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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 :)

The Cold in Canada

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Method,

You make some very good points here.

We shot across Canada, the Arctic, sub zero, high winds, low temperature. I mean COLD COLD COLD shoots for an entire winter when I was making the film about outdoor hockey.

Mountains, altitude, snow, damp, dry. You name it. We shot hours of footage without one major problem. I think it was close to -40C and put the wind chill on that.

The worst we had was some RF noise on one shoot in Ottawa at about 1 am in the middle of January.

On one shoot, it took more than 24 hours for the Sacthler Tripod head to come to room temperature, but the footage was totally usable. All we ever had on the camera was a blue porta brace cover. That's it!

That's the bar.

David
 
Just to clarify; some here used WIND CHILL temperatures to state conditions in which RED would operate: the wind chill is "the apparent temperature felt on exposed skin due to the combination of air temperature and wind speed"; the cam won't experience WIND CHILL and ACTUAL temperature can be used.

"Wind Chill" is mainly used by the media to make it sound even worse: It's 5°C, BUT WITH WIND CHILL IT'S MINUS 100°C!!!...they love that sort of stuff. Let's not do this here... :)
 
Pig said:
Just to clarify; some here used WIND CHILL temperatures to state conditions in which RED would operate: the wind chill is "the apparent temperature felt on exposed skin due to the combination of air temperature and wind speed"; the cam won't experience WIND CHILL and ACTUAL temperature can be used.
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Not true. Wind chill is the effect of air circulation over a conductive surface (let's say an aluminum camera body) and it can indeed lower the surface temperature below ambient. A great example of this is on a night that's 32F with a wet road. The road has enough retained warmth from the day to keep the water from freezing, and the temperature is right at the freeze/thaw point anyway. Wind can blow across the road and drop the surface temperature by a couple degrees and make ice. Just like air circulation over a heat-sink to cool electronics. How much of a cooling effect depends on how much air flow, the surface conductivity and how much surface area is exposed, the amount of humidity in the air, etc.. For the human body, the amount of wind-chill, if not properly protected, can often mean the difference between being comfortable in cold temperatures and hypothermia or frost bite.

Wind chill shouldn't be much of a factor for RED if proper precautions are taken -- use an insulated cover or wind-break. You'll want to cover it anyway if you're in a windy situation, regardless of temperature, to protect from airborne debris and moisture.

"Wind Chill" is mainly used by the media to make it sound even worse: It's 5°C, BUT WITH WIND CHILL IT'S MINUS 100°C!!!...they love that sort of stuff. Let's not do this here... :)
Click to expand...

Yes, sadly this is true. The media loves to sensationalize anything, even the weather. I often wonder how it can be 25F outside with steady 10MPh winds and the media will say "it feels like -40F".

Wind chill aside, I NEED RED to work down to -25F and colder than that would be welcomed. Regardless of what the actual temperature rating turns out to be, I will have to find a practical solution to make it work at these temperatures. I also need it to work in 120F heat too and will have to find solutions there too -- cold packs / fans.

If RED can't operate in such temperatures, then I will probably have to choose to buy a different camera or none at all. The rationale of "just take the camera inside a vehicle or warm area doesn't apply here. That's fine and dandy on a narrative set or the base of a ski slope or whatnot, but what if I'm 15 miles into complete wilderness, hanging off the side of a mountain? I'm also not too keen on the idea of putting RED into a bag and piping the exhaust from a snowmobile through the bag to warm it up... Actually had someone suggest that to me yesterday. Heh. Don't always have one of those with me either.

I agree with sentiments in this thread and the other cold threads... For RED to be widely accepted as a work-horse camera, it will have to go everywhere an ARRI 435 or a Panaflex camera can go.

Oh, and Sony corporate does claim 0C / 32F as the low end of most of their pro cameras. However, local Sony reps and dealers commonly guarantee operation down to -22F / -30C when you purchase in this part of the world with a service contract. And they work... Same with Panasonic I regularly use the Varicam in temps down to -25F with nothing more than a simple cover or plastic bag to keep blowing snow away from it. I used the HVX200 all last winter, cold starting in temps as low as -30F. The LCD would have some issues at -24F and colder, but never unusable. The Varicam cold-starts at these temps without a hitch as long as the batteries are kept in my pockets and don't freeze. Once running the batteries keep warm enough from the power draw, same with the HVX.

 
hubickc said:
Yesterday I went out to do a half day shoot with two REDs. The temp was -15C, with the wind it made it feel like -20C. I and the camera were outside for a total of 4hrs...
...Everything looked fine, and both camera's showed no signs that anything was going wrong. No error messages, no lockups. When I got back to my edit suite, and loaded the footage I noticed that over half the footage that I shot was corrupt. The RAW files have the same problem, and is not isolated to the quicktime wrappers...
...RED Team, what's up?
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I'm guessing the corruption is visible when you play those corrupt shots back off CF card, on the camera LCD/VF?

