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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 :)

An Epic First Day :)

Andreas Reischl said:
Any chance Mr. Cameron will get to see your Epic footage in exchange?
Would be very interested what he thinks of the cameras and if he could/would use them on the next 2 Avatar movies.
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I was thinking the same thing. Especially considering he wants to shoot everything at higher frame rates.
 
John Schwartzman ASC said:
We finished our first week and it went great, 54 set ups the last 2 days, we are all hitting our stride with this new technology. We respect to f-stop, I spent a day with Jim Cameron watching Avatar with the meta-data on the screen and the live action on that film was shot below a T2, it was 2/3" chip but his philosophy was to use DoF to direct the viewer to the part of the frame you wanted them to see. After a week I think I can sum up my feeling of shooting 3D this way, think of it as black and white, you can light very dark but you need contrast, flat isn't as effective for creating a good 3D, lighting an image with some guts seems to work better, which is fine for me because I don't think of my lighting style as flat.

John
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Thanks for the update(s)!

You might consider making new posts with each report because they get kind of lost in the thread.
 
Brandon J.F. said:
Thanks for the update(s)!

You might consider making new posts with each report because they get kind of lost in the thread.
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Or you could just click on John's name and then select "other posts by John Schwartzman ASC."
 
Epic Size

Epic Size

Just a note. John had to shoot a scene in a subway set over the past 2 days. I must observe that if it were not for the small size footprint of the Epic which allows the use of the small T5 3Ality 3D rig it would have been extremely difficult to get some of the angles. The small configuration alloed John to use stedicam and get into corners.

He DID NOT have to pull side walls of the subway car. It really made a difference.
 
For those who have been following the discussion about upcoming data rates with the Epic, you have to take a step back. Yes, Epic has higher data rates than the Red One, and yes the images look gorgeous, but you don't need a killer system to use the data, process the footage, or work with the Epic. We have used a laptop with no issues, the same way we would be using the Red One. It is very manageable. Granted, it is always appropriate to use the right tool for the right job. On a medium to light day on this Epic feature is about what Pirates shot on a crazy heavy day with two units shooting. In both cases, with simple and very accessible hardware we are able to keep up, no problem. Another thing to note as others have mentioned, just because the camera can shoot 5:1 doesn't mean you have to. It's an amazing camera. With the ability to select the data rate you want, you can customize your workflow to what works for you. No downside because even at its lowest, Epic still looks amazing!
 
Zach Hilton said:
Yes, Epic has higher data rates than the Red One, and yes the images look gorgeous, but you don't need a killer system to use the data, process the footage, or work with the Epic. We have used a laptop with no issues, the same way we would be using the Red One. It is very manageable.
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Very interested to hear some numbers here, what kind of transfer speeds are you getting, transfer time/file size ratios, what drives/storage being used, etc thanks
 
joe hedge said:
Very interested to hear some numbers here, what kind of transfer speeds are you getting, transfer time/file size ratios, what drives/storage being used, etc thanks
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+1 I'm really curious about what setup it is and how it is being managed? For long form work, using a laptop would not be the way to go. But if I can manage to do it for small projects, or on the doc work I do, that would be VERY helpful.

Please fill us in. :)
 
I think a lot of the issues surrounding data management are compounded by the fact that in a lot of markets there are 100 dollar/day RED's to be found, so asking a 250/day rate for a MacPro cart was just blown out of the water, so small TVC's and commercial work was farmed out to essentially 'students with laptops' who in a lot of cases destroyed productions.

Hopefully the physical barrier of Epic data rates will lead to a more professional attitude towards DIT work from clients. Because I know Im not alone in being sick of getting 'you won't work for 150 a day with a full MacPro cart? Well we will find someone who will..' phone calls from prospective clients.
 
Jay Gannon said:
I think a lot of the issues surrounding data management are compounded by the fact that in a lot of markets there are 100 dollar/day RED's to be found, so asking a 250/day rate for a MacPro cart was just blown out of the water, so small TVC's and commercial work was farmed out to essentially 'students with laptops' who in a lot of cases destroyed productions.

Hopefully the physical barrier of Epic data rates will lead to a more professional attitude towards DIT work from clients. Because I know Im not alone in being sick of getting 'you won't work for 150 a day with a full MacPro cart? Well we will find someone who will..' phone calls from prospective clients.
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Hopefully, as you said.
 
Is there anyway Jason, or another admin-y type create a new set of colored name tags for users who are currently on this shoot?
 
Rates

Rates

... so asking a 250/day rate for a MacPro cart was just blown out of the water, so small TVC's and commercial work was farmed out to essentially 'students with laptops' who in a lot of cases destroyed productions.
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Then hopefully they have learned the hard way not to cut (maintenance) costs at the expense of (repair / reshoot) costs.
 
Stuart English said:
Then hopefully they have learned the hard way not to cut (maintenance) costs at the expense of (repair / reshoot) costs.
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Some have , some haven't, Its still a case of educating a lot of producers who as you can imagine don't like their knowledge of how to run everything thats productions related challenged.
 
joe hedge said:
Very interested to hear some numbers here, what kind of transfer speeds are you getting, transfer time/file size ratios, what drives/storage being used, etc thanks
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We tested a macbook pro [latest gen] just to see some benchmarks. On the laptop you get up to 200 MB/s depending what drives and where your copies are going but in this environment we are making multiple deliverables so we need the "horse power" of 500 MB/s. The SSD readers can read / write around 180 MB/s each, which at 5:1 is about 3x real time. All I'm saying is that you for sure will be able to use your existing hardware for data management and processing. It will probably take longer as expected since it IS more data.
 
Zach Hilton said:
The SSD readers can read / write around 180 MB/s each, which at 5:1 is about 3x real time. All I'm saying is that you for sure will be able to use your existing hardware for data management and processing. It will probably take longer as expected since it IS more data.
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Thank you, obviously for on-set data management with A MBP, the writing is on the wall...
 
Zach Hilton said:
The SSD readers can read / write around 180 MB/s each, which at 5:1 is about 3x real time.
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If I recall correctly 2.5:1 would be around 250 MB/s, so 5:1 would be around 125 MB/s.
 
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