An Epic First Day :)

[Elsie N]

Today I think we made some incredibly beautiful shots, in the 3D anything that helps define your depth is a plus and today we shot a scene in the rain. The Epics we bagged for water protection for 3 hours without ventilation and didn't overheat, they got very warm but didn't shut down which was very encouraging. I can't tell you how great it is to have Deanan on set everyday, we are still beta, all the features for this camera are not available to us but the ones that I told Jim I needed are, our red remote is a bnc cable right now. Deanan is working his ass off on set everyday working on giving us more things that make filming easier, any DP who gets an Epic in June owes me a bottle of red wine and I ain't talking 2 buck chuck, we are testing the crap out of this camera in every possible situation and it keeps working like a champ. Today John Frazier our special effects man did his usual big rain and drenched us, the camera was under a 100' rain bar off a construction crane feed by a 5" fire hose, we were looking down and seeing the rain drop in front of the lens while we were on a 50' techno and it worked like a champ until the rain water got so high on the sidewalk it tripped my shock blocks.

John

What Che was to the R-1 is what this movie is to the Epic. And this time we get to read the back story as it is written. So much appreciate this shared learning experience.

 

[Stefan Antonescu]

Today I think we made some incredibly beautiful shots, in the 3D anything that helps define your depth is a plus and today we shot a scene in the rain. The Epics we bagged for water protection for 3 hours without ventilation and didn't overheat, they got very warm but didn't shut down which was very encouraging. I can't tell you how great it is to have Deanan on set everyday, we are still beta, all the features for this camera are not available to us but the ones that I told Jim I needed are, our red remote is a bnc cable right now. Deanan is working his ass off on set everyday working on giving us more things that make filming easier, any DP who gets an Epic in June owes me a bottle of red wine and I ain't talking 2 buck chuck, we are testing the crap out of this camera in every possible situation and it keeps working like a champ. Today John Frazier our special effects man did his usual big rain and drenched us, the camera was under a 100' rain bar off a construction crane feed by a 5" fire hose, we were looking down and seeing the rain drop in front of the lens while we were on a 50' techno and it worked like a champ until the rain water got so high on the sidewalk it tripped my shock blocks.

John

Thank you so much for sharing John.

We all know you don't have much time and we really appreciate your posts.

 

[Joe Carney]

You might look elsewhere - the travel costs would kill you :tongue:

Everything is constantly changing. I'd be on the phone to Torrey Loomis when you're ready to move. But each day you leave it, the better will be the solution. I've just myself discovered SuperShare from CalDigit and I'm all excited about storage again. Who knew?

Do you have any info on the cost per seat for SAN software?

 

[David Lagos]

You might look elsewhere - the travel costs would kill you :tongue:

I know, I know. I can dream can't I?

Either way, the budget has gone out the window. For a decent DIT station for the Epic, I could buy a pretty sweet car.

Still, that car wouldn't have HDRx...

(GASP)

I hadn't considered what HDRx will do to my storage and data management. :glare:....damn.

 

[Steven Caesare]

Each one of those pixels is now 25% larger though with the increased bit depth.

To be pedantic, each pixel is actually 33% larger (4 more bits than the original 12).

As Jeff riightly points out, this helps understand where the additional file size increase Michael speaks of is coming from above and beyond just the additioanl pixel count.

-sc

 

[Steve Johnson]

Picking up on what Michaels comments are about storage and the things to think about for DIT, would this work:
- MacPro with
-- REDRocket Card
-- Fibre channel to a SAS RAID (say 32/64TB) for main storage of footage
-- Graphics Card
-- extra 4 port eSATA card for 2xRED Stations SSD Readers + 2xGTECH Drives for daily storage
-- LTO 4/5
-- USB2 extensions for all the iPads

Just wondering if that could work?

Steve

 

[Francesco Bonomo]

I hadn't considered what HDRx™™ will do to my storage and data management. :glare:....damn.

I may be mistaken, but from what I've read so far in this VERY useful thread those numbers refer to "standard" 5k data...add HDRx and the lowest possible compression and I guess the increase is even more significant...or am I totally wrong about this?

 

[Paul Leeming]

What is important for all soon-to-be Epic users is to start brainstorming a way to manage their Epic data which, compared to RED MX:
1. is 2-3 times larger than MX RC42
2. is saved to cards that are 128GBs (8x larger than 16GB CF)
3. requires window-burned 3D side-by-side file creation (for 3D shows)
4. requires convergence adjustments (popular 3D trend is to shoot parallel)
5. requires 3x copies of all media prior to leaving set each day

Michael,

could you explain what you mean by point 3 "window burning"? It's a term I haven't heard before.

Cheers from Japan!

Paul

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

To be pedantic, each pixel is actually 33% larger (4 more bits than the original 12).

Depends which side you examine those pixels from... All in the semantics and yeah, I worded it wrong. But...

12 * 1.333 = 16 (33% larger than 12bit)

or

16 * 0.75 = 12 (25% smaller than 16bit)
:leaving:

 

[Gunleik Groven]

The difference in available levels to gently map the sensor data, OTOH...

 

[Lucas Wilson]

... And 1 or 2 day commercials aren't going to pony up $2k+ for a small RAID 5 box. ...

Anyway, Small Tree makes (I guess) the de-facto 10GbE networking cards for Macs, but damn pricey: ...

Someone else mentioned CalDigit's SuperShare. That's probably the ultimate way to go at this time, but again, VERY pricey.

Hey Chris,

Not meaning to pick on you at all, but to point out a shift in attitude that will be necessary.

