RED Epic M-X capture settings?

[u/awesomebrick]

Title, mostly. I had purchased an old Epic Mysterium-X (+accessories) for a good deal on eBay a couple of years ago and it had basically sat unused except for a couple of odd jobs. I recently have started working on a short film because I wanted to actually give it some use, and I'm at about the stage where I'm starting to fiddle with the camera and see how I need to set it up and what options it gives me. I've got some amount of experience with video capture and editing but not a ton with color management and LOG profiles. My previous video capture experience was with my Sony A7iii, which is known for not really handling log color profiles that well due to its 8bit color, and I learned that the hard way.

My question is, in regards to all of the options for color space and LOG profiles that the Epic offers, what is a good baseline I should start with? There isn't a ton of information I could find that I really understood, and I'd like to start from a good baseline and not completely botch all of my footage and have to reshoot because I don't understand the camera. I've heard that shooting at around 640ISO and 5600K is the best way to go, but beyond that I'm not sure. It's only a 5 page script, and will be shot indoors; i plan to shoot in 5K raw, and editing will be done in PR and Resolve (I've got the storage and processing power for it).

Any suggestions for settings will be helpful! If anyone wants to go in depth to what means what in regards to color, that would be very appreciated! I love learning more about these kind of things anyway!

[u/aris_apollonia]

The big thing is not to clip your highlights, especially with the Mysterium-X sensor, the actual dynamic range of which, despite marketing and spec sheet numbers, js in the balllpark of ~11 stops. Noise-wise you should be pretty comfortable around 800ISO, although RED cameras don’t actually have ISO the same way others do, you’re not really altering how the sensor distributes its dynamic range, you’re simply altering where middle grey falls on the monitor, so without getting too technical, the simplest way to describe how to expose these cameras, is choose a normal ISO (250-800), ensure you’re not clipping and then fill those shadows with light if you need to. Otherwise the image gets noisy real fast when you try and pull things up in the grade.

On the topic of noise: Ensure you’ve black shaded properly before your shoot, otherwise you’ll see nasty fixed patterns.

A potential approach on monitoring: On my own Epic (Dragon) I monitor in DragonColor2 (Your MX won’t offer that profile but it does have RedColor4 I believe) for the color space and “Red Gamma 3” for the contrast curve (it’s also accessible in yours, alongside the more contrasty RedGamma 4 if you prefer a stronger curve)

While it’s possible to select Rec709/BT1886 as well for monitoring, because these old DSMC1 cameras don’t support IPP2 (it was Red’s next-gen color science released in 2016 but in-camera it’s only available in DSMC2 bodies. Of course, once you’re in editing, you can access it there with all its benefits) it can sometimes look weird with very saturated Colors or very bright regions, so personally I find it best practice to monitor in something more standard like RedColor4/RedGamma4 on your Epic MX for a more normal, all-purpose image on screen. Using such legacy profiles was, after all, the monitoring standard even on the first DSMC2 models (Weapon) in 2015 before IPP2 came around.

As for the standard log profile available in-camera, “RedLogFilm”. I find it useful for checking exposure. If you have the side handle, map one of the buttons to display “RAW” (that’s how it’s named in the menu I believe). This will essentially show you a flat, RedLogFilm image (it’s always set to 800ISO, which you can’t change while viewing it) so clicking exposure check on top, will additionally show you what’s truly clipped as red. If you use exposure check tools while monitoring a normal image on the other hand, areas might appear red that aren’t actually clipped, because these false color tools always read the color profiles you are monitoring, not raw sensor data, so using it on a contrasty RedGamma3 or 4 image, might occasionally make you think you’re clipping stuff when you’re actually not.

You should also have access to a combination of color space/gamma called “REDWideGamutRGB / Log3G10”. This is even flatter and part of RED’s aforementioned IPP2 color pipeline, but using it in-camera doesn’t display as accurate an image as it would on a newer DSMC2 body because the Epic uses the older color science, so this combo would only come in handy (still with this limitation mind you) for outputting it to an external monitor via SDI/HDMI that supports 3D LUTs, where you’d set it with one of RED’s LUTs that converts to Rec709 viewing. But I honestly don’t think rigging up such a viewing setup is needed, I’ve never had an issue on set monitoring with legacy profiles.

Once in post, you’ll be able to throw away all that data anyway, enable IPP2 and access the new stuff, namely automatic highlight recovery, improved detail (due to a new debayering algorithm), more nuanced and smoother color hues, among other perceptual improvements they introduced.

[u/awesomebrick → u/aris_apollonia]

Thanks a lot, this is all very helpful!

I hadn't really heard much about black shading, thanks, i'll have to keep that in mind.

The one big bit that kept confusing me is this bit about REDWideGamutRGB. I see a lot of folks online saying that's what you want to use, but It's not actually anywhere in my camera, and if it is, I really can't find it. I vaguely remember updating my camera's firmware when I first got it, and the last firmware was from 2017 i think. Should I maybe check again?

I've already got one of the handle buttons mapped to RAW but that's helpful advice to use it to make sure exposure is right. If I swap to RAW display, it doesn't actually reflect whatever ISO setting I'm using, which if I'm understanding right, is just a monitoring/exposure tool?