EFP Scenario

[Mark Thorpe]

Hi all,
OK so I didn't want to hijack another thread so started this one. Basically what I was looking at with the other thread was to get some feedback on the possibilities of using RED for EFP work. I am still getting my head around the whole RED concept so if I make mistakes it's just that I am not fully aware of the current situation on certain topics, i.e is 1080P now dropped and confirmed?

The basic scenario is that I would like to think that I could use RED for my future field work. The final delivery format is for regular TV in the U.S and maybe future DVD release, hence the reason for thinking that I could shoot in 1080P and then keep that as a master. If that shooting format has now been dropped then thats a moot point.

Having taken a look into the whole CF card issue I am not sure thats the way to go for EFP, in my situation. I'm looking at being in the field for up to a month at a time which will mean taking a lot of cards for the daily filming so as not be continually interrupted due to the necessity of downloading cards and reformatting etc.

The other issue I wanted to think about is the fact that I'm going to be spending time in dusty places in Africa, Botswana for one and possibly the Namibian Desert regions for a second. I am obviously very concerned as to what extended periods in such an environment may have on the well being of the Mysterium sensor when it comes to swapping out lenses etc!

I hope this thread clears up a bit what it is that I'm trying to accomplish.

How would you guys approach such a scenario?
Equipment considerations require that I be as light as possible.
Glass selection is now going to be different than that required for 1080P?

Cheers,
Mark.

[Michael Schrengohst]

I think the whole concept is coming down to: shoot 4k redcode,
then encode using REDCINE to your desired codec. That way
you always have the largest "neg" and make "release prints"
as needed. So while some are talking about editing 4K, I feel the
majority of RED material will be edited in HD and then encoded
as DVD or downrezzed to SD for release. I would think a MacBook Pro
or some type of PC laptop would be necessary for field work.
I will let some one else answer your questions about lenses.
But I would think, the less lens swapping the better in dusty, sandy environments.

[Cam McGrath]

I have just returned this week from 6 weeks in the Australian desert...shot P2, carried a 2TB Raid drive, Macbook Pro...1800km of rough, corrogated 4WD track, sand dunes, red dirt, no worries. Powered all on Honda Eu10i genny. Dumped from cards every 2 - 3 days. Slept on the ground. Only one big issue on the whole trip, no beer!

Oh yeah, your gear is gonna get dusty at some point! You just have to be on top of cleaning it before it gets too dirty. As for changing lenses, be careful but quick and were possible do it in a vehicle. Driving on dirt roads you should also have the air on 'fresh' not 'recirculate' and crank the fan up high. This helps to maintain positive pressure inside (windows all up too!) the vehicle and prevent dust coming in gaps in seals etc...i carried a cylinder of "Instrument Grade Medical air" too with a regulator, hose & nozzle for cleaning kit.

cheers
cam

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Mark,

I'm basically going to start off with what I typed in that other thread where this came up. But now I know for sure that you're thinking of traveling as light as possible.

But when I think of a field assignment for up to a month... Delivery on 480p or 720p, I would think of traveling light when it comes to some of the gear and especially media/storage. Seriously consider shooting in 2K with s16 lenses or a B4 setup. A 320GB RED DRIVE could potentially store up to 12 hours of REDCODE vs. only about 3 hours of REDCODE 4K. Data rate requirements for 2K are a lot lower than 4K. On the order of 7MB/s for 2K vs. 27~30MB/s for 4K. It may also make a lot of sense to have a couple shoeboxes full of pretty fast CF cards to do most shooting with. They're a lot more robust than a hard drive. And shooting 2K won't require the super expensive ~$200 ones. The SanDisk Ultra III or Lexar Gold ones for $75 each may do just fine for a 2K workflow.

The CF cards may not work for you right now with 8GB (and 16GB sometime fairly soon). But perhaps this will make a lot more sense when 32GB or even 64GB cards come available and if they're affordable.

In most situations, I agree with Red Guy -- shoot 4K for your master. But we're coming back to a few issues in this scenario where that may not make as much sense. 4K takes roughly 4X the storage space compared to shooting in 2K. That's 4X more media you have to lug around, 4X more data to offload and back-up in the field, etc.. Additionally, shooting 4X will force you to carry 35mm glass with you, this can be a concern depending on just how light you need to pack.

