A new way of shooting coverage with the RED?

[Robert Sanders]

I want to see more coverage like RAN. I don't think there's a single close-up in that film, and it works so much better than a lot of today's seemingly DVD-conscious coverage style. I think as more people get HD TV's and HD DVD's coverage will start to move back out.

Agreed. At least I hope so.

Just drop in the Lawrence of Arabia DVD and enjoy the old-school way of shot composition and framing. There were no other formats to worry about then. Just the big screen.

Ahh. The good ol' days.

[Robert Sanders]

Well, you don't really need to wait for a 4 K projector as a tool in referencing size and proportions for bigger than standard Tv screen sizes. I've done mostly TV work, but once it became clear that most of our documentaries would be shown at festivals on cinema screens, I started editing more for the big screen. I still used my JVC CRT and an apple 30" for color grading, focus checks, etc, but I used the S-video feed out of the card and plugged into an old $600 Epson 480p projector onto a $100 100" screen and that did the job quite nicely. I was surprised at how much sharper and clearer than expected the image was (without loosing track of this set up's limitations). So, you can get yourself a big screen monitoring option for very little money and keep it running all day long ($50 for a new lamp every 500 hours), since you should still do most of the grading and critical work on calibrated monitors anyway.

Just my two cents,

Rudi Herbert

Yup. You can even get 1080p LCD projectors for less than $3k these days. Good ones! And run those in your suite. Edit, edit, edit...turn your head, lean your chair back and watch the big screen...make a judgment, and then get back to edit, edit edit!

[vanguy]

Hey Vanguy,

Any suggestions for CRT projectors? The weight and hassle is no problem, come on, if you can't handle that, then get out of the kitchen or the editing room :-) anyway, any models you can recomend?

Rudi Herbert

Check the www.curtpalme.com website. Tons of resources there. And Curt's a good guy, with a double garage full of projectors. He'll take care of you.

I used to have a Sony 1031Q, but it was rather dim, and needed parts. Now I have an NEC PG6000, which is quite nice, and Curt recommends for skin tone. The Electrohome Marquee series are also quite good. Get an 8" ("Intermediate") or 9" ("high performance") for the resolution. The rest is a price/performance equation.

Just be careful when mounting it. I shattered my desk and killed off some hardware when my hoist failed. 138 pounds falling six feet is deadly. :poster_oops:

[beatniq]

You wouldn't have to lay down a track for a dolly or set up a jib for a small crane shot. You could achieve all those results in post while minimizing the expense involved with the actual production.

Punch in, maybe. Pan-scan, yes (ech!).

Dolly shots and jibs, no.

Think about it. How are you going to do a dolly or jib shot from the same exact angle?

[Friedrich Moser]

I want to see more coverage like RAN. I don't think there's a single close-up in that film, and it works so much better than a lot of today's seemingly DVD-conscious coverage style. I think as more people get HD TV's and HD DVD's coverage will start to move back out.

It's already on its way. Just think of BBC's series "Planet Earth".

[Jonathan L. Bowen]

I think David was spot-on in page 1, as usual though, he has great advice.

I wouldn't shoot a movie relying on these kinds of techniques, but it's not at all crazy to think you have a bit more leeway just in case. That's not craziness, that's just a nice safety net. It's true, though, you really want to light every shot for its specific setup, that yields the best results. From my understanding it's even not something most professional DPs want to do to have two cameras shooting the same scene from different angles unless it's some type of stunt or action sequence (in which case it could be more than two cameras and I think always would be), because if you have a dramatic scene the lighting looks different if you have two totally different camera angles shooting it. At least, that is what I've heard from a few professional DPs.

There are a few things I don't think would be bad to do in post with 4K footage, though. One is correcting shaky footage and stabilizing it, because if it's just barely shaky you will hardly lose any image quality and there's absolutely positively no way anyone could notice the difference if you shot in 4K and a few shots are at 90% quality because you had to correct for a bit of unwanted camera motion. I actually found doing a few projects that you couldn't tell even with HDV footage if there was a bit of motion, we were able to get away with zooming in at 105% and fixing it, which wasn't much quality loss. The other application is a very slight zoom-in that would be about like a constant zoom feature on some cameras. If you did that in post I don't think it'd be bad, but I agree you wouldn't want to try to mimic full dolly movements in post because the look I just don't think would be the same.

Still there's no doubt to me that playing in a 4K sandbox does allow for a bit more lenience than anything else before.