10 Things RED Camera Users Need To Know

[J. Eric Camp]

You tell it ryan!

[RyanKunkleman]

haha thanks eric.
BTW Eric is an expert, and i think he would agree that we are still all learning.
I never have a problem saying "I'm not sure 100%, I need to check"

[onsighthawaii]

.
Get the Best damn Red Tech you can get who understands the politics and set etiquette of the production world.
Goodluck,

absolutely. the worst thing (to get used to) about the red wasnt anything technical. it was the people who came with it into the business. no clue what so ever.

[Steve Freebairn]

and just remember taking a class or reading the forum does not make you an expert.

So true, classes can help and so can a few posts, but it's not unti you've done it on set and lived it until it really starts sinking in.

haha thanks eric.
BTW Eric is an expert, and i think he would agree that we are still all learning.
I never have a problem saying "I'm not sure 100%, I need to check"

Such a great quality to have. It'd be nice if everyone practiced this.

[ChristopherKenworthy]

6. Use Ice Packs with your RED Camera.

It's been a while since we shot our feature, but we shot in hot Australian sunlight, and we never needed icepacks. We just set it so that the fans went off during a take. Between takes, the camera was under an umbrella, and the fans came on. Our sound was perfect and the camera never came close to overheating. Some of our takes were five minutes long, and we often went straight back into another take - still no sign of it overheating.

Have things changed since I was last here? Is the Silent mode no longer available? If it is available, then you need to find something else to do with your icepacks. These days I use them to keep the kids' lunch cool, because we bought 200 icepacks for the shoot and never used them...

[Steve Freebairn]

Have things changed since I was last here? Is the Silent mode no longer available? If it is available, then you need to find something else to do with your icepacks. These days I use them to keep the kids' lunch cool, because we bought 200 icepacks for the shoot and never used them...

Your memory serves you well, as long as the camera gets some time every so often to cool down, it'll be fine, especially if you give it some shade. If you do a timelapse in the sun for hours on end and crew is passing out, then you'll end up overheating the camera for sure.

[Mark Pamatat]

in regards to sync and sound isnt that what the Slate is for at the beginning of each take?

[Todd M.]

in regards to sync and sound isnt that what the Slate is for at the beginning of each take?

Absolutely. I think the idea is that you have a scratch track or merged audio track embedded in picture so you can edit with that and then only sync the master sound tracks with those takes you want to use in the final cut. I can attest that this saves a significant amount of time and money. Though it also helps to explicitly tell your sound-mixer that he's not supposed to mix the scratch track, that these other files do exist. I once had a mixer who went through nearly the whole film trying to clean up the production audio and isolate dialogue from a merged stereo track. I couldn't figure out why our audio sounded so awful until one day I asked to hear the isolated boom track and he was like "what isolated boom track?" That was annoying and not cheap.