Producer decides to pay more for a HVX rental over a Red

[Evangelos Achillopoulos]

I do disagree with you in this regard. Yes you do need Scratch or something similar but saying that each camera needs a whole backend means that every 35mm camera needs a whole lab which obvoiusly is not the case. Fact is that there is a new aquisition format on the matket, namely RAW.

The difference Hans, is that Film is established in the same workflow the last 50 years at least... RED is a new guy, that invented a new car, that runs with RAW gasoline, a new form of fuel thats better than all the rest, but none is producing it, so what do you expect... producers will rent a car that doesn't have sustainable fuel supply? they will carry there baggages with the cars that they have, and trust, with gasoline thats available every ware...

So yes if RED wanted to add a new tool in the market that is so much tied up with the debayering process, they should considering it, as ONE product, software and hardware. By only selling half of the functionality is like someone is advertising a 17K$ entry to a dinner but is hiding that to exit the dinner you have to pay 140K$... Its the same, like someone gives you the encoding for 17K$ but it doesn't tell you that the decoding will cost you 140K$

If you read Luki's posts, you will realize (from the attitude) that at Assimilate, they are confident, that they are the only solution available... And unfortunately its true!

My question is: Assimilate, to be so much confident, someone is fueling that confidence... who and why is doing that? Even the Scratch Cine that in reality should be the REDcine, cost twice as the camera...

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Yeah, but in a 35mm workflow you might scan to SR but track edgecode so that you can later matchback to the original negative for a high-res DI conform or final negative grade.

Point made. But aren't we talking about a suitable workflow in commercial land (at least I assumed that)? There, one or two tapes will do the job, and frankly, they preferably want a nice first light grade (off the RAW), pleasing the clients as well as the VFX guys.

In feature land I would never propose a SR route.

Hans

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Evangelos,

Red Digital Cinema always claimed that their stupendously cheap camera (compared to its contenders) is meant for everyone, including those who work on very low budgets. For this reason the camera can be used with still glass and the free software provided by Red will develope the RAW in something very usable. This works. Everyone on a tight budget can work with Red. Downside: you need time and nerves.

In productions where time is an issue you need money. Assimilate Scratch is a huge time safer. Currently the only one around but this will change in the very near future. Nevertheless all other fast solutions will be not cheap, at least in that what a indie reduser finds reasonable.

I'm totally with you concerning the fact that the film-workflow has been for ages around and RAW not. But this will change rather sooner than later and the RAW workflow will look in 2 years not like a screaming young child but like a nice, loving mum.

Hans

 

[Evangelos Achillopoulos]

But Hans wouldn't be wonderful if from the first day exist a VTR replacement like RED RAY I hope to be and all your problems were solved?

I also hope, in two years RAW will be an every day easy process, since I'm still thinking to buy an EPIC...

And i don't want to, even remotely, think that it could be a wishful thinking...

 

[laguun]

That deal with the Devil has not done Red any favours

I have to agree.
REDs lock out of all mayor high-end postproduction softwares has reduced its momentum massively.
It was certainly the single worst decision of red so far - many of all the other brilliant, clever and outstanding ideas have been spoiled for many customers by this.

Over and over again Post is the Red deal breaker for productions. I am a big Red Fan Boy but that stops dead when the project moves to post.

True.

To get into >80% of the editing market, red needs direct support for avid, adobe, autodesk and quantel. adobe is coming now, avid is still to complicated to explain to usual avid-editors.

Red would be consulted wisely to finally disclose their JPEG2000 RAW format to the mayor players avid, autodesk, quantel, iridas, filmlight, dvs.

The camera is great, but i can understand that even neutral editors are often recommend to dont use it due to the workflow.

For us, it works great, and for big budget and flexible guerillias the workflow is feasible. For your standard client who dont wants to be educated but to shoot and use his post however, its a different story, and many customers today dont care so much about the excellent image quality of red, especially with bullet-proof camera/post systems as HDCAM (SR) and standard 16/35 film labs in the market.

