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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

1,000,000 feet of film : something to think about.....

ShannonRawls

ShannonRawls

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One of my favorite directors of all time, Michael Bay, used 1-million feet of film while making one of his great action movies. The movie ended up only using 20-thousand feet for the final.

That equates to One Thousand reels of 1,000 foot cans, down to Twenty cans for the final print.

If we assume my man Jerry Bruckheimer bought the best stock for Michael, something like Vision II, then it's safe to assume each reel costs about $600 bucks a pop. (maybe less due to the volume).

That means the production spent roughly $600,000.00 USD on raw film stock to shoot the movie and kept only $12,000 worth in the end....throwing away $588,000.00 USD worth of exposed film.

RED owners.....

.....sleep with confidence tonite. *smile*
 
You can also think about it this way -- if Michael Bay isn't going to care how much he spends on film stock, why would he start caring now? If someone like him switches to the RED camera, it will probably be for image reasons primarily, not cost savings. Unless his budget for "Transformers 2" is half that of the first one... This is a guy who switched back to the more-difficult and expensive anamorphic format after trying Super-35 again on "Bad Boys 2", so clearly he has very definite ideas about how he wants his movies to look.
 
How many editors does it take to screen a million feet of film? Also, how many CF card offloads would that take? (rhetorically speaking)
 
number6 said:
How many editors does it take to screen a million feet of film? Also, how many CF card offloads would that take? (rhetorically speaking)
Click to expand...

That's about 183 hours worth of film. REDCODE RAW 4K runs around 100 GB/hour, so that would be 18.3 TB of footage, or 2287 CF cards at 8 GB each. More in practice, since you'll rarely fill a card all the way.

The good news is we'll probably be shooting to CF cards that are four times that size a year from now.

At current market prices that footage can be downloaded to around $10K worth of hard drives and backed up on $2500 worth of data tape.

And sure, major Hollywood blockbusters can afford to shoot as much footage as they like, on pretty much whatever format they like. But not every production has that much money. (Of course, a cash-strapped production probably isn't going to have a 90:1 shooting ratio in the first place.)
 
On his films he has approx 3 editors.

But the bay-ster is not the only gent to expose can after can... Peter Jackson did it, as did Kevin Costner for "Wolves"... I am sure many of you could add to this list. I would assume having multiple editors on large shows to be pretty common depending on the director, creatives, etc.

Film Stock price is irrelevant. Or to be less inflamitory, it's fairly low on the budgetary list of problems. On a film the size of bay's actioners, the above the line costs of "main-man Bruckheimer" and Co are probably a much larger bone of contention than the cost of raw stock.

Actually -- there is REDS new product! REDabovethelineONE -- if they could make a box that knocks those fools out of the budget then you would have something!
 
David Mullen ASC said:
You can also think about it this way -- if Michael Bay isn't going to care how much he spends on film stock, why would he start caring now? If someone like him switches to the RED camera, it will probably be for image reasons primarily, not cost savings. Unless his budget for "Transformers 2" is half that of the first one... This is a guy who switched back to the more-difficult and expensive anamorphic format after trying Super-35 again on "Bad Boys 2", so clearly he has very definite ideas about how he wants his movies to look.
Click to expand...

David:

I know you're right, but what's your guess as to why they wouldn't care about $500,000 or $600,000? Even though it's a small percentage of the overall budget, most businesses demand that their people save a half million whenever they get the chance. Why doesn't Hollywood care and do you think that will change?
 
TimPipher said:
David:

I know you're right, but what's your guess as to why they wouldn't care about $500,000 or $600,000? Even though it's a small percentage of the overall budget, most businesses demand that their people save a half million whenever they get the chance. Why doesn't Hollywood care and do you think that will change?
Click to expand...

I'm just speculating here, but I'd say that they feel more comfortable right now spending $600k on a tried and true workflow than they would spending less on something that's still in the teething phase. Also, in the grand scheme of things, letting an A-list director shoot his format of choice is probably worth the extra money as I don't think it would go over to well if Bob from accounting got to dictate to Michael Bay what camera package he could use. :biggrin:

-A
 
It's not that they don't "care" about the costs but they also care about the quality, reliability, and archivability of what they shoot on, and 35mm is a standard for image quality with a well-established, well-known workflow, distribution, and archiving scheme.

When something digital comes along that does everything 35mm does in all those areas, and has a well-known history of being reliable, and is cheaper to boot, then more producers and studios may mandate digital origination just as they mandate 35mm origination now.

But they will also probably let powerful successful directors pick what they want as long as it fits within the budget (though not always --- I read that Tony Scott wanted to shoot "Man on Fire" partially in Super-16 and the studio pushed him to shoot in 35mm. And Spielberg had the head of the studio fly out to Poland to beg him to not shoot "Schindler's List" on b&w film, but Spielberg held firm.)

Studios aren't exclusively concerned with saving money. When I wanted to shoot on Fuji film for "Astronaut Farmer", the studio told me that I could only use Fuji for artistic reasons, not to save the production money, because otherwise, they were more comfortable with me shooting on Kodak like everyone else. So technologically, studios are VERY conservative -- if using Fuji instead of Kodak makes them uncomfortable, imagine the song-and-dance when directors want to shoot expensive productions in a non-traditional format like digital.

