"Do it Anyway" A Ben Folds Five music video featuring Jim Henson's Fraggles - SCARLET

[Eric J Robbins]

"Do it Anyway" A Ben Folds Five music video featuring Jim Henson's Fraggles - SCARLET

Last month I was fortunate enough to work on a shoot for Jim Henson studios, serving as DIT. Having grown up with both the Muppets and the Fraggles, it was a very surreal (and amazing) experience!

The video was shot by DP Damian Horan on his Scarlet. Fady Hadid served as Gaffer. Tremendously talented guys.

Directed by Phil Hodges.

 

[Justin Marx]

Awesome..

 

[Logan Gee]

Anamorphics?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Awesome, indeed. Although I do have to say the focus pulling (or lack thereof) was a bit distracting, even hard on the eyes. Other than that, it looked great.

 

[Eric J Robbins]

Anamorphics?

No, just filtration to cause the flares. I want to say we used the Zeiss Super Speeds, but I can't remember 100%.

What I do remember was that we shot in 4K HD, RC 6:1, RedGamma 3, RedColor 3, offlined to ProRes. I was only working on set, so I'm not sure what route the footage took after it left my station / Rocket.

This shoot was really exciting because it was the first time I attempted dailies streaming and delivery on set, using both of the Light Iron apps (ToDailies and LivePlay). I was incredibly impressed with the performance of the apps, and this shoot was a great playground for testing. Considering how much we ended up using them, I will definitely fold them into my regular toolkit.

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

3 of my favorite things: 90's pop culture, Ben Folds, and Red.

I love seeing the camera I have being used to make the things that I love. Constant stream of inspiration.

Eric, did you use any of LightIron's gear on set? Or just the two apps? I'm guessing you had a Red Rocket, converted once to ProRes and once to H264 for LivePlay/ToDailies (with or without timecode burned in)? Were you using a Matrox HD card to convert to H264 faster? Or, how long did the shoot take? I would think that having to setup all of the places to hide the puppeteers would eat up time. If this was a 2 day (or more) shoot, I could see having enough bandwidth just with a RedRocket to convert to ProRes, H264, with time to spare.

 

[Whitney Krapes]

Ben Folds Five is one of my all time favorites! Thanks for sharing.

 

[Sean Cruser]

oh man oh man so much great stuff in here.

 

[Eric J Robbins]

Eric, did you use any of LightIron's gear on set? Or just the two apps? I'm guessing you had a Red Rocket, converted once to ProRes and once to H264 for LivePlay/ToDailies (with or without timecode burned in)? Were you using a Matrox HD card to convert to H264 faster? Or, how long did the shoot take? I would think that having to setup all of the places to hide the puppeteers would eat up time. If this was a 2 day (or more) shoot, I could see having enough bandwidth just with a RedRocket to convert to ProRes, H264, with time to spare.

My on set system was my Hackintosh, running a dual boot of Windows 7 and OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). No Light Iron equipment on set, just their apps. The station I'm using at the moment has a Red Rocket card installed, as well as a modified nVidia 460GTX and 16 gigs of RAM. Since Red transcodes only utilize CPU cores and / or the Rocket, I had Redcine-X output to a folder being watched by Adobe Media Encoder. As the editorial files would complete, Media Encoder would just bounce out an H.264 proxy to my server folder and begin streaming instantly. Since I have CUDA support and the RAM to back it up, the lag time was negligible.

My hope is to eventually invest in some H.264 encoding equipment, such as the Teradeks, so I can offer nearly instantaneous playback. Obviously, the upcoming proxy and Meizler modules are of great interest to me.

The biggest time sink was the amount of customized footage I had to make. Since this project was under NDA, all footage leaving editorial for review had to be watermarked with a unique signature for each client. In the last 48 hours I was on the project, I did nearly 1200 transcodes. I've never been happier to own the Rocket.

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

My hope is to eventually invest in some H.264 encoding equipment, such as the Teradeks, so I can offer nearly instantaneous playback. Obviously, the upcoming proxy and Meizler modules are of great interest to me.

I did some testing on a Teradek from about a year and a half ago. The fatal flaw was that, let's say you recorded for 30 seconds, the Teradek Cube would take about 30-60 seconds after you hit Stop to transcode the H264. If you hit record again within that time, the wi-fi reception to the Teradek receiver would work, but since it was still processing the previous clip to H264, it would skip the one that you were recording next. Perhaps this is ironed out with new hardware, but the firmware I used was up to date, and this testing occurred only about 3 months ago.

The biggest time sink was the amount of customized footage I had to make. Since this project was under NDA, all footage leaving editorial for review had to be watermarked with a unique signature for each client. In the last 48 hours I was on the project, I did nearly 1200 transcodes. I've never been happier to own the Rocket.

Doesn't ToDailies auto-watermark for anyone tapping into it? Or did you have to watermark working-ProRes files for editorial purposes to give to a few different post houses? Ick. I hate watermarks.

But, I will say: good call on the Watch Folder thing; super smart. I often forget it exists until it's too late. I've had some glitches with it, but when it works, it's super slick.

 

[Eric J Robbins]

I've heard similar complaints about the earlier Teradek Cubes, but my hands on time with their new unit (Brik) was pretty impressive. Unfortunately, that hands on was relatively brief, so I'm definitely looking to do a test shoot with one before I throw down the cash.

ToDailies does watermark automatically, and we limited access to it for only clients that were to take footage from set. However, several clients needed footage that weren't on set (such as Lisa Henson, who had final approval over our work), so making customized footage was necessary. Honestly, ToDailies is awesome, but I am not sure that it is practical for delivering every bit of media from the set. One, you're limited to watching footage on the iPad. Two, you can't easily move it around. Three, if the client's iPad doesn't have enough space, it can get a little messy. I think "Amazing Spiderman" had the right idea, which was to use ToDailies for reviewing media from the last day on set, and that is about it (at least, that is my understanding of how they used it).

Again, since this was my first time running dailies streaming, as well as managing our private network, I wanted to limit the variables that could go wrong. We mainly limited the departments to LivePlay use, the goal being to stress test our network and to prevent anyone from walking off with footage. In the end, everything performed much better than expected, and I'll certainly be doing more streaming work once I return to working on set.

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

Thanks for the input/details Eric. Good to hear different perspectives and methods, and good to hear some of the conclusions I've had are backed up by someone else.

 

[Mike P.]

This was all over the local (Toronto) news tonight... Just the new video and the "impromtu" theme or whatever... I was like, "Hey, I know this. It was shot on Scarlet!"