Here’s an interesting comparison test. Red One side by side with Kodak Vision 3 250D. Knowing that I am a digital cinema techno geek, and a hard and fast Red One fan, you would think I wouldn’t give the Vision 3 a chance.

I have to say that I have just viewed the results of this test at Ster Kinekor’s Cinema 4 at Cavendish Square in Claremont. The first test of its kind to be projected at 2K in South Africa, probably on the continent.

First of all, the cinema is huge, it’s a gigantic screen, and the Christie CP2000 projector outperformed any 35mm projection I’ve ever seen. I can’t compare it to a 4K Sony SXRD because I’ve never seen a 4K Sony SXRD, but it’s impressive. As far as the 2K/4K debate for digital cinema projection, I can safely say that 2K is perfectly adequate for delivery even on a very large screen.

The quality of the encoding itself also impressed me, no noticeable artifacts or tell tale signs of compression. After rendering a 2K JPG2000 sequence out of Assimilate Scratch myself last week, I could tell from the files sizes of each frame that they are only 30% or so smaller than the uncompressed DPX files, this is a good indication of the image quality we are looking at here.

Now to the nitty gritty.

The first shots to be compared were long shots (probably on an Angenieux 17 – 250 zoom if I were to hazard a guess) of the Sea Point area taken from Lions Head. Here, to my surprise the Red One produced a noticeably cleaner image than the Vision 3, which had a very noticeable grain, but otherwise the images were for all intents and purposes identical.

The real test for me were the shots that followed. These were high contrast shots at a beach (Clifton or Camps Bay I think) in direct sunlight where the subject walked towards the camera for a few steps out of direct sunlight into shade. There were two pairs of similar shots here, the first pair showed the Red One to be very hot compared to the Vision 3 in the direct sunlight, pretty much a stop or two over-exposed in my opinion with less detail in the mids (like in the blue sky and ocean on the horizon) compared to the Vision 3, and then less detail when the subject moved into the shade also.

I’m glad they shot another pair of similar shots, because the first high contrast shots didn’t fare well for the Red One and I watched with a suspicion that something wasn’t quite right, the Red should have been a tad bit closer than it was.

In the second pair of shots, also with the subject moving from direct sunlight into the shade, the Red One showed a much better image, whereas the Vision 3 was the same. The highlights in the sunlight were not so hot, and there was far more detail in the mids, the sky and sea were a nice blue with good definition rather than a bright grey/blue flat nothing as they were in the first time around. In the shade the image also held up better the second time around and I think something was tweaked in camera between the first and second high contrast shots. It could have been the ISO setting on the camera, and / or an aperture change (closed down a stop or so I reckon from the first shot). In any case it was much better and showed the capabilities of the camera in a much better light, especially compared to the latitude of the Vision 3.

One other issue I want to bring up is the noticeable slew during quick pans on the Red One, its nasty! I don’t like it at all. If the camera is stable and an object is moving quickly through the frame, it’s far less noticeable, in fact I wouldn’t really worry too much about it at all, but if the whole image is moving quickly as in a whip pan, it’s really, really bad. Note, if you shoot with the Red One, avoid quick camera movements at all costs!

All in all, the new Kodak Vision 3 is a fantastic stock and overall produces a better image, however the thing that surprised me is how close the Red One comes. It can’t match the latitude of the Vision 3 stock, but the difference is not huge, neither is it marginal, but one could safely choose to shoot 35mm or Red and the results will be fantastic in both cases.

Neither one is the right answer, make the choice based on your budget and you will have a great looking film in both cases.

Now the another issue is we need to get 2K projectors and DCI spec JPG2000 playback rolled out in cinemas country wide.