Independent feature film shot in the UK, London

[MichaelHalsell]

Composition and lighting are terrific. You mentioned previous features 1 & 2, are these commercially available? I would love see the final edit.

 

[Ryan E. Walters]

So as soon as we had spots of pink and green on the key side of the faces we were happy . No red no purple as well.

I just read that a little closer- I missed it before. If I understand it correctly you are exposing the sensor based off of the meter at 250, and then raising the overall levels in the shadows through the control of lighting.

 

[XiaoSu Han]

Hi Michael, unfortunately not yet., Here's some information regarding our feature before that: http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=31360

and this is coming out soon we hope: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1390397/

Ryan, we light the set to iso 250, but expose to false colors and camera set to 320, yes we usually play it safe and keep everything in the orange area, only in extreme non-controllable situations we turn to raw and see if its not RED there, but usually keep the redspace clipping safe as well. As said for faces usually we are happy with pink and green, for shadows and dark sides of faces we are mostly satisfied with dark grey, we seldom go into teal, purple since that would introduce noise. Just pull down the black level to a reasonable amount in the grade and we usually end up with very juicy shadows and well exposed faces.

Contrast ratio is the key!

so what we like is doing 1 over and 1 under, that works quite well.

So light to a dynamic range of 3 stops as in faces, but have hotter and darker spots of course for backgrounds and highlights.

hope it helps!

cheers Xax

 

[Pete Wallington]

Very nice stuff Xax

Out of interest, do you monitor in Redspace or Rec709. What is your post production workflow to get these stills? Which color and gamma spaces do you use in post? And how much grading have these been through? It would be great to see a graded and ungraded example of the same frame...

Thanks

 

[Ryan E. Walters]

Xax,

Thanks- that is very helpful. I find it interesting that you are monitoring and using false color in Red Space. Generally speaking I have not liked Red Space as the curve delivers a brighter image which can lull me into thinking the the image is better exposed then it is- resulting in a more noisy image if I need to bring it up at all. But it sounds like you have not experienced this issue. I think I'll go back and play with Red Space more.

When the images are brought into Color for grading, are you grading off of the R3D's? And if so, do you still use Red Space then, or do you switch over to Camera RGB & Red Log? Did you shoot everything at 4k, or did you do any 2k work? If you did 2k work, and you used the R3D's from within Color, what are your thoughts on Color's ability to debayer the R3D's? (Generally speaking I have found Color to not do a good job with the debayer and it ends up feeling soft on the 2k footage. 4k is not so much of an issue as some of the softness gets hidden in the down scaling to 2k.)

One more set of questions- this was shot on build 20, so you did not have use of the 4.5k option- was that choice made because build 21 / 4.5k was not available yet, or for another reason? In Summer Time you had cropped the stills to 2.35:1, so will this end up at that ratio as well?

Thanks again for your input and helpfulness- you've been a great resource!

 

[Yang Liu]

It's a good one. Nice job buddy.
By the way, are u working in UK? Which city of China are u from?

 

[XiaoSu Han]

Hey Pete,

I took a rather easy route with those stills,

just browsed through raws with clipfinder, CMD+R to load them into RedAlert, save as 2K TIFF, get them into Lightroom and do a slight color correction. I didn't do much as we pretty much achieved what we wanted in camera, will post some comparisons.

Also, it was redspace all the way through.

Ryan,

we finished a project for the web earlier this year grading R3D's in Color, we used redspace as well since this gave us the most satifying results colorwise. This project is slated for a 35mm print, so I guess we'll take it to the posthouse and they are going to suggest a workflow based on either REDLog or something else, maybe DPX. I'll post more about that as soon as I know something.

We try to avoid 2K at all since we've also experienced that 2K gives a much softer image, so no 2K work here. We did some 3K slomos on another project, maybe I can grab a few stills from there. I also haven't really coped with the debayer stuff, our 2K Prores masters from 4K looked fine enough for the web. As said as this project is slated for a theatrical print we'll aim for the best picture possible in that regard of course.

As this is going to be 1.85, we didn't see the necessity of upgrading to build 21, as we wouldn't gain resolution anyways. Also, Summertime is slated to finish in 1.85 as well, I just cropped some to 2.35 for fun

Hope that helps!!

Hey Yang,

we shot several projects in London, UK, but also worked in NYC and HK before. I am originally from Xi'an and Beijing

cheers, Xax

 

[XiaoSu Han]

Here are a few side-by-sides (original first, corrected afterwards)

as said this is just an initial correction, we're going to have a proper grade at a later stage of course.

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

We set our light meters to 250 ISO all the time to be on the safe side and verified the exposure using mostly false colors.

I think that we've found our sweet spot for a skin-keylight to be 1/2 - 2/3rds a stop over, which is pink anyways on the RED false colors since build 20. So as soon as we had spots of pink and green on the key side of the faces we were happy . No red no purple as well

Xax, nice photos! Love to see people doing ambitious work. Let us know when the film is finished.

Overexposing the key by 1/2 to 2/3rds of a stop when the lightmeter is set to ISO 250 is the same as setting the lightmeter to 160 ASA, isn't it?

This is what I find: Red's real world sensitivity for me is something around 160-200 ASA when using a lightmeter, not to be confused with Red's metadata ASA.

Good approach though, false colour and lightmeter. I heartily agree.

Kind Regards form Germany,

Hans