I Bloom
12-21-2007, 01:08 PM
In the past two weeks and a half I was able to complete principle photography on three small productions with Red #87 and Vladimir Eugene. I want to post some stills and some quicktimes but I need to do that with the producers and directors I've been working with so that their rights are respected.
I'm posting here in a similar way to my first experience using Red. But I want to note that all of the issues I encountered are known or have already been addressed by Red. As you know Red has made many changes and improvements to the cameras they are about to ship that are not reflected in the body that we are using. Likewise we chose to keep build 10 (v 1.6.4) on our camera, Red had already released build 11.
Here is the upshot. Compared to my first experience shooting on build
6. Build 10 is essentially a different camera, better stronger, faster with more features that made accurately focusing and exposing possible.
Build 10 is like being captain hook and finding out you can get the hand replacement from Star Wars.
But Build 10 is also like being Luke Skywalker, and deciding "I'm gonna roll with the hook."
We had no camera related issues during our first five days of shooting and over the course of 12 days on set we had no issues that I could trace back to firmware (with two non-critical exceptions). I shot in all kinds of conditions, especially some wet and snowy night and day exteriors where the temperature was sometimes hovering around and below the freezing point.
The purpose of this thread is to share my experiences, my problems and the solutions I found. I'm trying to keep things as objective as possible, this is what happened and this is how to avoid these pitfalls.
Production Title: Glossy Veneer, Short Film
Director: Tom Payton
Producers: Alex Cripe, Andrew Renzi
DP: Ibloom
DIT: Vladimir Eugene
Gaffer: Meg Schrock (meg at megschrock dt cm, http://www.megschrock.com)
Best Boy Electric: Adam Benlifer
Key Grip: John Shim (also can do in-key-grip-playback of important takes.)
Best Boy Grip: Travis Tips
Rigging Grip: Luis Colone
1st AC: Alex Peterson (Awesome, yet quietly putting fear into the hearts of production)
Lenses: Zeiss Superspeed MK3's
Camera Support and Lenses: Du-All Camera http://www.duallcamera.com (he's got brand new S4's now, but scheduling didn't work for us.)
Delivery Format: Film-out.
Our first project was a five day short film entitled "Glossy Veneer". The film included among other actors, Lucy Devito, daughter of Danny and Rhea. Shot on location in Greenwhich Connecticut with a mixture of interior and exterior shots.
The first problem I ran into was that the flange focal depth was out on our camera, and I couldn't get it reset because without a depth gauge the process of shimming the camera is aparently very time consuming, essentially trial and error. As you know, Red is replacing the aluminum mount that we were using with a user adjustable stainless steel mount and replacing their first 100 cameras, in part to address this potential problem. The solution to this problem is fairly simple but not desirable: The focal depth is set to something, just not to spec, so make a new ring on each lense with camera tape and lay down new marks. Took me about three hours. Not fun but it definitely works. I was lucky because I took the same package on three productions, so I only had to do this once.
While I was calibrating the lenses I was able to use Graeme's magic focus assist in combination with image zoom. Pointing it at a focus chart, I have mixed feelings. I feel first and formost that I don't understand how it works. So here are some perplexing things:
-If you focus up on a chart and make it sharp, you will see very high peaks. However if you then dim the lights, the peaks will decrease as well.
-If you focus up on something that out-resolves the sensor it will read as soft. This is easy to tell on a focus chart, harder in practical shooting.
In practical shooting this makes the meter difficult to understand. As I understand it a tall peak definitely means something is in focus (though I aim to test this further). But a low peak does not mean that something is out of focus. Focus is relative to contrast here. So unfortunately: perhaps not false positives but many false negatives.
I found that in normally trying to use the assist to make sure that the focus was dead on the eyes. On a closeup we would move the assist bar to the position of the eyes, but it wouldn't pick them up even when I knew for certain they were sharp.
I found that the red bar is terrible for operating since it messes deeply with your sense of composition. Best to leave it off.
I would love an alternative to the joystick. In the meantime I think all menu's should roll over, so that if the joystick isn't responding in one direction, you can just roll over in the other direction.
I still occasionally had difficulties getting the Red LCD up, but the situation was greatly improved. A quick solution to this problem is to jump into the menu and switch to EVF and switch back. That does the trick.
