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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 :)

6 red camera lock up

Steve G

Steve G

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May have a test shoot coming up for a fx shoot with 6 red cameras. Is it possible to lock up 6 cameras together so each frame is locked up, in terms of time code and absolute relationship to action ? Each frame on the time line needs to be 100% synced together so post production moves can be done without sync issues.

In my experience, gen locking sony cameras does not sync up 100% and obviously film cameras can be locked up, but can the red ? Shoot would be in a studio controlled environment.

Steven Gray
Director Of Photography
stevengray31@mac.com
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1034732/
 
Thanks steve,

From looking at the forum you linked, seems like you were doing a similar thing to our prospective test. Footage will be used in cg world to create a time slice like movement. How did your sync slip effect post production ?

Steven Gray
Director Of Photography
stevengray31@mac.com
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1034732/
 
Fortunately we took precautions and were in a tight studio like setting that allowed us to use a camera strobe unit to flash a frame that all four cameras could see at the beginning and end of the take. So even though the jam sync and genlock failed we had some reference. The shots were short enough not to drift in that span of time.

In this case we got lucky and it didn't ding us badly. We can't offer genlock and jam sync to customers as an option until this gets figured out. I plan on running tests again once build 16 is out.

Best,

Steve
 
Red 103 was used recently on a 8 Red camera ( gen locked ) shoot ...
don't know the details on how they did it - just know they did it... they operated the camera's remotely ( iris, focus, pan/tilt) from 300+ ft away ... had all info that we see on LCD displayed on monitors in control room .... that's about all i can say about the project until ??
 
We're jamming our cameras (Jeremyn's #19 and our #1108) on Darko 2 with a smart slate. The strange thing is, timecode is always 1 frame ahead on the camera than on the slate (on both cameras), but they've stayed locked, so we're working around that issue.
 
donatello said:
Red 103 was used recently on a 8 Red camera ( gen locked ) shoot ...
don't know the details on how they did it - just know they did it... they operated the camera's remotely ( iris, focus, pan/tilt) from 300+ ft away ... had all info that we see on LCD displayed on monitors in control room .... that's about all i can say about the project until ??
Click to expand...

Donatello, you're referring to the job Jon Chater supplied, right? Maybe he could offer up the details.

I'm curious myself.

M
 
We're supplying a VFX-heavy show that is jamming three cameras using Clock-its without issue. No genlock though... (not required for this setup)
 
" you're referring to the job Jon Chater supplied, right? Maybe he could offer up the details."

Yes, from where i sit my post above is about all i can say about it other then HDMI didn't do the 300+ft ...
 
The above mentioned 8-camera shoot is part of a film we are doing.

Chater supplied the cameras.

The post above is incorrect, we were not able to genlock the cameras.
All cameras were just timecode slaved.

Cameras were 4k 16:9 23.976. We had to run redcode28 because of the codec faults with complex imagery using redcode36 - very annoying.

I initially tried feeding tri-level sync to all the cameras, but it was un-reliable - clips would have glitch frames, they would lock up, or just not genlock. No logic to it. I tried aja and evertz generators that we use everyday in the studio.

Gave up.

Fed timecode over cat6-stp from Da'd masterclock. Used cat6-stp so I could run RS485, timecode, start/stop all over the same cable.
Actual event was 2 hours or so - no timecode problems. Started/stopped the cameras a few times throughout to avoid the potential disaster of having a problematic 2hour single r3d file.


Cameras were anywhere from 300-1000ft away from master control. We used fibre extender to run the hdmi. This was way more difficult than it needed to be, to the point of red asking me to sign a nda just to tell me some specifics of their hdmi signal. Ended up using an hdmi analyzer myself.

Lens control was using cmotion and pretson, hotheads were something we built.

To the original question, I don't think you will be able to reliably genlock the cameras using the current software build - at least not at 4k 16:9, 23.976.

Cameras should be genlocked for bullet time, depending on the action you may be able to get away without it - explosions, gun fire, etc are out.

Using PhantomHDs, if you don't mind just 2k - but at much higher frame rates, would be a better approach for bullet time fx.


-c
 
Next week I want to use two REDs to create HDR shots by shooting with identical setup of both cameras except the shutter speed.

Is this possible to use Genlock output from one RED and input to the second without using any additional boxes?

May I create cross over cable for Genlock between two cameras?
 
No.

No Sync output or Timecode output from the camera.

If genlock actually worked... the cheapest tri-level sync box is the AJA Gen10. You can run it off dc if need be.


BlackMagic has a cheapo one too, but dont think its shipping yet.
 
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