RED Film School Proposal

[Erik Greensmith]

Mahalo,
I'm currently attending the Media program at an arts college fancily named the Sheridan Polytechnic Institute up in wintery Kanaduh and have been trying, or tried, my darndest to convince my program technical coordinator to pick up a Red body. No such luck. What did they decide was a more worthwhile system? Two XDCAM's. I now get to dance the 25 megabit MPEG-2 shuffle and watch my shots vibrate in artifact-filled joy. I'm not bitter in the least. Below is the link to the "formal" proposal I sent this short-sighted man and somehow I feel it neccessary to share with you all. Please, let me know what I said that apparently scorned my school from making their first wise decision. Cheers.

www.redfilmschoolproposal.cjb.net

[mikkowilson]

Ok, I'll comment as I read.

The first problem I see is the title page. Schools are not democratic. They don't like to see students with any amount of power, as the teachers are automatically presumed to be more knowledgeable - which is true.
I think your subtitle makes the document seem somewhat rebellious.

"What the hell am I about to read?" also sounds very condecending.
To be brutally honest, if I was reading this as a teacher or other high ranking school official, I'd stop right here. Your document doesn't show any respect to the reader.

The furthur jokes and misspellings (2.3 "Edukation") don't make you seem very serious either. Words like "Daydreaming" arn't paticularly convincing either.

Unfortunatly the whole document comes off as very unprofesional. It also provides very little actual information that would help convince me to buy the camera.

A full re-write, perhaps with the assistance of a teacher who shares your view, woudl be necesarry for it to be a convincing proposal.

- Mikko

[Mike Seymour]

Since you raised it...
At fxphd.com we will be doing RED courses on line, covering both camera - and in particular workflow - especially with things like the CODEX (codexdigital.com) and Assimilate, FCP, Shake and DI.

We will have guest DOPs covering filming, with technical and visual effects experts covering post production. For us the secret is to show producers an end to end solution that covers On set to effects, editing and grading.
RED will be brilliant but to work in production we need to show a complete workflow that solves everything from timecode to DVD rushes. People need to see everything from on set split monitoring to final film output is solved. Of course a large part of this will be how to film to get the most from the camera, (which will still be of course composition and lighting).

But we'd really like to hear from you what you would like to see? fxphd.com is owned and managed by practicing professionals - so we really value your opinion. What would be useful? What would you like to see covered?

All our courses will be online as high quality downloads. Current courses cover Lustre, Shake, FCP, AE, 3d tracking Maya etc. We are the worlds first authorised online Autodesk training center.

We have camera reservation 22. So you can tell we are very committed to RED.


Mike Seymour
co-founder fxguide.com
co-founder fxphd.com

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Erik, first of all - well done. I am only criticizing because you asked us to. The first page seemed a bit confrontational and used absolutist rhetoric that probably soured a percentage of your readers right off the bat. Once you moved on to the the technical argument and comparisons to other options you were making solid contact. Frankly, with your permission I wouldn't mind grafting portions of your treatise into my business plan / funding proposal - I think the way you laid out some of the advantages of the "digital negative" approach are compelling and accessible to non-tech savvy types. Unfortunately, no matter how well you stated it, the ability for any given reader to get the point of the whole deal is highly dependent on either a solid technical knowledge base or an open facile mind or both.

Not to quibble but, to my knowledge, as of yet the support of proprietary Avid codecs is not been promised as a feature of RedCine. It may very well be included but I wouldn't go around promising it just yet. If Stuart, Rob or Graeme wants to correct me that's great. I am an FCP guy myself but the Avids are great tools if you don't mind the price.

I have never been a professor at a film school or have an ASC or CSC after my name so my opinion may not carry any weight with your institution but for what its worth: any film school that already has a reasonable exisitng inventory of tripods, PL mount lenses, NLEs for DI/edit and the like - and - the willingness to get something beyond the HVX200 or one of the HDV sub $10K cameras - the RedOne is a very cost effective option. It is also much more environmentally sound than celluloid with less consumable expense for the cash strapped students trying to realize their vision. It also has the makings of becoming a very widely used camera accross a large swath of professional applications that students might find employment in. Why do I believe that? It offers beyond state of the art image quality, moderate storage requirements and a price point at or below any "professional" rigs on the market.

IMHO the only thing that will slow down the train is the time it takes for the transition to IT centric workflows, once that resolves, the Red will spread faster than in the opening scene of a Taratino flick.

