FORGED - Shot on RED Weapon 8K

[Marcos Montenegro]

Fantastic!!
I know first hand how challenging it can be to create suspense for a hand crafted product, but you nailed it; the sword is spectacular!

Any way we can download the file?
THE Trent Reznor made that piece????
And how come you didn't have long sleeves? lol

 

[Elsie N]

Alrighty. Thoughts and behind the scenes content.

...
Huge, huge thanks to Adobe for getting me a very early build of Premiere Pro CC that supported Weapon 8K .R3Ds. This was a 4 day shoot with 2 days of post and a bit of experimentation with various codecs and things. I edited the 8K FF .R3Ds natively in Premiere Pro CC with no real issue. 1/8th playback for time sensitive cuts, 1/4 for QC related work. I also leveraged the Lumetri Color Panels in there. In the screen grab above you can see where I masked off an area on the grinder wheel and knocked it down about 1/2 a stop. The grade was a achieved via a custom 3D LUT I made then individual clip adjustments via Lumetri within Premiere Pro. I exported a whole bunch of versions. 2K, 4K, 8K. What you see on YouTube was a high bit-rate H.264 4K DCI encode. Then of course YouTube re-encodes that and we lose a bit of the goodness. My ProRes, VP9, and H.265 4K and 8K masters are actually much better than what you can see via the web at the moment.

Phil, what are your opinions/expectations for computing power to handle 8k .R3Ds? Toia often says he cuts footage on a laptop. Would a workstation laptop handle 8k footage in your opinion?

 

[Björn Benckert]

Phil, what are your opinions/expectations for computing power to handle 8k .R3Ds? Toia often says he cuts footage on a laptop. Would a workstation laptop handle 8k footage in your opinion?

Its no more data to move then when working 6k but its ofcourse a different beast for the graphic bus if you want to look at the 8k canvas in full glory. But you can work in 4/1 or even 8/1 and only go 1:1 for final render. Still this is only me just speculating from what I see working with 6k stuff.

Im traveling right now, and been La and Cabo mexico with my weapon and i can only say that prores feature is fantastic.

i just have my very old little macbook air with me and after a day shooting it turned into standard procidure to sit in the hotel bar with just the mag reader and laptop and do a "mov" search straight on the card and then viola open all files as quicktime 2k super sampled with real time playback with scratchsound straight from the mag.

I also edied those and uploaded for remote aproval on frame.io without any render all straight from the mag.

While uploading I could sit and go trough the r3d files and adjust their colorsettings etc. And later in my hotel room offload all to a raid, edit proxy and when done render from the fully fledged 3rd:s... all on a super slow little macbook air.

So to me the weapon concept with prores proxies makes it possible to work using pretty much any mac computer.

Also its so nice with the lowered weight of the camera. I been walking around for full days with camera and tripod. Weapon, canon mount, canon 16-35mm zoom, evf and xl module, one xl battery in each pocket 2mags. and the camera on a superlight carbon tripod and im a computer guy... still my back does not hurt at all. it was like hiking around carrying a fishing rod. And 3 x xl bateries and 2 x 524gb mags lasted to shoot all I wanted from sunrice to sunset. XL on weapon is a big difference from epic. I think they where to small brfor but for this hiking kind of stuff they are exelent.

 

[Phil Holland]

Any chance you can put out a .red for RedRay playback?

I'll work on that. There's licensing "things" I would need to deal with.

Absolutely beautiful. I love to watch the process and these artists.
The picture is just fantastic! Phil you are my kind of shooter.

Cheers Brice. It's good to receive mostly kind words for this insane shoot.

Amazing job Phil ! I'll coin the term: " Cinematic Clarity "

So much detail, so lifelike, yet so cinematic.
With so much definition and last generation digital oriented lenses, one could expect a video-ish look... but the colors, rendition of movement, everything screams cinema !
It really strucked me the same way when i watched "The Martian", so clean and vivid, with such amazing aesthetics.

This is the future , right now.
Phil, i hope you got to keep the sword

I like that term Richard! My girlfriend got to see it Friday evening and she said "this is better than my eyes can see" and that's sort of a nice complement.

As for the sword, it's in Jarred's hands now and hopefully will be put in a place where others can see it.

So the 8K Weapon is pretty much an IMAX camera that you can also use to shoot TV. ;-) I think that if IMAX features take off, as they should, then RED won't be able to make enough cameras for a while.

Great story, very good film. I don't like the way it looked, though. I dare say it was visually boring. That is not the best advertisement for the most excellent digital cinema camera known to man.

