FORGED - Shot on RED Weapon 8K

[Chad Lancaster]

I'm at the giant screen expo today and we got to see some side by side tests they did for tomorrowland between 65mm, 35mm, f65, and Alexa. Wish I thought of this short you did a couple weeks ago. Would've been perfect to see here at the amc IMAX with the new laser projector.

 

[Phil Holland]

I don't like to gush, but damn Mr. Holland. What a beautiful piece, watched it so many times, showed it to dozens of folks and everyone is usually just silent afterwards. Many times thank you for your tireless effort, information, encouragement, professional tact and artistic craft you put into this forum. You are a true testament to this industry. I sure hope Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have had an opportunity to see these beautiful images married with their music.

+1, agree.

Thank you guys! That's very nice of you to say.

I'm at the giant screen expo today and we got to see some side by side tests they did for tomorrowland between 65mm, 35mm, f65, and Alexa. Wish I thought of this short you did a couple weeks ago. Would've been perfect to see here at the amc IMAX with the new laser projector.

Damn. Wish I knew. I would have happily exhibited this there. Sounds like NAB will be where people will be able to watch a quality finish in 4K and maybe 8K of this. Nothing has been hammered down yet.

I've been doing some pretty fascinating tests in my free time lately exploring various ways of working with the 8K footage. There's a lot of concepts to explore.

Some things I've been up to:

- 8K straight to 8K finish
- 8K straight to 8K finish with various sharpening techniques
- 8K scaled down to 4K with various scaling techniques
- 8K scaled down to 4K with various scaling techniques and sharpened
- 8K sharpened then scaled down to 4K
- 8K "soft" sharpened scaled down to 4K and then "fine" sharpened

There's validity to all of these methods and there's 3 main ways I've been exploring sharpening if that's your thing. Straight scaling to 4K is very, very nice looking in my opinion. I don't have an 8K display readily available for my tests yet, but I can extrapolate a lot by exporting 1:1 4K tests. Different scaling methods are fascinating. And there's something else I'd like to test that I don't have the ability to just yet.

What will likely be shown at NAB will likely be 8K straight to 8K and/or 8K scaled to 4K. I have some other footage I'd like to exhibit there shot on Dragon, but just getting to trimming that down below 30 minutes this week. Hard to do, but making a sexy cut of BIG visuals is tricky when the shots are supposed to be long.

 

[Jonas Rejman]

Reality the new SD.
This is the shit.
Thank you.

 

[Karim D. Ghantous]

I'm at the giant screen expo today and we got to see some side by side tests they did for tomorrowland between 65mm, 35mm, f65, and Alexa. Wish I thought of this short you did a couple weeks ago. Would've been perfect to see here at the amc IMAX with the new laser projector.

So what were your impressions? How did 65mm compare to the F65?

Straight scaling to 4K is very, very nice looking in my opinion.

I think simplicity should prevail wherever possible. Some people apply all sorts of adjustments simply because they can, or they like to feel in control. I like the Super 8 Kodachrome paradigm: expose how you want (and don't fuck up!), shoot, process, project. That's it. Some colour timing might help of course but other than that, the simplicity is powerful. Simplicity lets you focus energy on important things, like editing and sound. Just IMHO.

 

[Phil Holland]

I think simplicity should prevail wherever possible. Some people apply all sorts of adjustments simply because they can, or they like to feel in control. I like the Super 8 Kodachrome paradigm: expose how you want (and don't fuck up!), shoot, process, project. That's it. Some colour timing might help of course but other than that, the simplicity is powerful. Simplicity lets you focus energy on important things, like editing and sound. Just IMHO.

For standard production work (especially narrative) I tend to agree. However, much of my work in the last 2 years would more or less classify in the category as exhibition visuals and sometimes that's more about using the combination of capture and display mediums to extract the highest quality picture. To which the standards are set more by myself and the companies hiring me. In those cases exploration such as this is very, very useful. Specifically to my clients who are displaying my work in over 120 countries, they typically want "the most" I can give them.

On the feature film side of things, specifically VFX heavy productions, nothing is really out of bounds if it services the shot and the final image quality.

 

[Elsie N]

Thank you guys! That's very nice of you to say.




Damn. Wish I knew. I would have happily exhibited this there. Sounds like NAB will be where people will be able to watch a quality finish in 4K and maybe 8K of this. Nothing has been hammered down yet.

I've been doing some pretty fascinating tests in my free time lately exploring various ways of working with the 8K footage. There's a lot of concepts to explore.

Some things I've been up to:

- 8K straight to 8K finish
- 8K straight to 8K finish with various sharpening techniques
- 8K scaled down to 4K with various scaling techniques
- 8K scaled down to 4K with various scaling techniques and sharpened
- 8K sharpened then scaled down to 4K
- 8K "soft" sharpened scaled down to 4K and then "fine" sharpened

There's validity to all of these methods and there's 3 main ways I've been exploring sharpening if that's your thing. Straight scaling to 4K is very, very nice looking in my opinion. I don't have an 8K display readily available for my tests yet, but I can extrapolate a lot by exporting 1:1 4K tests. Different scaling methods are fascinating. And there's something else I'd like to test that I don't have the ability to just yet.

