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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 :)

1st big project with RED...experience summary

M

Maz Mawlawi

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Hello,

I just wanted to share our experience with our first RED project. Today's shoot took place all outdoors. It was for 3 30sec commercials. We were using an Angenieux 25 - 250 HR Cinema lens and we shot at 4K.
It started at around 9:00am and temperature was about 20 degrees F and with wind chill temperatures of 10F. It was freezing!!!!! The first 15-30 minutes the camera was pretty much unworkable. It was too cold for the red drives to operate properly. The RED would reboot itself or lockup and behave erratically..... the camera eventually warmed up and we switched to CF media and things started working smoothly after that. So if you are shooting in very cold temperatures you may want to use CF cards and give your camera some time to warm up. :cold:

Once it started working properly everything else went smoothly. Having an expensive lens made a world of difference in sharpness and focusing. I posted a thread earlier how we were struggling with 720P focusing, but today for the most part it worked out ok. I still wish we had better tools for focusing but I can live with it....for now.... :devil:
I really had only one major complain....it was very limiting not having multiple output enabled with the RED LCD on. Pretty much the director had to work "blind"...he couldn't see anything we were shooting because we needed the RED LCD for the camera operator. I know this will get fix soon but it was really annoying not be able to do this right now. This really was my only gripe! Hopefully build 15 will fix this.

Overall we had a good experience with it, and we were pleased with the RED's performance. Footage came out nice and I believe most of it is in Focus. I am not at liberty to post any pics or footage yet....

Despite my frustrations with weak workflow options and some other bugs/shortcomings, overall I am pretty happy with it...once some of the issues are worked out, it will be very hard for other manufacturer to compete with the RED at that price point!! I am really pumped to see what build 15, 16 or 17 can do.
I just hope it doesn't take forever.... :biggrin:

Keep up the good work RED team! And thanks for an overall great camera!!!



P.S:...fyi...I may be cursing at you guys (RED team) next week once I start trying to figure out a good workflow...lol...:bleh:
 
You need to rent the Panasonic 8.4 inch monitor for the camera HD-SDI in and out to the directors monitor. No reason to not have the director see anything!

Mark
 
no the camera did not spend a night in the truck.... come on man! I am not that dumb! :sarcasm: I would never leave such an expensive piece of equipment in the truck...especially not the lenses...which are more expensive than the truck itself!
It was in the cold for about 30 minutes (while setting it up on a crane/dolly before we tried turning on.... We just didn't expect it to be that cold today. It was ridiculous....and of course the shoot could not be canceled...the Talent was about to kill us! lol....
....and our rental place didn't have the Pana in stock for this date....so we had to do without it... :(
 
I can only imagine how could that must of been. I live in Florida and you have me shaking just thinking about it.

Overall, how do you like your camera?
 
Overall we really liked the camera. It was pretty solid and performed real well. We have another commercial in 2 weeks. (this one indoors)....what is interesting is it appears we may end up using tungsten lighting...so I wonder what a sensor rated for 5000K will react like. I am expecting some noise in the blue channel....we'll see.

lol...yes....our RED(s) get plenty of love now....I cuddled with one to keep it warm the other day.
 
zylight looks interesting...but it appears they only make on camera lights...which won't really help us light a whole set.:turned:
 
You don't even need to use a splitter.

We were running an onboard Nebtek and had a 17" Panasonic
going off the ET breakout box--one on the hd-sdi out and the other
on the 720P out.

We don't use the RED onboard lcd.

The Nebtek is great, but until our EVF arrives its a pain not having
all of the menu information displayed (it gets cut off on the lower part of the monitor).

-Kerber
D.P.
L.A.
 
exactly!!!! We want to use the RED LCD for seeing all the options/information/menus and an HD-SDI for Director viewing.
 
If there is menu information that other people need/want to see--like the sound mixer for instance--I dislike having them use the EVF. I think many D.P.s, Operators, 1st A.C.s feel the same way about only certain people having access to the eyepiece.

I hope future builds enable other non-RED monitors to display the menu information as well as dropped frame warnings and the like. Ideally, you could select which outputs are transmitting the info, so you can keep some clean--some eyes don't need to know what's going on with the camera.

-Kerber
D.P.
L.A.
 
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