This has been a big week for RED News, and we’re pretty damn excited by the latest revelation, RED’s newly announced “HDRx”. For those not in the know, HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, a term that describes a recording medium’s ability to store the brightest brights, darkest darks, and all the values in between of richly contrasted imagery, in one “container.” Traditionally, this is a trait that is natural and inherent to silver based film and photography, but not easily replicated with standard digital imaging tools. Commonly, the approach used to replicate the depth and dynamic range of film has been to shoot a series of stills at varying exposure settings, then combining the multiple images into a new “HDR” Image, which contains as broad a range of light and shadow as possible. The result: you can see details in the deepest shadows and brightest patches of light of even the most brutally contrast-filled shots, making the darkest night shots and brightest beach shots both far more rich, and far more usable. So HDR is great, but until now this technique has been, for the most part, relegated to the creation of still images. With RED’s new HDRx, it looks like this is all going to change. RED has already based its imaging science upon RAW file formatting (r3D), which give the cinematographer a very film-like approach to shooting, processing, and color correcting. With the addition of HDRx, the theory is that you can take the power of RAW, and expand it ten-fold. Early rumors state the HDRx will allow the upcoming RED EPIC to capture a dynamic range of 18-19 stops, whereas most “digital” cameras are hard pressed to reach 12 stops. Which is why this is truly game changing, and extremely exciting news for all of us Red Users.
For more info, please check out the following threads:
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[…] A sensor that size would (through some very complex technical wizardry) allow for amazing range of light sensitivity -also known as having a high “dynamic range”. Today’s digital cameras arent very good at capturing all the details in scenes with both very dark shadows AND very bright highlights. In these situations, the camera must choose (or be told) which areas of the scene to capture. You can expose the shot for the shadows, or for the highlights -but not both simultaneously. (You have seen this effect when you tried to take a photo in very bright sunlight, where the people or object you were trying to photograph came out looking very dark or black. ) Today the best digital cameras have about 13 “f-stops” of dynamic range. Consumer cameras have closer to 8 stops. There are some experimental sensor designs that are capturing 18 or 19 stops of dynamic range. This is amazing and comes close (but not all the way) to competing with the sensitivity of the human eye. Amazing!!! For more reading go here: http://blog.kaiharding.com/?p=581 […]