Using RED On A Reality TV Show

[Jesse Tunison]

A reality TV show is slated to begin shooting in January. My DP wishes that all 24 episodes be shot on RED cameras. I love my RED and it's qualities, but is it worth buying three more RED cameras for a reality TV show. What problems might arise.

[Kenneth Elkington]

It depends on what type of show it is, not all reality shows are created equal.

[Joel Kaye]

A reality TV show is slated to begin shooting in January. My DP wishes that all 24 episodes be shot on RED cameras. I love my RED and it's qualities, but is it worth buying three more RED cameras for a reality TV show. What problems might arise.

Focus, heat, batteries, 2 minute boot times, tons and tons of data.

If your show has a lot of staged stuff that needs to be really pretty then maybe RED is perfect. If you're following people around and capturing tons of footage I don't think so. I think I'd be looking more at ENG style stuff.

Do you really need 4K and 35mm DOF? Shooting RED is opting for a bulkier on set experience requiring more assistants and slower workflow in post in return for top notch images. How many reality shows need that?

[Jesse Tunison]

We would be shooting at 2K. But I so understand the mass of problems now. The REDs would roll at certain times. Canon XH A1's are our B Roll Cameras.

[Tom.Wong]

xh A1's might not match with ur Red as well, although honestly for ur general audience i doubt they'd even notice but quality control is always key. the really question is, do you have the post facility that can give you the turn over that you need for a reality show? i've done work for reality tv and the amount of footage that comes in and the turn over needed for it is absolutely insane. 40 hours of footage comes in and one night, and they have to be logged, ingested, labelled, and prepped to cut on the sans system by the next morning. unless you have the budget for the systems to do that, then it might not be the best thing in the world. should look at ur existing resources first.

[Casey Schendel]

If it was me I wouldn't use red for a reality show, maybe a scripted reality show however. It would really overcomplicate the whole fast paced process + having to transfer and store all that data is gonna be expensive and time consuming.

You'd have to have all the red's equipped with ENG lenses & specific shoulder mounts to make the camera ops feel at home but even then they're not used to a camera like the red which has very little external buttons and no external audio mixer.

Go with an HPX and just shoot to P2 if you want to go tapeless.

[James Press]

Hi Joel,

It's a good question and consideration. I think though that I agree with most other's comments here.

Just so you know, my background that's relevant here is: we have our own studio and shoot a live talkback style show, which regularly runs for about 2 hours. We are not yet quite up to speed but are planning on shooting between 3 and 4 shows a week. We have 2 Reds and 2 Canon XH G1s (the same camera as your XHA1s but the G1s also have HDSDI outputs--we take the uncompressed signal live from these cameras and capture it through AJA IoHDs as ProResHQ). Incidentally, for the wide shots the Canons mix fine and look OK, especially when the final show is standard def (even at 720 it's pretty good). However, once you zoom in a bit closer to a wide-mid (and certainly on a mid) the difference in depth of field, visual noise and colour is very noticeable. We intend to replace our Canons with Scarlet ASAP.

Further in relation to the Canons, note that you'll be shooting to tape in the HDV codec which is 1440x1080, so you'll not only have to ingest this footage in real time after the event, but then transcode it to 1920x1080 in Compressor to allow you to multiclip edit the different cameras in FCP. Between the time it takes to do this AND transcode the red footage with red rocket (see more on this below), don't expect to be editing footage until the next day. (I'm sure you're aware of this but there are some solutions available for live switching, but I don't see how you could employ them with the A1s--see Steve Gibby's thread on Manila's Journey concert.)

The fact that you/your DP intends to shoot in 2K immediately defeats (arguably) the main reason to shoot Red for TV, and that's the visually appealing 35mm depth of field. At 2K you're shooting the equivalent sensor size of 2/3" chip broadcast cameras, that I think would be better suited to this kind of project anyway. (Also bear in mind that 2/3" chip cameras will still have half the depth of field of your B roll XH A1s, so will look prettier.)

The post production for >3 Reds in a production like this, in my view, will be intense to say the least. We have one workstation with Red Rocket, and honestly, Red Rocket has SAVED and CHANGED our life, so it would be a MUST. BUT for >3 red cameras (which your post implies) you would want at least 2 workstations each with rocket.

Just my 2c worth Joel. Good luck with all!

James