Sort of. True IMAX is 70mm 15-perf, but that isn't exactly common for IMAX productions anymore. As far as resolving power though, Weapon 8K is the most suitable camera for what IMAX should be all about. These larger, as Michael Cioni says, super sensors are a pain in the ass to actually manufacture. It's a difficult thing to comprehend but manufacturing something like the 8K Weapon sensor is more demanding than say a A7RII sensor due to specific things that separate a more stills minded versus a more motion minded camera. Something bigger that would need to be mentioned is that Weapon 8K's Dragon sensor at 5 microns doesn't suffer from a host of things that plague cameras like the 5DsR or A7RII (which the BTS stills were shot on btw).

The 8K will be in demand for sure. And really I like that RED has gone rogue with treating the DSMC2 camera lineup as essentially separate format sizes with a slight variation of processing power. That allows for a tiered system that makes a lot of sense. In two years, just like the modular concept, I bet certain manufacturers will try to find a way to do something similar.

As for Gone Girl, I totally disagree. I think that the cinematography was beautiful. However, I'm a big fan of the dark drama look that Fincher and Cronenweth have been able to achieve on the last few films.

Mixed reactions going on here... I am oscillating between "Congrats on producing some camera porn that tips the collective hat towards the 8K future" and "Christ, now I want to sell my Scarlet-W that I don't even have yet, and buy an 8K Red". Can you please PM my lease agent and sweet talk them into increasing our loan by a few digits?

Thank you Kevin. Keep in mind that Scarlet-W is pretty much the most disruptive camera on the market. For it's price point and getting 5K S35 filming it's outperforming a hell of a lot of the competition. I'd hold on to that one

Fantastic!!
I know first hand how challenging it can be to create suspense for a hand crafted product, but you nailed it; the sword is spectacular!
Any way we can download the file?
THE Trent Reznor made that piece????
And how come you didn't have long sleeves? lol

Thank you Marcos. I'll see about putting up a download friendly version. I did have long sleeves btw. Just rolled them down when things starting flying my way.

One thing that's fun about blacksmithing is handling very hot metal with tongs. There's a lot of dropping that occurs, so occasionally the billet or sword would tumble to the ground and smash up against my tripod, shoe, or whatever. Those are fun moments. Which reminds me I need to order new feet for my tripod

Phil, what are your opinions/expectations for computing power to handle 8k .R3Ds? Toia often says he cuts footage on a laptop. Would a workstation laptop handle 8k footage in your opinion?

As Björn noted, it's not too different than say 6K 3:1 right now. I was able to work with the .R3Ds on my laptop and I know Jarred uses his UHD laptop a bunch to work with the 8K footage. Handling the .R3Ds isn't going to be what's scary regarding the 8K workflow. Post and VFX houses going to 8K DPX or TIF or whatever are going to have the biggest issues with all of that. Those are big files. A 16-bit 8K FF TIF for instance is 202.5MB. 8-bit is 135.05MB. That can add up fast and honestly this shows the real strength behind REDCODE RAW.

Alright. I need to shave up and put on my penguin suit for the ASC Awards this evening. I'll have a bit more BTS and thoughts next week. I've been getting a ton of questions from Twitter and abroad regarding this whole shoot. I'll do my best to answer everything.

 

[Billy Jim]

...

As for the sword, it's in Jarred's hands now and hopefully will be put in a place where others can see it....

Phil, curious to know what a sword like that cost?

 

[Matt Hall]

Phil, curious to know what a sword like that cost?

I'm not Phil, but handmade swords forged from a billet of varying carbon plates is extremely labor intensive, even when using a power hammer. Among my many hobbies is forging swords, though my interest is more focused on medieval blades. A good handcrafted sword can cost more than $10,000.

One of the finest blade suppliers, if you're looking for historical accuracy, is Albion swords. Although their process involves CNC milling a high carbon steel blank into approximately the correct shape, rather that a full forging process.

 

[Matt Hall]

Oh, and I thought the short looked really stunning. Crisp, pleasing highlight roll off. Amazing to see 8K Weapon in action. Thanks, Phil.

 

[Chad Lancaster]

So awesome Phil, wish I had a 4k screen..I might have to go to best buy and watch it.

 

[Brian Ferguson]

My Dad had an autobody shop in Old Town Scottsdale AZ a long time ago. There were 2 Blacksmith shops next to his garage. I could watch the forges and anvils for hours, this film really made me nostalgic. I thought this was a great example of doc footage with the 8K, very badd ass.

 

[justin ahlmann]

loved hearing about all the bts information, it was very enlightening. thanks for taking the time to write it all down to share with us.

 

[Phil Holland]

Woof. Busy few days. I was interviewed and this shoot was referenced by Engadget:
http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/15/films-cinema-comeback-is-driven-by-nostalgia-not-logic/

Promptly after that I attended the ASC Awards and that left me with many, many thoughts regarding so many aspects of our industry. Some of which I'm still digesting really.

