Canon 5D Mk II vs Red Epic Dragon


January - April 2017

At Contender Productions, we’ve been doing a lot of still photography, many of the shoots are food related. Now that our kitchen is near completion we decided to have some fun before our next photo shoot. Chanse, our Studio Executive, who is also a chef, decided to whip up an original burger as a stand-in. Of course he made enough to feed us and most of the company.

We took the opportunity to try something new- using our Red Epic with Dragon sensor to shoot still photography.  The raw R3d files edit very similarly to Canon’s CR2 so we were excited to see the difference.  The Canon images were lit with our Profoto D1 with a 4×6 softbox.  We added some fill using bounce cards and our new Dracast round LED lights.  The Red images were lit with the same Dracast lights plus our in house lighting grid.

For post processing we used Adobe Lightroom for the Canon CR2 files and Redcine-X pro for the R3D files.  The process for each was very similar aside from the massive weight difference in the cameras themselves.  For the purposes of this test, the biggest difference came down to the lighting. Since the Red needed to be lit with constant bulbs, not flashes, there is a significant difference in the look of the images.  Shadows and highlights came out very different with each set up.

In the end we decided that we preferred the Canon/Profoto setup to the Red.  What do you think?