THE SWEET SPOT IN THE NEGATIVE

Our four-part series dissecting the RED raw image is presented in order of, what I consider, importance.  I believe the second most important ( and sometimes misunderstood ) area is to not only exposing the image correctly, but hitting the sweet spot in the negative.

Again, I'm not going to tell a DP how to light, how to expose, or how many stops over or under they should be.  I'm only going to offer some thoughts on what has helped us create good looking images from the RED.

There is a clear difference between “what the camera is capable of” and “hitting the sweet spot”.  And you don't always want to hit the sweet spot.  Sometimes you're going for a very specific look and you want to intentionally overexpose the negative, or whatever else.  But most of the time, you are trying to create a well exposed, organic, film-like image with little grain and not too many blown out highlights.

Below are some grabs from a film shot by Ben Kufrin.  We did tests on this film before they shot and helped show them the ideal range to expose within.  I was very impressed with the results, its spot on.  I use these grabs as an example of a kind of negative I consider a perfect RED exposure.  I've posted the corresponding waveform readings and histogram of the raw negative.

RAW

WAVEFORM OF RAW

GRADED

RAW

WAVEFORM OF RAW

GRADED

RAW

WAVEFORM OF RAW

GRADED

These represent what I consider the sweet spot of the negative.  Notice anything?  The RAW's seem a little dark, don't they?  Thats a good thing.

If you're trying to achieve the most organic, rich image with the RED, its important to watch your high end very carefully.  Notice how nothing is either clipping or crushing in the RAW.  There are no blown out highlights or crushed blacks.  That means that we are going to be able to preserve detail both in the high end and low ( like film ) and most of the information is clumped in the lower middle.  That's where the skin tones live.  So we're also going to get a nice amount of tone and detail in the skin.

if the exposures were any hotter overall, we'd be clipping in the highlights and the skin would develop a plastic-looking loss of detail.  If we were any darker, there would be bad noise in the shadows.

This is a sample ( not shot by B. Kufrin ) that shows what can happen when you are underexposed in RED :

GRADED

WAVEFORM OF RAW

Notice not only the noise, but vertical compression lines ( or something, hard to know what is creating that but it appears without fail in all underexposed footage ).  That's very hard to get rid of, if not impossible.

Long story short, watch your highlights, watch your low end, and try to get a nice gathering of information in the middle of the exposure.  When we pull that RAW file apart in the DI, it will be the difference between possibly being able to fool the audience into thinking its film, and the audience knowing its digital.