48 Hours with RED...

[Dylan Reeve]

So in just over a week we'll be shooting our 48HOURS film with RED #23 (Rocketeer's).

48HOURS is New Zealand's 48 hour film making competition, it's pretty huge - a prize pool of more than $100,000 (including cash from Peter Jackson's production company), and hundreds of teams nationwide.

It'll be a big challenge for us (as if writing, shooting, editing and delivering a short film in 48 hours wasn't hard enough). It will also hopefully be the first field test for the SolidStore, with our #1 Prototype being used in the field to copy media.

The delivery is standard definition, so we'll be shooting 2K for PAL finish (probably just from proxy media unless we end up with a whole lot more time than we expect).

It will be at least a month after the comp before we can post something online, but I'll report back on how it all goes after the weekend.

[Andreas Reischl]

Sounds fun ! (But hard..)
Wish you all the best and look forward to the finished movie.

[Ed Watkins]

Wow... good luck.

I did the Washington DC 48 this weekend, and the RED would definitely have taken too long to in post.

If you're going down the FCP route and finishing in SD, converting the proxies straight to ProRes and finishing on those is probably the best option, although the image quality won't be optimal. I'd recommend shooting 4K 2:1 if you want the proxies to be nice looking, I've found the 2K proxies pretty ugly.

Get some sleep in while you can :) !

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

Some teams just have too much money to throw at 48 hours I tell ya...

[Kyle Mallory]

We shot our's this last weekend o RED 1163. It was actually very smooth. We edited on a Mac Book Pro, on set, swapping drives between setups. We were about 2/3 finished with the cut when we finished photography.

Aliasing was a concern from initial tests (shooting 4k and down-resing to miniDV), but the projection actually turned out fairly well. The "RED'estetic" more than made up for any aliasing that was apparent.

Come Monday, after our awards screening, I'll post a copy of the film online.

For the record, despite being "48 hours", we actually didn't start shooting until 22 hours from deadline. So, we were able to shoot, edit, 1-color-pass, and finish a 6m40s RED project in just under that (we spent about 45 minutes futsing with the miniDV deck, tape-out, and travel to the drop-off).

[Dylan Reeve]

If you're going down the FCP route and finishing in SD, converting the proxies straight to ProRes and finishing on those is probably the best option, although the image quality won't be optimal. I'd recommend shooting 4K 2:1 if you want the proxies to be nice looking, I've found the 2K proxies pretty ugly.

We'll actually be cutting in Avid Media Composer. I've been pretty happy with the look of the 1024 proxies from 2K footage in Avid, but I'll check it out before we finalise the shoot format.


Get some sleep in while you can :) !

We have always ensured that sleep isn't neglected.

[Scott Webster]

Dylan, Please be aware of sub-clause 26.1a of the rental agreement:

26.1a Under no circumstances shall the hirer ride a motorcyle at the camera because the shot would be really cool.

And it's Red 23 dumb ass!

[Justin Kirchhoff]

This sounds cool. I'll be doing a 24 hour film contest next week with my RED #813. I'm interested to see if we could do it.

[Dylan Reeve]

Dylan, Please be aware of sub-clause 26.1a of the rental agreement:

26.1a Under no circumstances shall the hirer ride a motorcyle at the camera because the shot would be really cool.

I learned my lesson on that one in 2003. But I shot the rest of the day with a broken arm (I couldn't actually lift the camera up onto my shoulder, but I was okay once it was there).

At least that wasn't your camera, it was Peter's.


And it's Red 23 dumb ass!

Yeah. I had a little numerical dyslexia.

[Dylan Reeve]

So a little update on this...

WE WON!!!

Not the whole thing - we are the winners in Auckland... Judged the best of the 230 films in Auckland. We now go on to compete for the national title against the winner from each the five other regions, and probably 2-3 "Wildcard" pick chosen by Peter Jackson.

Craziness.

[Daniel García]

Congratulations Dylan!
Please notice us here when you upload the short somewhere :)

[C.H.Haskell]

Congrats! This is great news...mind filling me in on your workflow in post that you decided to go with?

We are shooting our 1st 48 hour film and RED test on #1781 starting next week friday and I am trying to figure out what would be the fastest post worflow...

A. Cutting and delivering proxies
B. Encoding best take via log n transfer (FCP) into Prores from 2k R3d.

Still have not tested the proxies myself but I hear there has been issues going SD, doing some test tonight and tomorrow.

Again, congrats!

[Steve Sherrick]

If mostly straight cuts, some dissolves, editing with proxies is very fast. I have not cut anything complex with proxies yet, so I can't comment on how that works. I do know that the first Nikon test I did, I was able to edit it straight from the Red Drive using proxies in about fifteen minutes. I then later conformed it using Crimson Workflow.

[Dylan Reeve]

We cut with proxies in Avid. As we were delivering in PAL for the finished product anyway, the proxies provide sufficient quality.

At 2K the H proxy (at 1024x512) is quite good.

Our largest hurdle was audio - we had to manually sync the audio for each clip first (I've since learned of a potentially better way). The import also took a while, but it was mostly at about 3am, and we wanted a nap anyway, so that wasn't a problem.

[Jason Diamond]

hey-
do you not keep your audio embedded in the QT? then you need no syncing

i didnt see if you were recording audio separately.

[Dylan Reeve]

hey-
do you not keep your audio embedded in the QT? then you need no syncing

i didnt see if you were recording audio separately.

Avid is unable to import the audio directly from the QT proxies. Also, I use Redline to generate new QTs in the size and settings I want all in a single directory which is easier for use with Metacheater.