Breaking my RED virginity

[john jeffreys]

I'm in the process of writing a short film right now and I plan on shooting it in the next month or so. It has a lot of scenes and compositions that I feel would benefit from the alleged massive amounts of grading/editing freedom that redcode gives, so I am tempted to rent a basic scarlet package and use my leica r primes with it. I'm also intensely curious about the red system and I feel that I should break out of my typical camera comfort zone and shoot with something new. This would be my first time using a red, ever. What should I expect? I kinda know the basics but I am unsure regarding how smooth editing will go on a late 2008 macbook pro, for one, and also how much hard drive space I will need to store dailies of a 10-15 minute short, shot at 4k and I suppose 5:1 compression (thats the "sweet spot", right?).

Anyway, any advice or comments would be much appreciated.

 

[jimhare]

Hi John,

If ultimate possibilities and flexibility are what you're after, then Red is the perfect way to go. But infinite possibilities means you need to respect the process. If you're willing to invest the time into gaining the knowledge and experience, your end result will be second to none.

Where people get in trouble is renting gear, shooting without knowing what they're doing and jump head first into post. What they get are mediocre images and a painful workflow. The next reaction is to blame it on the camera.

Now, to get back to your questions:

1. 7:1 compression is more of the sweet spot. Obviously the lower you go the better but you will go through drive space like mad at 5:1. Many are shooting 9:1 or even 12:1 and getting excellent results.

2. If you are editing on an older MBP, my advice would be to transcode all of your footage to ProRes at HD or even SD resolution for offline. Do all your editing then reconform to the original R3Ds at the end for grading and FX.

3. Be patient. If you aren't geared up with big towers with Red Rockets in them, just leave your footage to transcode for a few days. With the right gear this would be faster than realitime but you can get the same results with a laptop, will just take longer. The best way to think of it is waiting for your film to come back from the lab. Again, this is only due to the lack of gear, otherwise you would be editing immediately.

4. You'll want to get a few drives to back up and protect your footage. How many depends on your shooting ratio and compression settings. If you get a couple of 1TB or 2TB you should be fine. One of them is to keep a second copy of your footage. These should be big enough to hold your ProRes at the same time so you can keep everything together.

As I said at the start, test test test! You don't want the start of your film to look different than the end because you only got into the groove half way through!

Better yet, maybe hire a DP that already owns an Epic/Scarlet. You will probably get a much better result and learn volumes at the same time.

Best of Luck!

 

[Chris McKechnie]

My suggestion would be to hire a camera operator who knows the RED camera. :-0 Having someone there who knows the camera, worked with the footage, experienced in troubleshooting should a problem arise, will give you the comfort knowing your covered.

 

[Jake Wilganowski]

Edit in premier. Natively with the camera files. Export XML and grade in Davinci lite. Export master from davinci. Just did it. Easy.

 

[Drew Baird]

Edit in premier. Natively with the camera files. Export XML and grade in Davinci lite. Export master from davinci. Just did it. Easy.

This is the easiest and most painless workflow, though R3D's in Premiere on a 2008 MacBook Pro is going to be a little tedious. Even at 1/8 resolution it will more than likely stutter. A director I was working with had a 2008 model and he ended up buying a new computer. R3D's in Premiere aren't a problem with current hardware.

 

[jimhare]

Edit in premier. Natively with the camera files. Export XML and grade in Davinci lite. Export master from davinci. Just did it. Easy.

As an editor, my experience is this breaks the flow. You will dumb it down so far and it will probably still stutter, especially if you are using internal or USB drives.

I use it on my Mac Pro with Rocket and fast drives. Works great!

If you're using an older laptop, unless you're editing a TVC or very shortform, I still recommend transcoding. Will be a much more fluent edit, which is important.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I wouldn't dare go over 7:1. 5:1 - 7:1 is the sweet spot in my opinion. For Chroma-Keying 3:1 is best. Anything over 7:1 gets noticeably compressed.

 

[john jeffreys]

Thank you for all the great advice, I really appreciate it. I edit everything in FCP X and I loathe Premiere (well, I'm just not familiar with it is all), so I'll have to adjust my workflow to be compliant with that. Wish FCP X allowed native .r3d editing, that would be real neato. But I think the first thing would be the get a newer laptop, and some external drives. And yeah, I will probably get somebody onboard who is familiar with RED's, perhaps renting from an owner/operator kinda guy, as oppose to a rental house where I would be totally on my own.

I'll keep everybody posted on what happens with the project and maybe post a preview or something later on.

 

[Rodrigo Prata]

You can not shoot 5:1 on a Scarlet, the maximum quality you can get is 6:1 24fps at 4K. as your shooting a short film I would sugest you to shoot 6:1, unless you shoot like a mad man, two 2TB External Drives (one for a back up copy) should be enough, 2TB should give you up to 700 minutes of footage wich for a short is usually much more then enough. That said many huge blockbuster movies were shot with the equivalent of 9:1 compression. The social network and the girl with the Dragon Tattoo where shoot at the equivalent of 7,5:1 compression and even the Hobbit was shot with a compression ratio higher them 3:1 (as they shot 48fps). Jimhare said that people are shooting 12:1 compression with great results, so just FYI, i`m acutally shooting a political campaing at 18:1 compression ratio with very aceptable results (but just because the post production team doesn`t have the infrastructure to deal with very large files, otherwise I would probably shoot 8:1) .

If there is one more thing that I can add to this discussion, I`ve been shooting with the scarlet for just a few weeks, and the first thing I noticed is that it can make a beautiful subject even more beautiful (I invite anyone to check some stills on my FB: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.4377351877166.2179558.1389188621&type=3) , but it will also make a ugly subject even more ugly, so a bad art direction, bad lighting, bad makeup and bad framing will "pop" in a very disappointing way, much more them shooting with a DSLR... At least it was this way with me...