Shooting RED DRIVEs is the most economical and allows for the longest uninterrupted record times. But They're hard drives, with lots of moving parts, sensitive to vibration, shock and dirt. More sensitive to other factors like extreme temperatures than a CF card would be.

Workflow considerations... You'll definitely need a good notebook system and portable backup media (redundant hard drives, etc..). Budget is going to play a big role here. Ideally, shooting to RED DRIVE and then backing up to external hard drives (preferably RAID-1 configs) would be nice. If the budget allows for providing enough RED DRIVES, then I would say shoot to those, back-up to external storage and keep the RED DRIVE as a master.

Even though you will be delivering for broadcast, 2K is probably the way to shoot. Besides, it looks like 1080p and lower modes may end up being dropped from the camera, leaving 2K and 4K RAW as the only on-board formats. Initially, 2K and 4K will be the only modes there, regardless of future possibilities.

[Mark Thorpe]

filmnorth - An Aussie with no beer is liken to a Bear without woods!! How's you get through that one mate? Great feedback by the way. Sounds like you had a good time there. I've got my eye on everything with regards to cleaning, sun & moisture exposure / protection etc.

Jeff - Thanks as always for your enlightened feedback. I guess it will be a deciding factor as and when my delivery time comes and to which CF capacity is around for my final decision on storage options. I'm hoping upwards of 8GB. That will make things a bit easier.

For the Glass issue that makes more economical sense all round to look at shooting initial projects in 2K using s16 lenses. It would be a perfect World if I could go straight out there and shoot / archive in 4K but that would stretch me too far unfortunately. If future budgets increase, unlikely, then there could always be the option to shoot 4K at that time.

A lot of the shots, I can only envisage at this time, will be long shots as that gives better potential for more natural behaviors from wildlife. Maybe I won't need to change out the glass as much as I initially thought. At least I hope not.

I'm going to be getting a new MacBook Pro when I get back to Europe in October.

Thanks again everyone else who offered info too. I'm still looking into things so feel free to post if you think of anything else. I'll re-post with any updates.

Cheers,
Mark.

[Michael Schrengohst]

Those are great points. If you use 35MM lenses on the RED what happens
when you shoot 2K? Does the image crop?

[Hans von Sonntag]

filmnorth -
A lot of the shots, I can only envisage at this time, will be long shots as that gives better potential for more natural behaviors from wildlife. Maybe I won't need to change out the glass as much as I initially thought. At least I hope not.

Mark.


Hi Mark,

2K windowed using 35mm lenses will work like a 2x extender. Good for wildlife shooting.

Hans

[Michael Hastings]

Mark,

Additionally, shooting 4X will force you to carry 35mm glass with you, this can be a concern depending on just how light you need to pack.


With the availability of the Birger mount I can't see why you would shoot with 16mm glass unless you already owned the latest/greatest 16mm lenses.

This is pretty much the standard kit for a pro photographer using Canon:

EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM Price: $1,449.95
EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM Price: $1,139.00 about 950-1000 on ebay
EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM Price: $1,699.

and weighs 7.7 lbs. for all three.

These are phenomenal quality lenses even on full frame and shoot the sweet spot in 4K, and even more of the sweet spot in 2K. Plus you get the Image stabilization on the 70-200. The 16-35 was already excellent but was recently redesigned for the new 22 megapixel camera, so the older used ones should be cheaper and still would be fine on 4k and pretty much indistinguishable from the new one on 2k since most of the improvements are on the edges. The other two will probably be updated fairly soon now that the 22mp has been announced.



Mark,

Data rate requirements for 2K are a lot lower than 4K. On the order of 7MB/s for 2K vs. 27~30MB/s for 4K. It may also make a lot of sense to have a couple shoeboxes full of pretty fast CF cards to do most shooting with. They're a lot more robust than a hard drive. And shooting 2K won't require the super expensive ~$200 ones. The SanDisk Ultra III or Lexar Gold ones for $75 each may do just fine for a 2K workflow.[/I]

Additionally, shooting 4X will force you to carry 35mm glass with you, this can be a concern depending on just how light you need to pack.


This is probably the biggest argument for 2K

[Mark Thorpe]

Very valid and well received points,
My main issue with the type of filming I may be doing is that recording times to CF will be very limited, at current card capacities, before needing to swap out. Sometimes I just have to keep rolling to tell a story, as is always best to do with Natural History. Cut it all up later. The RED Drive 320GB seems the best deal for me. I've seen the threads regarding durability but there are arguments both ways on that.