What will likely be shown at NAB will likely be 8K straight to 8K and/or 8K scaled to 4K. I have some other footage I'd like to exhibit there shot on Dragon, but just getting to trimming that down below 30 minutes this week. Hard to do, but making a sexy cut of BIG visuals is tricky when the shots are supposed to be long.

Phil, I hope you can keep us updated on how these develop over time. And if you can include HDR shooting/finishing methods for those of us needing to know more, that too would be very much appreciated.

 

[Christopher*Seguine]

Is 12:1 the least compression for 8k FF 60fps? No motion mount used? and mostly 1/120 shutter?
Some really nice close up shots in there.

 

[Phil Holland]

12:1 the least compression for 8k FF 60fps? No motion mount used? and mostly 1/120 shutter?
Some really nice close up shots in there.

Glad you like the CUs Christopher. That's certainly one area where 8K show's a lot of potential IMO.

No Motion Mount. Don't know if there's an 8K Motion Mount in the works actually for PL. I think the Canon Motion Mount might work fine, but I haven't tested that at all yet. Actually all 1/60th here. Besides the 4X lights I setup there were shop florescent tubes (daylight balanced) in the ceiling fixtures that were on and this shutter speed allows for flicker free on standard US 60Hz power.

At 8KFF 60fps, yep 12:1 is the max data rate as of now. That's about 253MB/s. If it was possible to hit 11:1 we'd be looking at 276MB/s, 10:1 would be 303MB/s.

Internal Data Transfer Rates on Weapon CF and Forged bodies is indeed 300MB/s, but overhead is also a factor here. I am indeed curious to see if there's more possible with MINI-MAGs to squeeze out another tick, specifically with the 512GB and 1TB media.

8K FF @ 24fps lowest REDCODE RAW Compression Ratio is 5:1 with a data rate of 243MB/s. I do wonder if we can get to 4:1 at 303MB/s.

If you're curious a full uncompressed 1:1 8K FF frame would be 1215MB/s and that would be CHUNKY.

Based on my MINI-MAG 1TB speed tests you can actually write to them closer to 350MB/s and read from them up to about 500MB/s which makes me wonder if we can squeak out more.

This also inspired the curiosity of potentially even being able to lower than 6K FF 3:1 (222MB/s) at say 2:1 with 333MB/s, however, that's getting very close to the ceiling and I'm certain there are write checks on RED Media that throttle things just a bit to ensure reliable writes.

Hard to say, but I'm sure if it's possible once things are hammered down a bit more RED Engineers can squeeze that last tick out.

 

[Steven Caesare]

Phil, did you see your short made it on Gizmodo?

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/beyond-gorgeous-video-shows-the-making-of-a-damascus-st-1765119147

It really is an awesome piece.

 

[Phil Holland]

Phil, did you see your short made it on Gizmodo?

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/beyond-gorgeous-video-shows-the-making-of-a-damascus-st-1765119147

It really is an awesome piece.

Thank you Steven. Yep, noticed that yesterday as I suddenly was getting a heck of a lot of questions about the shoot out of nowhere!


Here's one tidbit:

I've been getting a lot of questions about what that powder stuff Tony is sprinkling on the billet that he's hammering. That's known as Flux, which is made up of borax and a mixture of several other things. The main purpose of the use of flux during forged welding is to keep the material from oxidizing. Constant coating creates a higher quality weld. And yep, anytime Tony whacked it with the power hammer it shot off and hit everything everywhere.

For this situation, and I mentioned it earlier, it was important to use optical clear filters in front of the lens and camera. Went through a few of them on this shoot because they were all pitted. Some have asked why I didn't use acrylic instead of the more expensive glass filters. The quick answer is optically the glass is better and additionally if hot molten bits of metal things hit acrylic there's a chance it gets milky or explodes/cracks in a way that ruins the shot. With the glass it mostly just pits the filter and gets stuck in there or bounces off, which gave me pretty high odds I could film through that chaos rather than calling for a filter swap in the middle of power hammering. The thing is once this process starts, there is no going back and calling for another take. The billet is constantly being transformed. If you miss the shot, you've missed the moment.

There were actually 3 pieces of damascus made for this sword. The bits in the sword that are damascus are the blade, finger recessions on the grip, the top plate on the guard, the skull detail/logo, and pommel nut. The pommel nut is actually one of my favorite details on the piece. The grip and pommel nut got the "twisting" treatment and the pommel nut shows that detail in a fantastic way.

Here's a shot of the unpolished RED Skull Logo:

That's what was cut out at the water cutter. Grinding and sanding that down to a rounder surface also brings out the layer detail in the damascus.

 

[Steven Caesare]

Certainly welcome... thanks for some additional sneak peeks behind the scenes... very cool.