Color red tests
 

First time out with the A1, wanted to see how this cam preformed on reds, so I went out and shot a great old mansion about to be demolished. Red brick in bright sun could have been nasty, but I was quit impressed with the results.

I have only monitored on an sd production monitor, but know that the noise you see in the blacks & sky are from compression, they are not there at all on my Sony pvm.

I mixed it up with presets, rolling tape on the ones I liked in the lcd. What's very valuable sitting with a printout of the preset spreadsheet while watching the footage, excellent way to learn how settings act & interact.

Impressions: My baseline will probably be preset 18, negative sharpening values didn't do it for me, which is surprising, as my dvx, my gold standard, was set up fairly soft. I've alwasy equated soft with filmic, but 18 is +1 sharpening, and its plenty filmic to me. LCD is surprisingly close on color, but a bit tricky for focus, even with peaking. Most important - rich, saturated reds can be had with the A1.

For all: shutter at 1/48, 24f, gain -3, nd on most, every thing else corresponds to preset number from the library, in lower left. No cc other than slight crushing of blacks on the second b&w shot. Be warned - its a big file.

http://www.filehosting.cc/file/20843...treds-mov.html

Very nice. My favorite, I think, was 17. A little brighter and warmer. Thanks for posting.

Did you use the presets that are here?
I think, after did see you tests, that 17 looks very nice.. I was using 18 but I will do some other test with the 17.
Thanks for sharing it. Ciao

Yes, these are the presets from the dvinfo library.

Does anyone know the technical reason why red is such a freakin pain?

I dunno, but it always seems to have been a problem. I remember when I worked in news (all analogue), red was an "illegal" colour. None of the presenters could wear red jackets or shirts.

it has to do with the way the compression algorithm treats reds when compressing for tape.