Red Scarlet X #316 "Skully"

[Patrick Grossien]

I agree Doug. The 509HD is a different beast. It's not as solid on the movement return as say a an OConner 1030, but it's pretty much great in all other areas for cameras of this size. I'm not using the centering as much as I thought I would as that only really takes a few seconds to balance, but I agree it's a nice feature. My old 503 had the illuminated bubble level and that's something I think every head should have.

I'll be putting these legs to the test on Saturday for sure. We got some crazy terrain to deal with!

Hehe, I'm glad to hear that you like your new head and sticks. (Sounds awkward ... hehe)

cheers!

[Patrick Grossien]

Here's a shot of me under the 536 legs. I'm 5'6":

love it !

[Patrick Grossien]

BTW what setup do you use for your 15mm rods?

cheers!

[Lliam Worthington]

heheh... That's a coooool shot. :))

[Phil Holland]

BTW what setup do you use for your 15mm rods?

I'm using a baseplate and LWS 15mm rod support my machinist made for me. It's extremely similar to the Viewfactor plate, but a little different. Whenever the top is done, you'll see just how different :)

[Mike Garrick]

Hey Phil, another great post.

Interesting point about Manfrotto a known name in stills circles but a name largely ignored in our circles. However their QR system works a treat & is actually, in some ways, more flexible & far less costly then many dovetails & QR systems . I had dismissed this tripod head "as just another manfrotto" maybe should reconsider. Thanks for the heads up.

[Patrick Grossien]

I'm using a baseplate and LWS 15mm rod support my machinist made for me. It's extremely similar to the Viewfactor plate, but a little different. Whenever the top is done, you'll see just how different :)

Hehe. Thanks. I guess I'll just have to stay with VF or RED then... Or get my own machinist ;)

I guess you hang out too much at RED. You got that teasing attitude well figured out ;)

[Steve Murray]

T
I intend on getting the Miller Sprinter II or the OConner 30L legs at some point as I feel that I need a heavier duty two stage tripod than the two I currently own.

Phil be sure to check out the Cartoni H604 CF 2-stage legs as they are MUCH, MUCH sturdier than the Miller or the O'Connor 25L (have owned both). Perhaps the 30L can compare (have not tried those) but the others seem like toy legs compared to the Cartoni's. They are rock solid and about the same $$. Check them out.

[Phil Holland]

Mike Garrick - Totally agree. I have 4 Manfrotto still tripods with heads and love them, but prior to the 509HD there really wasn't too much to write home about on the fluid head front.

Patrick Grossien - I have to admit I enjoy going over to Red Studios Hollywood a lot, maybe they are rubbing off on me. It's incredibly useful to have their studio, store, and event locations in Hollywood. Tremendously good idea to take over Ren-Mar Studios when they did. I was at the first "Red Day" event just after that happened and it's very impressive to see how far the lot has come.

Steve Murray - Thanks Steve, I'll take a look at those legs. I have a few more things on my "list of toys" prior to hitting those legs, but I'll do my best to try as many as I can before purchasing.


Illusion BTS

I just wrapped on a VFX short called "Illusion". I served as Director of Photography. There are still two pickup days left on the schedule, but that's way down the line. Fun shoot. Outdoors, within a "cave" set, and a blue screen with some aerial harness work. A little bit of motion control even.



We had a lot of Redmags on hand, which allowed us to shoot fairly freely, but we had a DIT on set and I even brought my "mini DITy" in case rough color or review needed to happen.



Here's mini DITy setup at the top of the hill a bit away from production space. Redstation, 2x USB3.0 Hard Drives, and a V-Mount charger. Also on the cart, misc grip gear and cables. Flag for the sunlight, and bag for gravity.



On of the interesting challenges we faced on this project was the outdoor work. We were on a hill with a fairly steep incline for much of the first day of shooting. The ground was also extremely soft. Every camera setup required caution and leveling. Things got a bit more tricky when the slider moves came into play.



Importance of Backing your Material Up

Just some words of caution. I had what I what I would describe as a catastrophic computer failure earlier this week. Something freaked out on the power supply and toasted some RAM, a video card, and my main hard drive. This is my primary edit and color workstation and I was in the middle of working on a project. This was my first major system failure in 13 years of working professionally. I was well prepared for this due to a very keen habit of backing up my data regularly and at this point I'm back up and running again without any loss of data. The only thing lost here was time. Word to the wise, back up frequently.