Look at the archiving issue -- after the movie is finished, what do you with the many hours of original 4K RAW REDCODE-compressed footage, not just what was used in the final cut? You could stick it all onto LTO tapes, but it's got a unique Bayer-pattern and a compression scheme that would need to be handled if someone took out these tapes twenty years for now, let's say. So do you save a copy of REDCODE with the 4K RAW footage? Do you take all those hours of footage and convert it to 4K RGB uncompressed and store that on many, many more LTO tapes?
 
from imdb

transformers....this is what it takes to go through 1,000,000 feet of film



Film Editing by
Tom Muldoon (as Thomas A. Muldoon)
Paul Rubell
Glen Scantlebury

Editorial Department
Edward Albolote .... apprentice editor
Ken Blackwell .... associate editor
Des Carey .... digital intermediate producer
Salvatore Catanzaro .... on-line editor
Danielle Daly .... post-production coordinator
Rob Doolittle .... senior digital on-line editor
Dan Goslee .... digital intermediate assistant
Adam Kimmerlin .... assistant editor
Todd E. Miller .... additional editor (as Todd Miller)
Jerimiah Morey .... assistant colorist
John Murray .... additional editor
Missy Papageorge .... digital intermediate producer
Jim Passon .... color timer
Erik Rogers .... digital intermediate producer
Eric Rolnick .... editorial technician: Digital Domain
Chris Scharffenberg .... post-production assistant
Stefan Sonnenfeld .... digital intermediate colorist
Kevin Stermer .... post-production assistant
Jimmy Tom .... digital intermediate colorist
Ian Turpen .... digital intermediate scanner: Company 3
Matt Willard .... post-production assistant
Lawrence Howard Williams .... post digital media operator
Calvin Wimmer .... first assistant editor: avid
Lindsay Brayden .... post-production assistant (uncredited)
 
BTW most of the people at Company 3 credited, are already checked out on running REDCODE through their pipeline...we have been helping them out at Red's request.
 
one solution for archiving that has been discussed is just keeping all of the CF cards used as is...and putting those on a shelf.
 
kosmos3d said:
one solution for archiving that has been discussed is just keeping all of the CF cards used as is...and putting those on a shelf.
Click to expand...

Yes, but that doesn't address the issue of long-term storage of a 4K Bayer-filtered RAW file compressed using REDCODE, and how decipherable that sort of information will be decades from now. Maybe it's not a real problem, I don't know.
 
Malick shot like 3 million feet for the Thin Red Line, so give credit where credit is due. :)
 
I think it's in the making-off from Magnolia where they go into what features have shot more than a million feet (like Titanic). The context was that P. T. Anderson was hiding from his UPM because he was fast approaching a million and the budget was veering into 'danger' zone... and the implication from his UPM seemed to be that Magnolia was no Titanic.

So I guess film stock costs does have an effect on the psyche of at least the UPM's. :greedy:
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Look at the archiving issue -- after the movie is finished, what do you with the many hours of original 4K RAW REDCODE-compressed footage, not just what was used in the final cut? You could stick it all onto LTO tapes, but it's got a unique Bayer-pattern and a compression scheme that would need to be handled if someone took out these tapes twenty years for now, let's say. So do you save a copy of REDCODE with the 4K RAW footage? Do you take all those hours of footage and convert it to 4K RGB uncompressed and store that on many, many more LTO tapes?
Click to expand...

You really could just process to RGB and dump to tapes, with a Hollywood budget. Some quick math shows it would still be substantially cheaper than film, even if you make two or three copies. (Try making a lossless copy of an original camera negative.) And it doesn't have to be all that labor intensive; tape autoloaders are an established technology.

That said, a better approach would be for Red to publicly release source code for a simple REDCODE RAW decoder. That source could be archived to whatever media was used to archive footage. If it required nothing but a C compiler and standard libraries to run, it would be runnable with little trouble on any general-purpose computing platform for the foreseeable future.
 
TheThe said:
... and the implication from his UPM seemed to be that Magnolia was no Titanic.

So I guess film stock costs does have an effect on the psyche of at least the UPM's. :greedy:
Click to expand...

Good thing Titanic is no Magnolia :-)
 
Sorry me again. A friend of mine who for a while was to be produced by Michael Mann saw Miami Vice before release and he mentioned it had a shooting ratio of 1 to 240 (if memory serves me well, it was something outrageous).

Now I hate to be the devils advocate here but that is what happens if you suddenly have the possibility and freedom to shoot more. I mean, that I myself fell asleep during this movie (I'm really sorry MIchael I love your films to death but that one I rather forget). I know it was a huge success in the states but it didn't do that well in Europe (didn't do to bad, but not that well). I think that movie could have been great if he had less freedom. If he was forced to think creatively instead of shooting the crap out of it and then leave it to editing. Just imagine if it would have had the same feeling as "Heat", wow that would have been great.

fred
 
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