featured films
You don’t use an HV20/30 in that case, silly.

In any case, you always need a good plan. Plan ahead your shots by sketching, and leaving notes on a notepad about camera movement and composition.