Still Lens Kit

I've been getting a lot of private messages regarding the still lenses I'm using for motion work. Here's my current kit of what is on me most of the time.

Case 1: Prime Kit
Sigma 14mm f/2.8, Canon 20mm f/2.8, Canon 24mm f/1.4L, Canon 35mm f/1.4L, Canon 50mm f/1.2L, Leica Elmarit-R 60mm f/2.8 Canon 85mm f/1.2L, Canon 100mm f/2.8, Canon 135mm f/2L, Canon 200mm f/2.8L

Case 2: Zoom Kit w/ a couple more primes
Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8, Canon 24-70mm f/2.8, Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS, Sigma 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye, Olympus 18mm f/3.5, Voigtlander Ultron 40mm f/2 SL-II, Leica 90mm Summicron-R

Case 3/4: Long Lens Kit
Sigma 300mm f/2.8, Century Precision Optics 600mm f/4.5, 1.4X Teleconverter, a 2X Teleconverter.

The black Storm case in this shot is "Case 1". Handy and rugged, also it's the perfect size to mount all of those lenses vertically:


A few of my Leica Rs stay at home as well as the Canon 100mm f/2 as I tend to use the 85mm f/1.2L or punch in to the 135mm f/2. My older Canon FL glass and a few of my Nikon lenses also get to take a lot of time off at the moment.

The odd monkey in the tree is the Canon 20mm f/2.8. I seem to have a very, very good copy of this lens. Most users I know absolutely hate it. I wish it was an f/2 or f/1.4, but I can live with this for now. I wish the same for my Olympus 18mm f/3.5 for that matter.

You can clearly see I'm a prime shooter, but I'll add the Canon 16-35mm f/2.8L to my zoom kit soonish as I'm impressed by the optics on the newest version. If I can avoid zooms I do prefer primes for a million different reasons. If time or portability is a concern, zooms are what I have to go with.

Another oddity. You may also ask why I have the Tokina 11-16mm and the Sigma 14mm f/2.8. Many have pointed out that the focus throw on the Tokina is extremely short. However, the Sigma 14mm f/2.8 is a much longer throw and much nicer to pull with. Also optically speaking it is a better lens. Less geometric distortion, closer focus, more pleasing out of focus blur, and certainly a bit sharper wide open; which you can see here:




Redvolts

I'm finding that I'm using my Redvolts more and more. A few months ago when I first recieved the Scarlet X I didn't really use them that much at all. However, I'm finding them to be very useful where light weight and compact setups are desired. For instance this dirty vertical slide move was much easier without the V-Mount Brick:




Red XLR Cables

Prior to shooting "Illusion" I zipped on over to the Red Store at Red Studios Hollywood and picked up the new XLR Microphone Cables so we could feed some scratch audio. I did this the day before shooting and ended up gaff taping them to some rods mounted off my 3" inch rods below my top handle, which you can see in the image below. We had a great audio guy with a Sound Devices 744T who worked hard and very well. Never minded being attached to him. However, our HDSDI was certainly in the way a bunch. I need a breakout box or wireless solution pronto.




And at the moment I'm doing a bit of last minute pre-production on my 4k Portrait project at the moment. Shooting tomorrow through early next week. Got my music license coming through this week, and have about 5 days to edit, grade, and export. Should be a fun race to the finish. I'll do my best to document everything. I'm going to attempt a couple of fun things and hopefully show what the Scarlet can do in a variety of situations.

[Doug Beatty]

Nice cart! I feel you on the system meltdown. I had it happen to me last year and it's no fun. On the plus side, you get to build yourself a better machine.

I would highly recommend the Antec Easy SATA for your next tower. I did some testing and found that I can download a full 64GB Redmag directly to a 7200RPM HDD at essentially the same speed as downloading the mag to my desktop (SSD).

I back up everything to a USB 3 drive, plug in a freshly formatted MacOS Journaled drive (FAT32 caps file size at 4GB), and work off the Easy SATA drive as my scratch disk. Once the project is complete, I throw away all the unused clips and only backup files that are used in the edit to my tower's internal RAID. It's a nice way to work fast, save space, and I can playback clips at 1/4 debayer.