Phil, curious to know what a sword like that cost?

Matt's pretty much in the wheelhouse on cost. It's pricey, but the bigger thing is Tony is a busy dude. He's got commissions to whack out and then move his whole shop. I have to say again, I'm very grateful to all involved who helped pull this thing off. It's a bigger miracle than it looks.

Oh, and I thought the short looked really stunning. Crisp, pleasing highlight roll off. Amazing to see 8K Weapon in action. Thanks, Phil.

Heh. Thanks Matt. There's still some wicked, nasty, bright stuff that's way up there exposure wise. Even if I was at T16 you'd be seeing clipping, but I do rather like the transitions of the forge for those who noticed it warming from orange, to yellow, to white hot. Wanted to expose that way to show sort of the variance of how Tony worked the metal.

My Dad had an autobody shop in Old Town Scottsdale AZ a long time ago. There were 2 Blacksmith shops next to his garage. I could watch the forges and anvils for hours, this really film made me nostalgic. I thought this was a great example of doc footage with the 8K, very badd ass.

Thank you Brian. It's a real honor to do something like this with an experienced blacksmith. I learned a lot during the process. Not going to lie, there's a few times where I jumped out from behind the camera to grab a close up still occasionally. There are several states the damascus went through that is seen in the short and once that state is done, it's never going to be seen again. Here's a couple images of some of the good bits of texture:

Early on right after the blade was hammered out:

After thermal tempering:

Before oxidizing:

After oxidizing:

After etching:

Really, really glad I got that take of his one full pass on the final blade sharpening. Like I said early, there's literally one moment to get some of that stuff and then he's off to a different part of the process.

The blade's finish is really fascinating and truly somewhere between dark and light, which I fully appreciate.

loved hearing about all the bts information, it was very enlightening. thanks for taking the time to write it all down to share with us.

Thank you Justin. As much as this was a project for me to whack out I feel this was something to share with RED and the REDuser community. I'm glad we did something special with a unique and talented individual. That sword will outlast us all in reality.


Oh, one last image to share real quick. Here's a 4K still export I futz around with a bit. Click it for the 4K version.


In my mind, this actually tells us a lot about the potential of 8K.

 

[Karim D. Ghantous]

Regarding that last frame: my goodness me. Yes, that 8K sensor is good enough for IMAX.

I won't say that I love everything about this sensor (though it's way better than anything else in digital cinema) but getting ideal image quality is an astonishingly difficult battle. One could 'cheat' and just shoot 65mm film. But... that's not as simple as it sounds, either! ;-)

 

[Brice LeCarre]

I enjoyed the article. In some ways, it perpetuates the same old battles. Canon vs Nikon back in the "old" still day, Apple vs PC and so on. Now it is digital vs film.
I believe none should be dished in favor of the other. Especially now with camera like the Weapon. Film is film and will always be that, it ignited our visual thirsts and was the standards for a few generation. there was nothing else. When Louis Daguerre came up with his chemical concoction to make life photographs was he dished by the master painters? I don't know but knowing human nature there was probably a line in the sand somewhere until popularity blurred the line. But the treasure left by the world's master painters remained a treasure where many painters and filmmakers went to for inspiration.
There are similarities with film today, in my opinion. I love film and everything in it. But my eyes are wide open at what filmmakers today can do with current technology and tools.
To those who swear by the film look litmus test, I truly respect your quest, I am in awe of your creations and will never turn a blind eye. However, to those who believe we can use our film heritage to explore new lands, I say go for it.

 

[Ho Perry]

WOW Phil!

That's fantastic creative and amazing shooting, wonderful...

 

[Thomas Akira Nakasone]

So is it safe to say that the otus trio covers 8k?

 

[Phil Holland]

So is it safe to say that the otus trio covers 8k?

I sadly had to return the prototype 28mm Otus right before this shoot and literally was shooting when the first production models flew out. Ships passing in the night I guess. The 55mm and 85mm cover just fine. I'll hopefully test out the 28mm very, very soon. I plan on shooting a lot with that trio.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

I'm starting to get an Otus woody myself. I'm still considering re-housed Leicas, but modern coatings and T1.4 is calling my name...

Cheers - #19

 

[Tyler Pruitt]

This would be even more awesome with an HDR grade

 

[Phil Holland]

This would be even more awesome with an HDR grade

Working on it. My grading monitor somehow bit the dust this weekend, so I need to find a 4K HDR monitor solution quickly to push that baby out.

 

[Nick Fury]

Better get to Murano before Ketch gets there..

Thank you very much

Fury