I want to share my newest work and the story behind it. It was a hell of postproduction with one of the worst issues I ever had with the Red One or any other digital Camera.
You can see the Video here:
http://www.vimeo.com/11617046
Attachment 7335
setting up
The Shoot
From the first day the whole Project was on a very tough scedule: 3 weeks for a fully animated 3:30 Clip including the life action shoot of the singer in front of a green screen. This part I shot with Red One (not MX upgradet), build 30 with 4 16gig CF cards and Red Pro Primes - all rented.
The greenscreen was light by cycloramas for the walls and spacelights for overhead and floor lighting, all on a digital dimmer board, to control each one of them seperatly. I always shut off the spacelights above the singer to get rid of this ugly nose light and light him with two 5K tungsten through half silk and a bounced fill sometimes a bit of backlight. Also I used a 80c in front of the lense to rebalance the tungsten lightning. I set the zebras of the red to 60 IRE and exposed the greenscreen to that, wich made the keying with Primatte nearly a one click.
Attachment 7336
shooting
The Trouble
While shooting I found some of the Proxies stopped Playback, but it happened randomly just in some clips from the same CF card. I intended it to be corrupt Proxies, because when I just scrubbed through the Clips (in Clipfinder f.e.) I could see the Footage was there. In Postproduction I planned to make the Compositing in After Effects (CS4 at that time) and use the original R3Ds, cause we needed the 4K scaling possibilities (output format 1080). Some of the Clips just stopped playing again. I regenerated Proxies but still the same. The Footage had corrupt frames, plain green frames, that often occured in the first few seconds. The Footage was there exept these corrupt frames, but no Application (redcineX, redalert, clipfinder, aftereffects) was able to playback.
The Sollution
I asked RED Tech Support and here on the forum and (thanks to all your replies) Kaku Ito (again, thank you very much!) was so kind to download one of the clips and found he could transcode them with the Redrocket. So I searched for a Post House with a Redrocket and let them transcode the Footage. At that time I was so much running out of schedule, because till than not even the Cut could have been made. They got all Clips saved exept for 6, that I really missed in the Cut, but I was lucky, exept for the real big amount of 4K data that they delivered. Redrocket transcodes realtime but just bringing it on an external eSata drive took half a day.
Attachment 7337
Tretmille
The Conclusion
What has happened, where was the error?
Unfortunatly all Equipment was rented (my rental house didn't charge the shoot becuase of the issues) and at the Moment I recognized the failure it was already on another shoot throughout the country. But here is what Red says it could have been: Camera CF Module, Camera Firmware, CF card reader, Fire Wire cables of the reader or the external drives and maybe the CF card itself. I tend to the first two points, because the Backup made on another drive and also dirctly from the CF cards had the same issues. The Corrupt frames occured randomly but were the same on both backups.
Finally I made it and with just 3 days of delay, wich was fine for the Client who doesn't know anything about all these Problems.
Everyone is happy with the final Video (the Label, the Artist and me) and it finally is on Air on MTV Germany.
So good Shoot everyone!
Test your gear (everytime) and stay creative!
Regards
KIM
Originally Posted by Kim Frank