With Epic productions, and especially with stereo Epic productions - the time for holding things together with baling wire on the storage end is over. RED ONE data speeds allowed for a ton of weird and wild storage solutions to be used, because the read throughput necessary was not that high, and there were a lot of solutions that could do it reasonable well.

On paper, there are tons of storage solutions that support 100MB/s reads. In the real world, there are very few that support 100 *sustained* over a long enough period of time and reliably enough that a crew just really doesn't have to worry about it.

Michael very correctly points out the exponential increase in data coming off the set... fall behind on an Epic shoot and you are quickly in a world of hurt.

Lucas

Lucas Wilson
------------
3ality Digital
lucas.wilson (at) 3alitydigital (dot) com

 

[Terry VerHaar]

Michael,

could you explain what you mean by point 3 "window burning"? It's a term I haven't heard before.

Cheers from Japan!

Paul

Paul - Historically, "window burning" means putting time code visibly, right in the video, for offline editing so you can be frame accurate in describing what frame you are referring to, etc. I assume it means the same thing in this context since matching frames precisely would be "kind of" important :yesnod: in matching the L/R frames in Stereo 3D.

 

[David Lagos]

Picking up on what Michaels comments are about storage and the things to think about for DIT, would this work:
- MacPro with
-- REDRocket Card
-- Fibre channel to a SAS RAID (say 32/64TB) for main storage of footage
-- Graphics Card
-- extra 4 port eSATA card for 2xRED Stations SSD Readers + 2xGTECH Drives for daily storage
-- LTO 4/5
-- USB2 extensions for all the iPads

Just wondering if that could work?

Steve

Hope Michael spots this as the new setup I'm conceptualizing is almost exactly like this one.

 

[David Lagos]

I may be mistaken, but from what I've read so far in this VERY useful thread those numbers refer to "standard" 5k data...add HDRx™ and the lowest possible compression and I guess the increase is even more significant...or am I totally wrong about this?

I don't think you're wrong at all. The basic concept of HDRx (multiple shots at different exposures) would definitely require much more storage capacity. I wonder if a lower resolution could counterbalance its use in storage space. Probably not?

Anyone have any ideas or numbers as to how much larger HDRx would end up being per resolution? :confused5:

.....paging Jeff Kilgroe.....

 

[Eki Halkka]

Anyone have any ideas or numbers as to how much larger HDRx™ would end up being per resolution? :confused5:

As far as i know there are two streams, so "twice" sounds like a reasonable estimate...

 

[Jody Neckles]

Michael,

could you explain what you mean by point 3 "window burning"? It's a term I haven't heard before.

Cheers from Japan!

Paul

Burnt in Time Code (and other metadata) into the pictures.... can be shortened to BITC

 

[Peter Lyons Collister ASC]

I completely agree with the core sentiment here. I sometimes think with new tools people overthink these things and forget to just be an audience. Avatar in 3D was so frustrating for me because I kept trying to scan the background and foreground for more information about the world I was watching and found myself trying to focus on things that could never be in focus.

What I believe will happen as 3D technologies mature is that we will get deeper and deeper focus. The whole concept and use of shallow focus in 2D photography is to create the "illusion" of depth because it does not and can not exist in 2D space. Once you add that "3rd" dimension the viewer will automatically want to be able to focus on any point within the field of view at will if it is to feel natural. If 3D is meant to help make filmed imagery more life-like then we the viewer need to have the ability to make the focus choice ourselves, our eyes will then blur those objects that do not fall within our chosen plane of focus. Control and direction of the viewers attention should be subliminal in my opinion and this shallow focus technique only serves to make the "camera" more visible. Just my $0.02.

We can basically agree to disagree on this point. The choice by John (and Marc Webb) as well as Cameron to shoot with wider apertures and thus limiting depth of field so that They can direct the audience to the part of the frame important to the story telling is correct in my thinking.

We aren't talking 80's commercials shot on 250mm with 1/2 an inch of DOF.

What they are doing is similar to what Wells and Toland did on Citizen Kane where they had HUGE depth of field yet controlled where the audience looked by light and shadow.

Our jobs as DPs is to help tell the story and the emotion with light, shadow, color and focus.

Respectfully,

Peter

 

[Jarred Land]

As far as i know there are two streams, so "twice" sounds like a reasonable estimate...

Correct.

 

[Gunleik Groven]

And the current shipping SSDs are capable of handling that @ 5k up to what framerate/compression setting?

 

[Roberto Lequeux]

I wanted to run file size numbers on my own to get an idea of storage requirements and realized we can just do the math based on RC50, which literally means the file will be about 50MB per second, or 3GB per minute.

If memory serves me right, Red already mentioned RC50 will be what they consider a no-compromise RedCode sweet-spot. Some shows might have the law of (very) large numbers on their side to offset diminishing returns and end up shooting higher RC, or even their mathematically lossless RedCode for those wanting the bleeding edge of everything. Most shows will likely find themselves shooting somewhere closer if not exactly at RC50, and do so without a worry in the world about their IQ and the malleability of their (5k!) footage in post. 0.02

Regular 2D
~3GB per minute

HDRx 2D
~6GB per minute

Regular 3D
~6GB per minute

HDRx 3D
~12GB per minute

So again, not scary at all to me considering we are nearing (if not already at) a worthy film successor. Anyway, some of the file size concerns expressed here had me worrying that I might have missed something, but it doesn't seem like I could even if I tried with such simple math. Please let me know if I missed something that makes this redundant or incorrect.