Glass is the big concern at this point. I'm not gonna go out and buy 35mm glass, just not possible at this time. The new full frame Nikon 14-24mm f2.8, and others released to compliment the full frame 3D, don't have manual aperture control on the lens, a potential problem for underwater housing features (?) So I may just go with Birger mounted Canon glass as mentioned but still to be decided.

Thanks all, great feedback.
Mark.

[S. Um]

For EFP, I cannot see shooting 4k to CF cards. Maybe if you shoot 2k at 24p, but even then you don't get that much time. I think the Red Drive is a necessity, but you also need CF for backup. I've used the Firestore FS4 and FS100 for several years now, and they work great except in high vibration situations. That's where you'll need the solid state recording.

As for lenses, if you already own Nikons, you probably don't need to switch to Canon. I believe the Birgir mounts will control the aperture on G type Nikon lenses (the same way it does on Canon lenses without aperture rings).

BTW, it seems strange that you're an underwater guy and you're spending a lot of time in Africa, especially in the interior part.

[Mark Thorpe]

Hi Sumfun,
Thanks for the points. Did you ever run into any issues with regards to vibration having an adverse effect on your HDD storage options? What conditions would you say are max limit for vibrations etc? Driving across African plains for example?

Personally I love all wildlife filming. The fact that I have spent the past 16 years underwater, with the occasional surface interval :ohmy:, has been fantastic. As the old saying goes 'Man cannot live by bread (substitute with water) alone' so I have recently accepted a deal that requires me to go topside too. Hey, so long as I can get to film wildlife I'm happy. I've 'camped out' with a certain fish species for seven month in the past for a 15 minute doco. I'd love to think sometime in the future with RED I could find a way to roam the African plains for a couple of years documenting all of the amazing stuff there. Imagine 4K stock of all of those nice fluffy puddy tats!

Each to their own, I prefer animals, others prefer Angelina Jolie!

Cheers,
Mark.

[Fence sitter]

I came back from a shoot recently, 5 months over 6 continents. In Africa we shot pretty much in the zone of where you are filming. Documenting the San, near Botswana and Himba near Angolla. The shoot was on HDcam with a light weight package. If I were you I would acquire at 2k for the l/w nature of a S16 lens package and its reach and speed. Everything got incredibly dusty and I would vouch for waterproof/dustproof pelican or storm cases. In the case of the drives, I would take spares and would not be trusting them beyond immediate acquisition. I am planing out another international gig and will be taking a Quantum LTO3 a-series tape drive for backup....400gig to a tape and about $80US dollars. The tape machines are quite expensive but cheaper than having to return to reshoot...if that were possible. LTO3 a communicates through ethernet using an FTP client as is very fast to write. Battery power will be your concern. One thing I was glad I took along was two chargers. I had a four way that the inverter wouldn't run off the car battery but was great in hotels and a two way that the inverter would run but would otherwise have been a wake upm in the middle of the night change over deal. Remember red chews roughly double the power of a traditional broadcast camera! Power will be the enemy. Also make allowances for the camera's 90 second start up time....you will have to keep power to it. Make sure also that if you go 2K with appropriately long lenses you will need something in the vicinity of 600mm plus for pretty shots and a stable shooting platform. Much heat will come off the desert of Namibia in the middle of the day and this brings with it a stiff breeze!

Fence

[Steve Gibby]

Nice post Fence sitter...many good points...

Adventure travel and nature production have their own set of unique challenges for sure. I've already launched into my initial shooting in those genres with RED #8. This past week I hiked into a remote location with my RED camera package in a backpack, and shot 4k/24fps footage of elephant seals and sea otters using the RED 300mm prime. I shot some of the footage using just the 300mm, and some additional footage using a PL to PL x2 extender with the 300, thus 600mm.

I'm in shape and strong, so hiking in with the tripod and backpack was a cakewalk. It was calm and sunny, so the different "magic hour" conditions (morning & evening) were just right. I used the RED LCD for a monitor - it works well even in direct sunlight. 8GB cards burn up fairly fast, even in 4k RC RAW - you get about 4.5 minutes per card. I just had two CF cards with me, so it was a "don't pull the trigger unless it's a keeper shot" session for sure. When I can get away with it, I'll also shoot 2k RC RAW - thus much longer storage times on the CF cards.