We had another problem, which I determined was not caused by the camera. I'm including it here as a cautionary tale:
Our abbey singer shot for the whole show was an 80 ft dolly leveled to a 5ft elevation change, with limited time at the location, a steel welding facility in Connecticut. This was likely the most expensive shot we did. John and Travis did an incredible job of making this happen. While Meg and crew overcame a herculean task of lighting the huge background in the rain at night. After we completed about 8 takes with the dolly and verified them with director via in camera playback we passed off the card and hurried to move on break down the dolly and relight for a wide establishing pan of a van driving into the location.
After we completed the final shot I came back to the DIT area, and discovered we had a situation. We had unfortunately pulled a CF card out of the reader while it was in the process of mounting. The result of this was that many of the files on the disk including all of the R3D files appeared as Zero KB in Finder. I felt at that time as if I had just drank about 10 shots of espresso. I immediately went into the terminal and looked into the Volume, same story. It appeared our FAT32 file allocation table had been damaged. I put the card into the camera, and it read it as full, but could not play back the clips. Unfortunately reshooting was not an option at that time.
I want to stress that this was not a camera related issue, as far as I can tell the camera functioned properly, created proper files and was able to play back clips several times before we attempted the transfer. This was a transfer issue that taught me that CF cards are not as robust as I had thought. The lesson here is never dismount a card manually, if you attempt to mount a card and it does not show up. Shut down the system, remove the card and reboot. And never, never, never move on without verifying that important takes have properly transferred and will play back appropriately from your archive drives. Transfer is HIGH RISK. You can't blame on the DIT, it is the production's job to verify that the transfer has occured before the move on from an expensive setup. You need to adopt a set protocol that checks the transfer, the same way we check the gate on film. (By the way, Eric from Red was extremely helpful to us, I never got a chance to get back to you, thanks.)
I would suggest also using a Lexar Firewire 800 reader, we were at the time using a USB Multi port reader, for various reasons. I have seen the Lexar mount faster and my gut says that the Lexar is more robust.
If Red could create a CF solution that had a locking mechanism like P2 it would be worth the extra expense.
After looking into several file recovery software options we eventually decided to take the card to professionals. After getting an evaluation from several companies we settled on sending the card to a company in Florida that specializes in CF cards, http://www.lc-tech.com/ I am awaiting to here back to them if the print take can be recovered. It's my fault, I was riding the dolly thinking, "This one's going on my reel."
I'm posting here in a similar way to my first experience using Red. But I want to note that all of the issues I encountered are known or have already been addressed by Red. As you know Red has made many changes and improvements to the cameras they are about to ship that are not reflected in the body that we are using. Likewise we chose to keep build 10 (v 1.6.4) on our camera, Red had already released build 11.
Here is the upshot. Compared to my first experience shooting on build
6. Build 10 is essentially a different camera, better stronger, faster with more features that made accurately focusing and exposing possible.
Build 10 is like being captain hook and finding out you can get the hand replacement from Star Wars.
But Build 10 is also like being Luke Skywalker, and deciding "I'm gonna roll with the hook."
We had no camera related issues during our first five days of shooting and over the course of 12 days on set we had no issues that I could trace back to firmware (with two non-critical exceptions). I shot in all kinds of conditions, especially some wet and snowy night and day exteriors where the temperature was sometimes hovering around and below the freezing point.
The purpose of this thread is to share my experiences, my problems and the solutions I found. I'm trying to keep things as objective as possible, this is what happened and this is how to avoid these pitfalls.
Production Title: Glossy Veneer, Short Film
Director: Tom Payton
Producers: Alex Cripe, Andrew Renzi
DP: Ibloom
DIT: Vladimir Eugene
Gaffer: Meg Schrock (meg at megschrock dt cm, http://www.megschrock.com)
Best Boy Electric: Adam Benlifer
Key Grip: John Shim (also can do in-key-grip-playback of important takes.)
Best Boy Grip: Travis Tips
Rigging Grip: Luis Colone
1st AC: Alex Peterson (Awesome, yet quietly putting fear into the hearts of production)
Lenses: Zeiss Superspeed MK3's
Camera Support and Lenses: Du-All Camera http://www.duallcamera.com (he's got brand new S4's now, but scheduling didn't work for us.)
Delivery Format: Film-out.
Our first project was a five day short film entitled "Glossy Veneer". The film included among other actors, Lucy Devito, daughter of Danny and Rhea. Shot on location in Greenwhich Connecticut with a mixture of interior and exterior shots.
