Parkour Shoe Spot

[Sean Rawls]

Shot a spec shoe commercial last week in Portland. I think this might be the first Parkour footage shot on the Red . . . but who knows. . Got to work with the immensely talented Tyson Cecka. Recently he was in a K-Swiss ad with Anna Kournikova. Just walking around location scouting with someone that good at Parkour changes the way you look at the world.


The Red performed very admirably. I was concerned with the drop frame issue because we shot the entire day at 110fps, but we never had an issue. We also shot the entire day handheld, mostly to the drive (thing is much more rugged than I expected). When I had to move with the camera obviously we switched to CF card. We engineered the shoot so we could put every piece of gear we needed in three backpacks and walk between locations. I think it's a testament to the versitility of this camera that a six-person crew can produce a professional looking spot.

SPECS:
Rated the camera at 600ASA (impressive!)
2K Redcode 28
110fps
1/96 Relative shutter (so much higher in practice)
We used a S16 Zeiss superspeed 9.5mm as our wide and a Zeiss 11-110 S16 zoom for everything else
Had a Pola and various NDs dropped in the entire day

FOR POST:
Color pass in Red Alert compressed to 2K Prores HQ
Edited in Final Cut 6.03 on Macbook Pro

(While we rated the camera at 600ASA for shooting in post the footage was processed at 320ASA and detail was pulled out of the darks)

Just got an edit together of some footage from the first location. I'll do my best to get stuff up from our other locations but I'm really busy right now.

STREAMING:
http://www.seanrawls.com/Parkour.html
16MB 1K H.264, pretty impressive the footage holds up under this sort of compression

DOWNLOAD (Right-click):
Parkour Download.mov
54MB 1K h.264



As a final note: wow this camera is fun to shoot with, it seems a little bit like cheating . . . Also, does anyone have advice on getting a spec spot sold? Or does anyone know any K-Swiss execs ?:turned:

[hunterrichards]

His eyes were starting to blur...but those were fun images. I want to see some skating like that shot on Red.

[Jean Wallez]

Nice
Were the B4B batterys OK?
Specs and durability?

[Jim Exton]

Very nice, I love watching parkour.

[Andrew Walker]

Will be interesting to see the whole spot when its done.

[Sanjin Jukic]

Amazing and especially the last jumping...

[Cüneyt Kaya]

congrats....nice....did you have any real problems

[Alexis Vanier]

Wow, I got to say I'm rather impressed. The some of the shots are very interesting, there some very nice movements and the cuts are absolutely seamless.

[michael zaletel]

Really cool!

-shooter

[Sean Rawls]

Nice
Were the B4B batterys OK?
Specs and durability?

Yeah they worked fine. The battery pictured is a 130WH knock off of the Anton Bauer system. We used 190's for the actual shoot. The only real issue is that they don't interface with the camera so there is no warning when they are going to power down. As a result, it's absolutely necessary to check battery levels before every take.

The 190's were really heavy for a hand held set-up, but powering the camera and a 9" Panasonic monitor (which is soo beautiful, but also heavy) the 190's only last about an hour and a half. We started the day on the Red batts but went through both of those and two and a half 190's by the time the day was finished.

As far as technical problems, had one instance where the drive got stuck in playback mode and wouldn't exit. I've encountered this before and the only solution I've found is to press record and burn through a useless clip. Also had one really dumb operator error: accidentally pressed the focus enhance button without noticing between set ups. The next take I thought the camera was crashing because title safe and such were missing from the display. So we powered the camera down and restarted it. As soon as the camera booted back up I realized the simple solution, but it was a minor delay.

The only other thing I would mention is that our package didn't have the Red LCD or EVF (PTPS is still waiting for their EVF) and operating the menu structure only looking at the rear on-camera display is a bit of a pain. The Panasonic monitor doesn't display the bottom 200 pixels necessary to see the menu display, so the operator basically has to memorize the menu structure. The moral of the story is that even if you find the quality of the Red LCD unacceptable (at least compared to the Panasonic models) it might be a good idea to purchase it just to help out your operator. Also, for hand held set ups the Red LCD makes a lot of sense. Or just hold out for the Red EVF which is beautiful.