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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 :)

First Red feature shot entirely in FL

Keith Alan Morris

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our first day went great. i seriously dont want to do anything other than shoot with this camera til i'm an old, old man. cancel all my plans for the next 50 years, i'm sold.

this is very important what Red has done here. i feel like i'm holding the rosetta stone.

more soon...
 
thanks tonaci for all your help! and send best wishes to michael too. (our backup camera is still MIA...) i really appreciate you being so helpful.

one of my guys will be posting some footage here later today. i want to learn how far we can push footage to match one shot to the next... most of my posts will be of the "can we save this?" variety.

the shoot is going smoothly. we shot a BMW X3 convertible on highway I-4 handheld from the back of a truck and it looks amazing. lots of full speed running like RedUsers were asking for, and a bunch of other stuff too.

We're already way ahead of schedule--that gives us so much time to go back and try to get things even better. the post workflow is smooth so far too... We have two editors editing scenes right after we hand them cards. its crazy fast. my team is crankin'!

so yeah, i'm going to post the good and the bad to get tips.

some behind the scenes snaps from someone's phone: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?p...517163424&aid=-1&oid=18517163424&id=500353256
 
#206 with the Birger mount prototype:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=758700&l=8a352&id=735261728

Steady as a rock through 11 days and going to probably 21. I love this camera.

Other behind the scenes photos should start here: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?p...517163424&aid=-1&oid=18517163424&id=735261728

A few things we learned on the fly:
The camera really does see how you see.
Dont switch builds in the middle of a big project because it starts over naming your files.
With Build 15 you cant punch in to set focus, so we went back to 14.
A regular-sized man can shoot a whole feature handheld, so the cameras not too heavy.
We're backing up our footage to multiple USB 2.0 drives til our raid arrives (its late). our usb cf card reader is slow but it works. takes 8 min to dump cards. We edit scenes as we go.
And tons of other stuff. We'll post footage and stills as soon as we can, sorry, we've been pulling 16 hour days plus. (And I'm the guy that complains when people dont post footage in the footage section.)

Bottom line, we are having a BLAST and getting great footage.
 
Thanks for the sneek peek guys.
So how is the birger mount working?
Can you easely adjust the iris and do some focus pulling with focus nob, or did you use a dumb mount?
Thanks

Tim
 
#206 with the Birger mount prototype:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=758700&l=8a352&id=735261728

Steady as a rock through 11 days and going to probably 21. I love this camera.

Other behind the scenes photos should start here: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?p...517163424&aid=-1&oid=18517163424&id=735261728

A few things we learned on the fly:
The camera really does see how you see.
Dont switch builds in the middle of a big project because it starts over naming your files.
With Build 15 you cant punch in to set focus, so we went back to 14.
A regular-sized man can shoot a whole feature handheld, so the cameras not too heavy.
We're backing up our footage to multiple USB 2.0 drives til our raid arrives (its late). our usb cf card reader is slow but it works. takes 8 min to dump cards. We edit scenes as we go.
And tons of other stuff. We'll post footage and stills as soon as we can, sorry, we've been pulling 16 hour days plus. (And I'm the guy that complains when people dont post footage in the footage section.)

Bottom line, we are having a BLAST and getting great footage.

Sounds good!
 
Thanks for the sneek peek guys.
So how is the birger mount working?
Can you easely adjust the iris and do some focus pulling with focus nob, or did you use a dumb mount?
Thanks

Tim

Tim:

They are using my RED with the industrial version of the Birger mount that Erik rigged up for me mostly for physical sizing for our underwater housings. It can only be controlled via a computer or PDA so we have only shot with it as a "dumb" mount. However it has worked very well for that - they have been using a hodge podge of still lenses - a couple of Zeiss Contax/yashica mount with a C/Y to EOS adapter and a Nikon medium zoom and a Nikon 28mm - both using a Nikon to EOS adapter. And they should be getting a Zeiss Contax/Yashica mount 28-70 zoom today.

All of these work with $20 physical adapters because the EOS mount has a short flange focal distance so it basically accepts almost any other lenses including Leica R, and Pentax and other M42. (If you are looking for nice, really low cost manual backups for your Birger smart mount take a look at the Pentax Super Takumars. You can get excellent primes for $30 to $100 on ebay all the time.