 

[Keith Neff]

Announcement coming

Announcement coming

Watch for a major equipment manufacturer to announce full .r3d support as soon as tomorrow, stay tuned. :bleh:

 

[Harry Clark]

Finner,
You're right on the money. That deal with the devil has hurt Red for sure. I knew that the first time I tried to output a clip from RedCine. Only the most adventurous young single editors would have the time and patience to debayer on the desktop.
I have lost more Red rentals than any other electronic camera.
I had both the SDX and HDX VERY early in the game (serials #52 and #82) and the DVCPro 50 and DVCPro HD EX tape formats made it a tough sell ("The editor says she doesn't have that deck. Can't we just shoot Digibeta? That's what she recommended") Unfortunately, I'm no stranger to the editor-telling-the-producer-what-camera-to-use scenario.
I could always offer to split the rental of a deck, maybe steer them towards a dub house to transcode, something. But I did lose a fair number of rentals in the early days (maybe something like 20% of initial calls)
But nothing prepared me for the dropping of the post ball by Red on this. There was just no clear path for editors to wrap their brains around.
I've lost as many Red days as I've gotten. I still get rentals; the Cookes look great on the D-21. The HDX and Pro-35 still make pretty pictures together. But that's not the point. I ONLY want to shoot Red (or 35mm) at this point.
It's very frustrating.
But there are solutions. Helpful places like offhollywood have sprung up to fill the need. I was on a job yesterday that sent footage to Emery to transcode overnight. So it can be done. It just requires more thought than popping out and HDCAM tape and editing. We have to help ease the production community into that thinking.
I'm sure we will all help the situation improve, and laugh about it later.
Cheers,
Harry

 

[Dylan Macleod CSC]

Harry, you hit it on the head...

"Unfortunately, I'm no stranger to the editor-telling-the-producer-what-camera-to-use scenario."

This is what frustrates me. There is only one editorial house I have worked with that speaks "RED". They are embracing it, because they are smart. Their clients are asking about RED and they want to be ready.

The other editorial houses can't be bothered - "just give us a tape" is what they say.

 

[Vincent Thomas]

I haven't a red myself, thinking to evantually buy one if i found a partner but i do know post production and one thing people here seem to forget or ignore is that rolling shutter distortion may make difficult or impossible the 3D tracking of the shoot. Lot's of commercial now rely on special FX and 3D track is the starting point to seamlessly composite everything together...


vincent*

http://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentthomas
http://www.myspace.com/bout_de_lune

 

[Keith Neff]

It's not elegant but we have had success dubbing out of the camera to HD-D5 (23.9P). Then ran it through our daVinci 2K and the pictures looked great.
Play out from the camera could use a better interface, but it sure beats rendering DPX files.

 

[David Wyatt]

What bugs me though is this week the camera was considered as a B camera on a commercial with a panasonic varicam being the A camera but the red was passed over for a HVX instead. Even though the HVX package was more expensive for the day it was picked because of Red post issues.

How would simply using the higher quality Red proxies compare to the best Varicam & HVX could offer? Just a thought...simpler workflow too (with Final Cut of course).

 

[Dylan Reeve]

I would really like to see a RED VTR personally - one that could read REDCINE look files and playout realtime over HD-SDI. Capture everything for offline with Metadata look, then apply custom looks for batch capture of final conform. Perhaps with Dual HD-SDI it could even support 2K output to systems that support it.

 

[Ariana]

I've pitched a number of jobs recently that were upsells and downsells from other workflows and no showstoppers. It's a pretty simple fast edit, transcode, full edit, deliver. Why all the fuss? The stuff works.

 

[Ariana]

I hear ya, I think the poor guys at RED under estimated the issues of releasing a camera with no post solutions off the start line ;(

As far as I know they're the only company that's really making an effort on the software side.

 

[Evangelos Achillopoulos]

I would really like to see a RED VTR personally - one that could read REDCINE look files and playout realtime over HD-SDI. Capture everything for offline with Metadata look, then apply custom looks for batch capture of final conform. Perhaps with Dual HD-SDI it could even support 2K output to systems that support it.

