REDmote Station?

[Zach Swena]

Hi,

I work at a local TV station, and one thing I have noticed when touring other stations is the need to upgrade the camera systems. This applies all the way from the local to the major religious networks they are affiliated with. The cameras they are looking at are in the $50k cost range, so epic is an option, however an overkill spec wise. They could save lots of money by going with Scarlet, except for two problems that apply to both Scarlet and Epic. The first is that they don't support 1080i. I understand this, but Unfortunately the broadcast industry has chosen it for their standard for now. This can be fixed with a format converter, although possibly at the cost of increased latency which is not good. The second problem is most of the productions are recorded live, and they perform shading, and some times color balance remotely from a CCU or RCU. To my knowledge RED has not come out with a solution for this. I believe the redmote and LCD screen have this capability, but we need to be able to do it from the downstairs control room, or broadcast truck. It seems like a true RED RCU would open up a very large selection of the broadcast industry to use RED cameras. It will also make the transition to 4k broadcast, whether it be online or on air, a lot more painless as just the production mixers and other processing hardware would need upgraded. Ideally there would be a Broadcast module that could send a camera menu feed and turn the remote commands over the existing triax lines. Then a set of REDmote stations could be bolted together on a rack drawer and feed their output to some rack mount SDI monitors. This doesn't seem very complicated, and the reward for RED and their new customers would be enormous.


Zach

[SeanBrown]

Great ideas but for now the Camera Opps can change the settings with what they need in the control room over the portacom.

[Björn Benckert]

The 1080p issue is only an issue for some editing systems. Today for many of them, before you get the cameras for not so many of them. If you for example soft import 4xHD into a flame or smoke and use quarter resolution high quality, then you have a superb HD image. And at the flip of a switch you have 4 times the resolution at any stage needed trough out the editing and online process.

Autodesk has it now and so does nuke. Premiere also work with the given resolution and I think avid and the others will have to adapt or die, the same goes for TV stations. Setting it up now / today to work for a max of 1080p is basically not forward thinking. Thats like investing in digibetas when others are all ready buying HD cam decks.

I think if a TV station bought epics instead of expansive HD cameras and also adapted to a red code workflow. They would very much stick out from the rest in terms of quality. Further more they would attract a whole new/different kind of camera crew and also editors, and people doing grading.

The quality would shine and make that station looking ahead instead of behind. They would then gain more advertising incomes and things would go in a positive way from that point on.

It's all quite simple even though it might look complicated.

A TV station would have no problem having a few render machines with 6 red rockets each. Then you convert the material faster than realtime and you can grade on the fly. Thats better than you had using tapes...

So Buy a couple of 12core mac pros filled with red rockets, attach super sized fiber raids, san fiber networking, a few smokes licenses and resolve and redcinexpro on each of the machines and then have PC's with san fiber network cards and premiere.... And buy a couple of epics.

If you got that then I think your competition should feel more than a bit nervous. You can also live feed from the epic with red gamma3 and your news would look better than most especially with some on the fly secondary grading.

Just my ideas, could not stop think of how easy and cheap it would be to put up a top of the line TV station with todays RED workflow.


when I was doing TV we got the Editbox and Hal... 6 minutes of PAL storage, if you had the "big HAL" that was :)

[Ryan De Franco]

Too much risk for the big boys with all the money.

You can do it the way everyone else does, make about the same, order the replacement kit from a company your regional supervisor has trusted for years if not decades.

or you can go with the cool camera all those younger people are making movies on, for which "post is a bitch," spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a workflow that overwhelms your needs and your capabilities, hopefully not get fired, in exchange for....

a more filmic weather girl?

forgive me for being crass here, but people like their news crisp and video-looking. I fully support the independent ENG/EFP producers who shoot Red but for entire networks to make this switch is like asking the legal system to switch to iPads, too much too fast not worth the money and risk in old rich men's eyes.

[J.D. Frey]

... too much too fast not worth the money and risk in old rich men's eyes.

Probably depends on the old man. :)

[Elsie N]

It seems the RC3/RG3 output from the camera could be a big plus for going straight from camera to on-air.

[Zach Swena]

Björn, I think you miss my point. RED makes great cameras for those who do post editing. For the part of the industry I'm talking about, LIVE is the key. For this, what you see on a live broadcast, there is live production mixing hardware. Many stations have invested tens of thousands of dollars in upgrading their production mixers, and most of the mixers on the market only support 1080i. So this is not a software issue, it is a hardware one. All of the productions I'm connected with are supported by donations, so the mixers are here to stay for quite a while. I have a feeling though that the for profit stations would not look nicely on replacing their new mixers either. They may post edit to fix mistakes before the next air or for DVD distribution, but they only have one chance to get a shot. The camera operator's job is to frame and focus the shot. By the time it is framed it needs to be able to go on air, because there are no second takes. The work load and shot setup time could easily double if the camera operator also has to do iris and color balance. We do this at some of the shoe string studios, but we also take a fairly large quality hit. This also would not be feasible over intercom, because the camera operator can't see all of the other shots in the cue to match with. There also need to be 2-4 shots ready at any time, so it is a continual process.

Ryan, I am aware of the differences in look between RED and the standard ENG cameras. Shallower DOF is sometimes a bad thing in broadcast, but there are ways of fixing that. For one, sensor cropping in 2k mode and stopping down could work when deeper DOF is needed, but there would still be much greater flexibility with the RED cameras.

RC3, RG3 might be able to eliminate the need for color balence on camera to air systems assuming the lighting stays the same color temp, but that is not always the case between house and stage for event shoots. The bigger issue though is the need for a shading station. Is there a way to accomplish that currently, or would it require something like a RedMote Station?

[Joseph Ward]

I and others have and will always want Red to include a LIVE BROADCASTING capability for their cameras. They have stated that this may come true, when is another story. Here is the last of any such news. Recon Proxy Module.

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthr...3-Proxy-Module

[Zach Swena]

It is nice to see they considered stuff that can help in live broadcast, but I don't see that module as really much use for live without the functionality I am calling for. It would be great to see a red wireless streaming solution, but that only works for smaller projects where shading and color can be done in camera. HD-SDI is the standard for broadcast, the only time h264 would be tollerated would be for wireless roving cameras where low latency is necissary. Any other use would not call for an on camera module, but a rack unit connected to the program output. We just need to be able to get the on screen menus down to the basement production room or out to the broadcast truck with a remote to controll the main functions. Theoretically this could be done with a Sdi adapter for the evf port and a network extender for the redmote, but that would require development support from RED and I would rather see a triax or other single cable solution from RED. One cable for signal to mixer, menu overlays and remote control. If this was availible I could personally make recomendations to several studios and stations to go red and it would more then half their upgrade cost. This represents well over 15+ scarlets.

[Zach Swena]

I guess another question is what other reasons would prevent Epic or Scarlet from being used on a broadcast event style shoot? From what I have gathered, the main issues are shallow DOF, no 1080i, and no RCU/CCU. The DOF is the only issue that can't be fixed fairly easily and from other reading on this forum, it can be compensated for by stopping down and or sensor crop. With scarlet available cost is not an issue either. I don't know of any sizable productions that use cameras cheaper then the $15-$20k price range. Is there anything else that prohibits RED from entering this market? I understand RED's focus on cinema as their core business, but why wouldn't they want to broaden their costumer base with a few accessories. I hope RED isn't developing a cinema exclusive attitude like some of my friends have started to think. There are actually professionals in other fields too...