[Erik Greensmith]

Man you learn things every day. I had hoped/assumed DNxHD would be part of the REDCINE push-through but if it's a no-go then that's quite a chunk of foot-in-mouth on my part. In the end the workflow would likely be shifted to a DVCPROHD 1080p pipeline or possibly even a PNG/TIFF sequence for mastering since, besides the Adrenaline, we only run FCP on Quad G5's. Keep the good word flowing.

[Scott Webster]

Since you raised it...
At fxphd.com we will be doing RED courses on line, covering both camera - and in particular workflow - especially with things like the CODEX (codexdigital.com) and Assimilate, FCP, Shake and DI.

We will have guest DOPs covering filming, with technical and visual effects experts covering post production. For us the secret is to show producers an end to end solution that covers On set to effects, editing and grading.
RED will be brilliant but to work in production we need to show a complete workflow that solves everything from timecode to DVD rushes. People need to see everything from on set split monitoring to final film output is solved. Of course a large part of this will be how to film to get the most from the camera, (which will still be of course composition and lighting).

But we'd really like to hear from you what you would like to see? fxphd.com is owned and managed by practicing professionals - so we really value your opinion. What would be useful? What would you like to see covered?

All our courses will be online as high quality downloads. Current courses cover Lustre, Shake, FCP, AE, 3d tracking Maya etc. We are the worlds first authorised online Autodesk training center.

We have camera reservation 22. So you can tell we are very committed to RED.


Mike Seymour
co-founder fxguide.com
co-founder fxphd.com

Mike,

Perhaps we could co-ordinate an ANZAC request for the RED team to exhibit at SMPTE 07 in Sydney?

The Red team on the ground in Sydney with courses held by you either side of SMPTE would be a fantastic opportunity for us Red owners downunder.

I'm hoping a similar opportunity will be available at NAB 07.

[Mike Seymour]

Thanks for posting your proposal

Can I ask why you would be expecting to master on Adrenaline Online in both options ? Is that just based on what you have or what you think will work best?

Mike

[Mike Seymour]

Mike,

Perhaps we could co-ordinate an ANZAC request for the RED team to exhibit at SMPTE 07 in Sydney?

The Red team on the ground in Sydney with courses held by you either side of SMPTE would be a fantastic opportunity for us Red owners downunder.

I'm hoping a similar opportunity will be available at NAB 07.

A RED team in Australia - either giving a paper or with a booth would be ideal. May be Graeme Natress on REDCODE???

I would love to see a co-ordinated move around SMPTE 17-20 July, 2007.

The timing sounds right doesn't it ...
I think in addition to that a workshop would be ideal...
I know a few of the SMPTE board members - would you like me to kick start this - or would you ? Perhaps an Invitation from them to Ted ?
I suggest it would also be great to see this extend to show RED in production - so Autodesk, Apple etc may be interested in joining a workshop. Just kicking around ideas ?!?

I guess for me - in addition to any papers or booths - a practical workshop would be great to see and we'd be happy to help contribute.

What camera are U? it says 23- 409 ???



Mike

[Chris Kenny]

Man you learn things every day. I had hoped/assumed DNxHD would be part of the REDCINE push-through but if it's a no-go then that's quite a chunk of foot-in-mouth on my part. In the end the workflow would likely be shifted to a DVCPROHD 1080p pipeline or possibly even a PNG/TIFF sequence for mastering since, besides the Adrenaline, we only run FCP on Quad G5's. Keep the good word flowing.

There's a DNxHD QuickTime codec. I would think RedCine would be able to export to that. I'm not an Avid guy, so I don't know what the situation is with using DNxHD QuickTime files in an Avid workflow. (I assume you can do something useful with them, since the QuickTime codec is, after all, from Avid.)

[Scott Webster]

A RED team in Australia - either giving a paper or with a booth would be ideal. May be Graeme Natress on REDCODE???

I would love to see a co-ordinated move around SMPTE 17-20 July, 2007.

The timing sounds right doesn't it ...
I think in addition to that a workshop would be ideal...
I know a few of the SMPTE board members - would you like me to kick start this - or would you ? Perhaps an Invitation from them to Ted ?
I suggest it would also be great to see this extend to show RED in production - so Autodesk, Apple etc may be interested in joining a workshop. Just kicking around ideas ?!?

I guess for me - in addition to any papers or booths - a practical workshop would be great to see and we'd be happy to help contribute.

What camera are U? it says 23- 409 ???



Mike

We have cameras 23 and 409. If you have contacts on the Smpte board, an official invitation from them for the event to Red or a Red Team member would be a great start.

I'm sure there must be enough reservations out of Australia & NZ, tied in with Smpte, to make the trip worthwhile for Red.