All went great! Footage looks amazing. Thumbs, stills, and down-rez motion sequences should be posted online sometime this week. More info this week...

RED 16 GB CF cards should be available in October. I'm looking forward to that. Hopefully 32 GB by January, and 64 GB by May 08. Once we get higher capacity CF cards, mobile EFP shooting will be easier. I'll also use the RED Drive when conditions permit.

[Michael Hastings]

RED 16 GB CF cards should be available in October.

Gibby any idea how much the 16 gig cards will be?

[Steve Gibby]

Gibby any idea how much the 16 gig cards will be?

I don't know Mike. The RED 8GB CF cards retailed for $225. As a guess, I wouldn't expect the 16GB cards to be double that ($450), but rather maybe around $400. I have no knowledge of RED's thinking on that, nor do I understand the economies of scale for CF card marketing. I do know that RED has been more than reasonable on the price points for their entire camera system though, and I don't see that changing much looking forward.

For storage, just rough estimating, and this is out of my zone of expertise - a data rate of around 7 Mbytes per second was tossed around for 2k RC RAW. If that ends up being accurate, then we should be able to get around 16 minutes of 2k RC RAW on and 8GB CF card, and possibly as much as 32 minutes of 2k RC RAW on a 16 GB CF card.

That would be excellent storage time for mobile EFP shooting...then the 32GB and 64GB cards would be even better...

[S. Um]

Hi Sumfun,
Thanks for the points. Did you ever run into any issues with regards to vibration having an adverse effect on your HDD storage options? What conditions would you say are max limit for vibrations etc? Driving across African plains for example?


Hi Mark,

Sorry for my late reply.

Driving across the African plains would definitely cause your hard drives to fail. Here are some vibration conditions I've encountered with my FS4 and FS100. Riding on a small roller coaster worked. Riding on an airboat mostly worked, but had some dropouts. Surprisingly, riding on a biplane mostly did NOT work. The vibration didn't feel bad, but maybe the amplitude was larger. I got a few short random clips but most of it didn't capture at all. And all the while, the record light was on on my HVX200, so I thought it was recording correctly. Didn't even try it on a helicopter or powerboat, but I can say that tape works in these conditions (powerboat at ~80mph). Jim Jannard mentioned that Peter Jackson had some problems using HDD in a helicopter, but somehow they were able to work it out.

So I would say that HDD's work well if you're stationary, walking, or in a car on a smooth road. Anything more, I'd shoot flash or tape for backup (or maybe not use the HDD at all).

Surprisingly, shock is not a big factor. I've dropped my drives at least 5 times, mostly from waist level (the belt clips suck). Sometimes they land on concrete, and once I even broke a battery locking tab. But in all cases, they were able to function correctly afterwards. I can't remember if I lost the clip I was recording or not. I was just happy to be able to continue shooting.



Each to their own, I prefer animals, others prefer Angelina Jolie!


Less competition for the rest of us.

Edit - Just remembered that I did take the HDD on a waterski boat going about 30mph, and that worked fine.

[Mark Thorpe]

Hi all,
Please, no apologies here. We're all working hard for our causes.

So what about if I was to look at employing a gyro stabilizing unit? I've seen people use these on jeeps etc when in the African bush, granted they are not shooting to HDD but they could potentially come in handy. I think this will all be moot as and when my time does come though. I'm not planned to be RED enabled until the end of December. Still time for CF card capacities to increase before making any final decision. If shooting 2K Red Code RAW I think they will be the way to go.

Thanks for all the great feedback. Hey Gibby, looking forward to those stills.

Cheers,
Mark.
Re: Gyro Stabilization - http://www.ken-lab.com

[S. Um]

If you want to shoot from a moving jeep in the bush, I would say a stabilizer would be very helpful to stabilize the picture. You may still want to shoot to flash, though, just to be safe. But remember, a stabilizer is a big piece of equipment to lug around and it requires power, too.

[Mark Thorpe]

Yah, CF definitely seems the way to go. OK, one hurdle down many more to go...I hear you regarding the stabilizer. OK, time to set up a spiders web of bungees in the flatbed and see if that works!!

Cheers again,
Mark.

[Fergus Meiklejohn]

Brilliant Gibby!
That sounds beautiful. I'm really looking forward to seeing those shots. It'll be very interesting to see how "pretty" it can shoot.