New RED Music Video

[Nick Bartleet]

Hi Guys,

I recently completed post on a music video which we shot with the talented guys from sonic films here in the UK. The experience of using RED with good technicians, was really superb and having recently used a viper, 35mm & f900 on several different projects, i was blown away with the images the camera produced in 4k. 2k was a real disappointment, but i am hopeful the 3k will be a great alternative.

Anyway, there is a link to the video below. It is the one at the top of the page.

http://www.pixelloft.com/music_videos.htm


Feedback and questions welcome.

Cheers, Nick

[Joel Kaye]

Looks awesome to me. Nice job. There's a lot to be said for the silky smooth look. Perfect for music videos these days. Were you using smoothing in post? Or smoothing secondary corrections anywhere?

2K was a disappointment? In terms of resolution compared with F900 and Viper or something else? Did you use the 4K and downrez for this video?

thanks for the upload - very cool.

[Nick Bartleet]

Hi,

I didn't do much smoothing, except with a couple of the 2k shots where the noise had to be ironed out with the nattress noise removal in color.

I hope no-one bites my head off for saying this, but for slowmo work at 50 frames, i think the viper at 720p 50, seemed much cleaner with less noise, and more detail. I'm not sure if using something like a digiprime would help with the detail, but I did find the difference between 4k and 2k staggering, as the 4k was just so clean and so detailed. I am not condeming 2k, as clearly people have used it to great effect and it may be something we were doing wrong... perhaps we should have used more fill to lift the shadows.

Much of the video was shot in 4k, however clearly all the high speed stuff we used 2k, using the same zeiss standards we used for 4k.

[Joel Kaye]

I hope no-one bites my head off for saying this, but for slowmo work at 50 frames, i think the viper at 720p 50, seemed much cleaner with less noise, and more detail.... perhaps we should have used more fill to lift the shadows.

Nah, people won't bite your head off for mentioning things about RED that didn't seem right. That is a little scary. You shouldn't have to add fill to fix the 2K vs. the 4K. High frame rates at very good quality have always been a selling point of the camera. Let's hope it was just something to do with the firmware build or the way the footage got processed.

Nicholas Bartleet: Director / DOP / Editor / Colourist

Now this is what people will bite your head off for. You can't be all those things. Just ask almost any union person in Hollywood - they'll set you straight. You have to HIRE an editor, colorist and a DP if you're going to direct. ;-)

[Nick Bartleet]

Ha!

But if i hired all those fancy people i wouldn't be able to play with new toys like the RED!

Cheers...

Jack of all trades... Master of none!

[David Birdy]

Great stuff Nick thanks for posting!

I did get my head chewed on a bit for including the RedOne in a Feature article about High-defintion cameras, so it's good to hear that you feel the RedOne can be included with the Sony F900 for quality...It was also my impression and speaks volumes for a camera that was labled as "Vaperware" just a few short months ago!

Can you tell us what lens selection your used?

Thanks
Dave

[Nick Bartleet]

Thanks for the positive feedback

We shot with zeiss standards. 16mm, 20m, 24mm, 28mm, 32mm, 40mm, 50mm, 85mm

Basically we had everything sonic films have in their shooting kit which was quite a comprehensive kit list for us.

http://www.sonicfilms.co.uk/ShootingKit.html

[Visceral_IvaN]

Hi,

I didn't do much smoothing, except with a couple of the 2k shots where the noise had to be ironed out with the nattress noise removal in color.

Out of interest, what ISO setting did you use for slow-mo?

I'll pass on a little tip here. My friend, Paul, taught me a neat trick recently for correcting any shots in RED that have noise in the blacks - if you shot at ISO 320, pull it down to say 200. Then in curves slightly bring down the blacks, raise the mids quite a bit, and slightly raise the highs. Fiddle till you have a reasonably clean image. It doesn't change the image much and you can still have plenty of room left for further grading.

Lovely clip by the way! I liked what you did in the colouring - very sleek and effective! Good job!

[Nick Bartleet]

It was great to work with you too Paul, and i'm sure it was not the last time... took me a few days to fully recover too!

Out of interest, what ISO setting did you use for slow-mo?

everything was at 320 ISO

Pleased to hear 3k is much better.

The post workflow was as follows:
Placed the r3d files on my raid.
Used 2 intel macs running redcine (1 was a quad 2.6 with ATI x1900xt the other was a new 20" Alu Intel Imac). They read from the raid across the gigabit network, and wrote onto external HD's.
I focussed on converting the Band Performance first which meant i was editing in a similar amount of time that i would take to capture from tape. So while i was editing, the rest was being transferred.

It took roughly 1 frame per second on both machines, and about 50 machine hours in total to convert the roughly 1:40 of material to Uncompressed 10Bit YUV HD 1080 25p.
I like working with 10bit HD as i have got used to it now, and it works really well on my G5 based edit suite. I wouldn't use Prores as i tend to go through between 4 and 5 generations of compression / rendering on most edits.


Hope this helps, and thanks again for all the great feedback!

Nick

[Phil D]

Hi Pixelloft,

Great looking music video.