I really like the Zeiss C/Y lenses - they typically are super sharp with good contrast and have a longer focus throw than most other stills - they are a little more money used close to what used Nikkors go for but they focus in the "right" direction. Easily as good as the Nikkors and many think better.
 
Thanks Aqua

I'm just asking because I have every Canon L lens up to 200mm that is out there.
If the Birger mount could be programed that the focus play will be wider than it realy is with still lenses, this would be awsome. Technicaly it should be possible.
That realy would change the game here.

It would be a great alternative till all the new PL solutions hit the market. I think it will take some time till we can actualy buy the new RED, Elite, Angenieux lenses. We all need some lenses now.

Just some thoughts.

Cheers
Tim
 
thanks tonaci for all your help! and send best wishes to michael too. (our backup camera is still MIA...) i really appreciate you being so helpful.

one of my guys will be posting some footage here later today. i want to learn how far we can push footage to match one shot to the next... most of my posts will be of the "can we save this?" variety.

the shoot is going smoothly. we shot a BMW X3 convertible on highway I-4 handheld from the back of a truck and it looks amazing. lots of full speed running like RedUsers were asking for, and a bunch of other stuff too.

We're already way ahead of schedule--that gives us so much time to go back and try to get things even better. the post workflow is smooth so far too... We have two editors editing scenes right after we hand them cards. its crazy fast. my team is crankin'!

so yeah, i'm going to post the good and the bad to get tips.

some behind the scenes snaps from someone's phone: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?p...517163424&aid=-1&oid=18517163424&id=500353256
Could you kindly explain your post production workflow in as simple terms as possible.

Thanks.
 
Hullo everyone. I'm the DIT/Editor for the Gutter King project, so I thought I'd talk about the workflow we've been using so far. It's actually not that complicated at this point.

Basically, during the shoot, once the cards came out of the camera, we'd just put them in a card reader and dump it to a hard drive. Unfortunately, we only had some 1 TB USB 2.0 (gasp, I know, I know) drives at the beginning of the shoot. We made due by dumping the footage to a working drive that would be used for organizing the footage in Final Cut and watching dailies. Then we'd back up the working drive twice a day to a backup drive.

Once the footage had been dumped to the drive, we'd bring in the medium sized proxies into final cut for editing and viewing (those are the _m clips). If you have the current Mac OS, an easy way to bring in clips is to go to the finder and type in the reel number followed by a _m (for example, you would type 'A026 _m' if you wanted to isolate all the medium proxy clips from reel 26). All the medium sized proxy clips from that reel will show up in the window, and you can just drag them directly into Final Cut. Since the camera gives each card an ascending reel number, I organized everything by day and reel in final cut. For example, I'd have a "Day 1" folder, and under that folder, all the reels (cards) that had been shot that day-- say, reels 001-030. Anyway, I won't bore you with how I organized stuff- I'm sure it depends a lot on the project and personal preference.

From that point on, you can start editing. Obviously, it was annoying editing on a USB 2.0 drive, but it could be done (very slowly, with lots of frame drops). Eventually we got some e-sata drives and made them our working edit drives, and everything worked peachily from that point. You may have heard that you can't do anything that requires rendering of any kind with the proxy clips in Final Cut Pro, and that's true. Just straight cuts. You can't even use fades - anything that requires rendering just turns green. So that's annoying, but I still think editing with the proxies is less problematic than converting all the footage on the front end.

I'm assuming that down the road, once an edit lock has been achieved, we'll make an edl and send it to Red Cinema for grading, finishing, and exporting to either 2k or 4k. I haven't done this part of the workflow yet, so I don't know how well it works, but I can say that editing the proxies in Final Cut has been surprisingly smooth going so far.

Ok, that was a little wordy, so I'll boil it down:

Capture footage onto media card --> Dump media from card to (preferably redundant RAID) hard drive --> import proxy clips to final cut and organize footage --> get an edit lock with the proxy clips in Final Cut --> export edl to Red Cine for finishing and final output.

It's worked pretty well for us so far. One caveat is that they switched from build 14 to build 15 halfway through the shoot, which reset the reel numbers to 0, and we weren't able to force them back to the reel number we actually wanted. So that was annoying, but could be worked around. Ok, I think that's pretty much it. I'd be happy to answer any other questions anyone may have.
 
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