The first problem I ran into was that the flange focal depth was out on our camera, and I couldn't get it reset because without a depth gauge the process of shimming the camera is aparently very time consuming, essentially trial and error. As you know, Red is replacing the aluminum mount that we were using with a user adjustable stainless steel mount and replacing their first 100 cameras, in part to address this potential problem. The solution to this problem is fairly simple but not desirable: The focal depth is set to something, just not to spec, so make a new ring on each lense with camera tape and lay down new marks. Took me about three hours. Not fun but it definitely works. I was lucky because I took the same package on three productions, so I only had to do this once.
While I was calibrating the lenses I was able to use Graeme's magic focus assist in combination with image zoom. Pointing it at a focus chart, I have mixed feelings. I feel first and formost that I don't understand how it works. So here are some perplexing things:
-If you focus up on a chart and make it sharp, you will see very high peaks. However if you then dim the lights, the peaks will decrease as well.
-If you focus up on something that out-resolves the sensor it will read as soft. This is easy to tell on a focus chart, harder in practical shooting.
In practical shooting this makes the meter difficult to understand. As I understand it a tall peak definitely means something is in focus (though I aim to test this further). But a low peak does not mean that something is out of focus. Focus is relative to contrast here. So unfortunately: perhaps not false positives but many false negatives.
I found that in normally trying to use the assist to make sure that the focus was dead on the eyes. On a closeup we would move the assist bar to the position of the eyes, but it wouldn't pick them up even when I knew for certain they were sharp.
I found that the red bar is terrible for operating since it messes deeply with your sense of composition. Best to leave it off.
I would love an alternative to the joystick. In the meantime I think all menu's should roll over, so that if the joystick isn't responding in one direction, you can just roll over in the other direction.
I still occasionally had difficulties getting the Red LCD up, but the situation was greatly improved. A quick solution to this problem is to jump into the menu and switch to EVF and switch back. That does the trick.
We had another problem, which I determined was not caused by the camera. I'm including it here as a cautionary tale:
Our abbey singer shot for the whole show was an 80 ft dolly leveled to a 5ft elevation change, with limited time at the location, a steel welding facility in Connecticut. This was likely the most expensive shot we did. John and Travis did an incredible job of making this happen. While Meg and crew overcame a herculean task of lighting the huge background in the rain at night. After we completed about 8 takes with the dolly and verified them with director via in camera playback we passed off the card and hurried to move on break down the dolly and relight for a wide establishing pan of a van driving into the location.
After we completed the final shot I came back to the DIT area, and discovered we had a situation. We had unfortunately pulled a CF card out of the reader while it was in the process of mounting. The result of this was that many of the files on the disk including all of the R3D files appeared as Zero KB in Finder. I felt at that time as if I had just drank about 10 shots of espresso. I immediately went into the terminal and looked into the Volume, same story. It appeared our FAT32 file allocation table had been damaged. I put the card into the camera, and it read it as full, but could not play back the clips. Unfortunately reshooting was not an option at that time.
I want to stress that this was not a camera related issue, as far as I can tell the camera functioned properly, created proper files and was able to play back clips several times before we attempted the transfer. This was a transfer issue that taught me that CF cards are not as robust as I had thought. The lesson here is never dismount a card manually, if you attempt to mount a card and it does not show up. Shut down the system, remove the card and reboot. And never, never, never move on without verifying that important takes have properly transferred and will play back appropriately from your archive drives. Transfer is HIGH RISK. You can't blame on the DIT, it is the production's job to verify that the transfer has occured before the move on from an expensive setup. You need to adopt a set protocol that checks the transfer, the same way we check the gate on film. (By the way, Eric from Red was extremely helpful to us, I never got a chance to get back to you, thanks.)
I would suggest also using a Lexar Firewire 800 reader, we were at the time using a USB Multi port reader, for various reasons. I have seen the Lexar mount faster and my gut says that the Lexar is more robust.
If Red could create a CF solution that had a locking mechanism like P2 it would be worth the extra expense.
After looking into several file recovery software options we eventually decided to take the card to professionals. After getting an evaluation from several companies we settled on sending the card to a company in Florida that specializes in CF cards, http://www.lc-tech.com/ I am awaiting to here back to them if the print take can be recovered. It's my fault, I was riding the dolly thinking, "This one's going on my reel."