If so, I wonder if the RED team can implement displaying a sort of confidence read of the CF card. Ie. analogous to the CONFI head play OFFTAPE in a DigiBeta recorder. So there would be a switch to go from looking at the data going into the record stage as normal, to a (delayed?) feed looking at data read off the CF immediately after it's been recorded? :nerd:

A kind of What You See Is What You GOT?
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
A great example of this is on a night that's 32F with a wet road. The road has enough retained warmth from the day to keep the water from freezing, and the temperature is right at the freeze/thaw point anyway. Wind can blow across the road and drop the surface temperature by a couple degrees and make ice.
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Jeff, that example is good, but what I meant was, to use your example, the road can't go BELOW 32°F (the air temperature).
Hence an outside temperature is what it is.....32°F as an example. The wind chill doesn't make it go BELOW 32°F, just that our skin makes us FEEL like it's colder.

Of course, your point about wind being able to cool an item down FASTER to the air temperature is 100% correct.


Just to clarify: having a cam NOT work at 0°C is totally unacceptable IMHO, and this issue needs resolving one way or another, either:
1) by RED
or
2) by an after market product
 
skipdivils said:
Of course, I have a better solution. This is now the PERFECT excuse for me to tell clients, 'I don't do cold outdoor jobs'.
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I'm with you skip! Not even the end of December yet and I've done about 6 days outdoors. I though commercial-land was supposed to be all padded apple-boxes and starbucks!

I'm not sure I'd be comfortable strapping burning handwarmers to any camera body. Yikes!
 
Pig said:
Jeff, that example is good, but what I meant was, to use your example, the road can't go BELOW 32°F (the air temperature).
Hence an outside temperature is what it is.....32°F as an example. The wind chill doesn't make it go BELOW 32°F, just that our skin makes us FEEL like it's colder.
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I don't want to argue this with you... But you might want to do a little more research on heat dissipation and heat transfer via fluids on conductive surfaces. My road example wasn't the best as it's ambiguous, but still applies and I should perhaps have made it more clear. Such as a road at 34 degrees (not quite freezing), but a sustained wind of sufficient velocity can in fact cool the surface enough to freeze the water. Here's a hint, go look for aviation links rather than "wind chill" to see the effects of air-flow over aluminum and other conductive surfaces.

I'm truly only concerned about "wind chill" in situations where winds are steady at 20MPH or higher. Less than that, there is little to no hyperconductive heat transfer from metallic surfaces and "wind chill" is just a "feel" factor. So in most cases, you are right -- "wind chill" is a matter of how cold it "feels" because of the faster cooling effect. But "wind chill" can have a very physical, temperature changing effect in high-velocity winds and/or depending on the conductivity of the materials involved. Aluminum transfers heat like mutha...


Just to clarify: having a cam NOT work at 0°C is totally unacceptable IMHO, and this issue needs resolving one way or another, either:
1) by RED
or
2) by an after market product
Click to expand...

Yep. If I would have had a RED and wanted to do a timelapse sunset from my driveway this morning, I would've been in trouble. It was 8F / -12C here at 7AM today. Cold is relative... My doofus neighbor walks outside in his boxers and flip-flops and walks through 3 inches of snow to pick up his newspaper.... I at least put real shoes on, I hate flip-flops.
 
All this whining I'm doing here...

I fully understand and accept that the RED camera my not function without help below freezing 0C / 32F. But I think we need some solid answers and some solid workflow recommendations or procedures to make it work and what gear to use. Because RED can't just be a fair-weather camera. It will cut out too much of the potential market for it and I have too many clients eager to use RED for upcoming projects that will involve shooting in the cold. I can always jump back and shoot Varicam or some other HD camera, but that isn't what they're going to want and I will have to charge them less while it costs me more due to rentals, etc..
 
Don't like flip-flops Jeff? No Cheeseburger in Paradise for you.

Seriously though, I do think that RED has gotten the message that cold weather operations are important to a lot of folks. The forum is providing the proper feedback loop, the ball is in their court.
 
Pig said:
....he says, and proceeds to argue with me! :)
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I understand the irony in it. Sad thing is Jeff is completely right about wind chill.
 
Blair S. Paulsen said:
Seriously though, I do think that RED has gotten the message that cold weather operations are important to a lot of folks. The forum is providing the proper feedback loop, the ball is in their court.
Click to expand...


I agree with Blair, I think Red should put their matte-box development on hold and Rent a walk-in Fridge, open up one of those bad boys and poke and prod. If the Fridge is too big to fit through the door then might I suggest Winnipeg Manitoba Canada as a base for cold weather testing? Come on Jarred, you must have heard of this place :)

Method
 
Finner said:
Sad thing is Jeff is completely right about wind chill.
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What, ganging up on me now?
Just because I've stopped debating the issue doesn't mean I concede!

:) j/k
(gosh I hope it is clear I am just being facetious)
 
You're both right. Circulation (like the fan on a heatsink) aids in cooling to ambient temperature.

But windchill #s are bolluks because they assume there is moisure on the skin to evaporate. (The real wind chill factor).

When you're at 14,000 feet and the wind picks up, even if you're wearing extreme weather gear you still feel your gear cool off. But not much only about 3-4 degrees. Ice axes are the worst.
 
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