Mysterium Sensor

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Mysterium™ Sensor

The Mysterium™ is RED's proprietary chip/sensor that accepts the image behind the lens.   It is probably the single most important part of the hardware from RED.  This is an important section to help us understand RED's translation.  Only three paragraphs long so we'll tackle each one.

If you've read the previous chapters you now can make sense of what exactly all this means. 

• variable frame rate imaging from 1 to 60fps in 4K or 3K resolution.
• variable frame rate imaging from 1 to 120fps in 2K.

You can achieve faster frame rates at 2K because the image size is smaller so the data rate is lower, so you can get more frames per second through that e-Sata cable to the hard disks.  So to begin our assesment of RED - we see that they made a conscious decision to limit the frame rate in order to maintain resolution and color depth. I agree.

Oh boy - this is a big one.  Both the video and the Film worlds are familiar with color correction and temperature in one way or another.  In the film world it is matched to either indoor, known as Tungsten at 3200 degrees Kelvin or Outdoor at 5400 degrees Kelvin.  Lower Kelvins means a "Warmer" light.  Light from the Sun is bluer than light from an indoor light bulb.  Video faced this same challenge, but rather than limit the operator to 2 color temperatures, the digital world allows the operator to choose where neutral white should be.  This is called White Balancing.  You can also do the same thing with Black on some cameras (like the RED) but its not done as frequently.  What should be avoided under any circumstances is the dreaded mixed-source lighting.  If the two light sources overlap, they will create a soup of washed out colors where they mix.  Your DP will know how to avoid this.

The RED One™ has a native white-point on the sensor of 5000 degrees Kelvin.  This is a little deceptive though, because as it says in the next sentence - this number can range from 1700 to 10,000.   So what is the right answer?  Ready for this - in reality IT DOESN'T MATTER on the RED.  Hunh?  There is a white balancing button and feature but it only affects the in-camera look.  The RED is storing the images in their native format RAW .R3D files.  This format is a logaraithmic color scale.  Anything you see will be an interpreted version of the RAW data.  RED has managed to store all that raw data for us.  So no matter what color temp we choose on the day - it can always be adjusted in post - with absolutely NO degradation to the image.  That is important.  Because we get RAW data we can work with  the image with far greater lattitude - than if we have to make those decisions at the camera - like video or film.  Any in-camera looks and color temperature information is saved as meta data - so this does nothing to take any power from the hands of the DP, it merely lifts one restriction for the Post House.

What all this translates to on the day is that you should white balance the camera so that your reference is correct.  But realize that the most important thing is to eliminate mixed source and have enough light, rather than worrying about white balancing the camera.

OK, we already touched on some of this but here is one of those key aesthetic and judgment decisions.  When it says 12 bit analog to digital conversion" it is refering to the process we covered in chapter 1.  The analog part is the light energy hitting the photo sensors of the Mysterium™ chip.  The digital is the converted 1s and 0s coming out the back that represent 12 bits of color on the RGB channels for each pixel.  The next sentence says the sensor is capable of 11 stops of dynamic range. when operating  at a sensitivity of 320 ISO.  I have found that in reality there are closer to 10 usable stops.  This is far more than other digital cameras anywhere near this price range, but less than some film stocks allow.  Again - we will touch on lattitude more later when we get in to the operation of the camera.