I hope that you are not the only one that noticed what I wrote...

 

[Brian D. Goff]

Aggggggggh

Red post is a nightmare that does not seem to end.

I have become use to producers passing over my camera for 35mm, 16mm, sony 900 and panasonic HD cameras even though I rent the complete red package with full arri and cooke accessories for less then all of them. What bugs me though is this week the camera was considered as a B camera on a commercial with a panasonic varicam being the A camera but the red was passed over for a HVX instead. Even though the HVX package was more expensive for the day it was picked because of Red post issues.

Someone please fix this post mess already.

Rant over!

I don't get it, all you need to do is convert the whole footage to lets say DVCproHD - they can't say this is a complicated workflow! They usualy have to ingest the footage anyway from either camera system! I'm on a 5 day/week 36 episode TV-series. We're shooting 12min/day final edit on two REDs - ingest into workflow in prores 1080p after every scene - editing - everybody is more than happy with the results. By the way, the series was originaly to be shot on panasonic

link: http://www.sf.tv/sf1/tagundnacht/website/index.html

 

[Sanjin Jukic]

I don't get it, all you need to do is convert the whole footage to lets say DVCproHD - they can't say this is a complicated workflow! They usualy have to ingest the footage anyway from either camera system! I'm on a 5 day/week 36 episode TV-series. We're shooting 12min/day final edit on two REDs - ingest into workflow in prores 1080p after every scene - editing - everybody is more than happy with the results. By the way, the series was originaly to be shot on panasonic

link: http://www.sf.tv/sf1/tagundnacht/website/index.html

Probably Finner had a bad luck dealing with sort of hardline and pretty conservative customers.

I've been showing almost 5 months ago that with Scratch even 4K output on drive(s) can be done on Macbook Pro 17" laptop in a field.

About DVCPRO HD output is much much faster.

 

[Philip Powell]

It's all about speed

It's all about speed

I agree...we need a deck, or somekind of hardware solution to solve the rendering problem, which is where I have seen clients time after time back off using The Red.

In my opinion while the Red has several ways to go post-wise, they all kinda work, but none of them works great. (excluding Scratch)

-Proxies tend to stutter in FCP (unless you use the smallest ones) Clients don't like stuttering video.
-Log and transfer is slow and ties up an expensive editing machine importing files.
-Redcine half the time renders out freeze frames unless you export Tiff or DPX, so I can't really recommend that to cleint
-Red Rushes...best option. rock solid and allows for scaling of differing rez content. It's what I use and recommend to clients.

I don't know what kind of mojo you guys are using to get great rendering times, but if I do a full debayer on a 4K 16:9 29.97 fps footage the hit can be brutal for me. (Although I have not tried DVCpro yet, so I'll give that a go) I'm getting like 8 times real time on a brand new 8 core intel mac. Pluse I've noticed that when client shoot with the Red they tend to treat it like a video camera and shoot MORE than they normally would, thus adding to the render times.

I've come to the conclusion that the an offline/online workflow is the only practical one for Red atm as rendering the raw footage files, unless you only shot a very small amount, just takes too long.

Again, clients want it yesterday, when you tell them all this, they think "that's gonna be too much hassle...I'll just shoot to tape or P2, and we can be in post tomorrow morning."

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

(Although I have not tried DVCpro yet, so I'll give that a go)

Don't do that. It's an awfull codec and makes your full debayer render efforts obsolet. ProRes is much better, though far of beeing great.

Hans

 

[Scott Simmons]

I agree...we need a deck, or somekind of hardware solution to solve the rendering problem, which is where I have seen clients time after time back off using The Red.

Isn't this what Scratch Cine was sold as? Being this is digital acquisition you will always have digital files on a hard drive before you have a tape of what was shot. If you tether an HDCAM SR deck to your RED during the shoot then it's not much different from a number of the other digital cinema cameras out there.... except for its original cost.