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First full 12 hour days on Scarlet #804- thoughts

Ryan Flesher

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Did first full 12 hour day shoot yesterday with my Scarlet on a music video in Nashville. I have been doing extensive testing and short shoots here and there so yesterday was a real work day. Here are some thoughts and highs and los of the day.

The entire day was on a sound stage under Tungsten lights. I used firmware 2.08 (with a flashed 2.05 card on set) for any problems.
1) The Scarlet Brain held up great. Was on pretty much so the entire 12 hours with a few shut downs here and there. Temperature never rose about 59 degrees C. Granted we never had a take longer than 3 minutes, but with the fan set at 37 percent during roll and 92 percent on standby, the camera cooled well.

2) The only real glitch of the day was some issues with the Zeiss ZE lens set the production rented. The 35, 85, 100 mounted on the canon mount without problem and communicated immediately (after on shutter click). The 50 worked well during prep day, but had some issues during actually shooting. And the 25mm never worked- just clicked away at the shutter and had a really cool strobe effect!
To get the 50 to work we had to put a Canon EF lens on and let it find it, then shutdown and then remount the Zeiss 50 and it worked.
So if you rent non Canon lenses, try and have a preproduction day or two to test them all.
Not sure if the official word is to do a shutdown with each lens change, but we have found that you should mainly to let the mount reset.
Cp.2s worked well (nonelectronic).

3) Batteries melt away pretty fast, so we plugged into AC power mostly. Redvolts lasted about 30 minutes give or take. Anton B Dionic 90 bricks lasted about 130 minutes. Had 6 Redvolts and 1 charger and 2 Dionic 90s and a twin charger. Probably need another redvolt charger and 2 more AB batteries. Hot swap not working from AB plate or AC to redvolt without a shutdown.

4) LCD monitor worked really well except for the pulldown to change the focus type (manual, rack, ect.) seems to be the most finicky. We used the sidehandle mostly to navigate the menus and that is must faster.

5) We monitored out to a color calibrated Sony 48 inch 1080p HD monitor. Was great to show producer and talent how things looked. And helped the director really double check the ACs work. Learned that to see menus out HDMI you have to change it in the menu and then reboot the camera for it to take effect.

6) We shot and monitored in RAW mode, which made us feel the best about our lighting setup. Although a little flat, still looked amazing.
A seperate post on this later.

7) Like all Red sensors (from what I hear) there is a slight green cast at brighht to shadow transitions). Most on set didn't notice it, but the DP and I did. Not a big deal just expect it.

8) On set Data management was basically uneventful. Unlike my home editing Mac (OS X Lion) where when I mount a SSD card in the reader it is seen as a folder that can be dragged and dropped to external drives, on set with mac laptops running OS X 10.6.8 (snow Lep) the SSDs are seen as drives and can't be directly coppied. So I just dragged all contents of the the cards to seperate named folders in both drives. Worked well. 60GB via firewire 800 would dump to 2 backup drives at the same time in about 35 minutes. Not bad.

9) Had (4) 64GB SSds on set and had no problems. For a music video I think you can get by with 3 64 GB SSds if you have on set data management. But 4 is better.

10) Wooden Camera A-box worked great for reference audio

11) The Red Quickrelease Platform pack with 19mm rails was a stable dream on the Sachtler dolly head using the long dovetail plate bolted onto the Sachtler plate.

12) The only other weak point we found was the short EVF/LCD cable that came with the monitor. the plug in for the camera is in an akward place and sticks out a bit. This limited the placement of the Cinevate FF we were using. Granted that follow focus is set up as a top mount from 15mm rods, but mostly we couldn't work around the plug when needing to place it on the righth of the camera due to the plug. So we had to rent an ARRI style and I will be buying a bottom rail attached FF.
Also the cable did get pulled on one time and the monitor flickered on and off for a while, even though it didn;t actually come out of the sockets. I'll be getting a longer cable.

So that's it for now. I can't wait to have a REDMOTE (if it works) to help the director adjust things from the second monitor.

I'll post more after our first day outside (in the snow) tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.

Ryan

Scarlet #804
 
Knoxville. My bro lives in Nashville so I do most of my work there (and the fact that Knoxville does have much going on).

You work at taillight I see. I know some friends that have worked with you guys and have great things to say.
I like the stuff of yours I've seen.
If you ever need a second Scarlet or any help let me know.
Ryan
 
Knoxville. My bro lives in Nashville so I do most of my work there (and the fact that Knoxville does have much going on).

You work at taillight I see. I know some friends that have worked with you guys and have great things to say.
I like the stuff of yours I've seen.
If you ever need a second Scarlet or any help let me know.
Ryan

Will keep ya in mind for sure. Who do you know from TL? I've directed for them about 2 years... Maybe I've run into them or you?
 
Ryan, so you got the short-ass cable with your LCD too eh? In another discussion it was brought up that people have been receiving them with 12" cables... and it's listed in the store as coming with a 12" cable (if the LCD is bought separate, not part of a package)

Just something you may want to look into. I'm going to email my rep on Monday about this, I'm very unhappy with the short and virtually unusable short cable.
 
I'm looking forward to shooting in Nashville next weekend, wish I would've known there were some Scarlet's there before I booked 5D's for the shoot!
 
Hey Ryan

Thanks for the insights. Interesting about the data wrangling, less time than I imagined using firewire. I have thunderbolt port in my lappy & I aim to give that a go once I find the bits to do it. But good old trusty firewire still handles the load, good to know! Also lol about the tiny LCD cable I bought a longer one to avoid those issues...... sigh $260 more.
 
Great read Ryan -thanks for letting us look over your shoulder...

Stu Aull
S-X #199
Alaska
 
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