Is RED too Intimidating?

[Jerrod Cordell]

So every high school student has no respect for anything? High schools should be held back from this technology? Other public high schools in my area spend a HELL of a lot more for their film program then my old HS does; as in multiple $6000+ cameras. I think your being extremely narrow minded. I'll tell you one thing, if a camera like this existed in my high school class it would have been a dream come true. This is the basic model Scarlet, not an Epic. He's already purchased a camera that was $4000 and its in perfect condition. Is it too advanced for a 17 and 18 year old age group? There are beginners in the class that use less expensive cameras, and advanced students who are allowed to rent out advanced equipment. That's his system. Plus there's a contract that if they break it they buy it. Does that make you feel better? :usd:

Hey I'm just telling you what my old high school told me. I remember my senior year, my school's TV Production program got a ton of money and my teacher was trying to think of what to spend it on. I tried to convince him to maybe get some HD cameras like the XH-A1 or something and he said that it was too much money and we had already had like two or three cases where he had to get cameras repaired due to wreckless students. So instead he spent the money on some editing suites with Avid systems (He did want some Macs with Final Cut, but the school for some stupid reason didn't want to buy Macs).

So its not that I don't think that high school students aren't advanced enough. I mean shit, my old school is editing in Avid and I still don't know the first thing about Avid. And I would love it if high schools would start using more advanced equipment like Scarlet. I would have killed to even be shooting anything in HD back in high school, nevermind 3K. But you also have to look at it from another point of view.

 

[Ben DiAnna]

Thanks for the info on the HMC USlatin. It defiantly looks like an impressive camera, especially for a high school class. My teacher just dropped about $6000 on 6 new small HD camera's so it might be a while before he buys new one's (maybe a year or so:sarcasm. But the HMC looks like something he would be interested in for the future, thanks! = )

I'm not part of the school or that program anymore, but I like to check up on old teachers and supporting that class is something I keep in mind since I had such a great experience in it. I'd like to support the future students. When I make short movies I give them to my teacher and he'll show class what past students have done after graduation and what the people taking the class are capable of doing. I think he's gotten more funding from the school cause he had a crap load of new stuff that I never got to use:angry02: He's certainly in no rush to invest into RED yet (nor can he for that matter), but i like to bug him about it.

 

[Ben DiAnna]

So its not that I don't think that high school students aren't advanced enough. I mean shit, my old school is editing in Avid and I still don't know the first thing about Avid. And I would love it if high schools would start using more advanced equipment like Scarlet. I would have killed to even be shooting anything in HD back in high school, nevermind 3K. But you also have to look at it from another point of view.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Now that I got some responses from people on this thread it helped me put things in perspective a little, or just look at things differently. I just like to see students get the best thing available, but not if it's going to discourage them or slow them down. I don't think that class has damage one piece of equipment yet (or at least when I was there) which is pretty impressive. I think I'd even be some what comfortable loaning my camera to them if I had to (which I don't! :biggrin: ).

I didn't intentionally make this thread all about my old school (I was using it as an example), but I'm kind of glad everyone focused on it cause I've enjoyed everyone's feedback.

 

[Roberto Lequeux]

Well it seems that there isn't a need for anyone to help you pick out a camera any more, but just to add... archiving 21Mbps 1080p shouldn't be hard at all. Asking your students to limit their shooting ratio is an excellent exercise... and with SD cards, as well as the more expensive P2s and SXS it is easy for them to erase the ones they don't need. Burning DVDs of the final projects is great and for archiving your footage, while not necessary it does develop a good practice for the real world and paid jobs.. you could even find a good external 7200rpm drive with firewire that was cheap and do a group buy making it a one time investment for each student that should last them the whole year. You can get a 320GB for about $100 any day, find a discount or negotiate a group buy and it may drop significantly. 500GB at 21Mbps is more than a LOT of footage.... just some ideas... for redundancy you could teach the kids to have footage they are currently working on in the computer's internal drive, on each other's drives, on the computer's faster externals... $50 ($150) more and you can get 1TB drives which might be comfortable even for a group/production team... the possibilities are endless...

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I'm not sure it is even necessary for college film schools to work with the latest and greatest camera technology, so I certainly don't see the need for high school students to do so... sure, I can understand that it's "cool" to use high-end gear as a beginner, but the point of education is to give people a grounding in the basics, whatever those basics you have determined as a teacher are valuable.

Maybe those basics are photographic, understanding exposure, lenses, focusing, so the main criteria will be that the camera have manual features. Maybe the basics though are editing, and getting any footage into any kid's laptop for cutting exercises is the most important criteria in choosing the camera.

But there is a value in going fairly cheap with the camera if it allows more cameras for more students to shoot on.

 

[Justin Thomas]

I think the RED workflow is too advanced for High School students if you are talking about them actually using the r3d files.


Just my opinion.

speak for yourself

 

[Craig A. Macon]

speak for yourself

Um...that is what I did. The statement was quantified "Just my opinion."

 

[Cüneyt Kaya]

Which won't take very long. Someone with limited resources and a lot of talent is going to make something amazing with this camera right out of the gate. With any luck it will be me.

Hi, filmmaking is still a teamwork.
i would take an awesome crew and cast over any camera out there.

if you are referring to EL Mariachi, in this case his medical tests to finance the movie were the main selling point. because its a fantastic story to promote the film.


And what you shouldnt forget...not he sold the Movie to Columbia Pictures. He was just able to find a distributor for the videomarket who wanted to pay 20k.

It was an Agent from ICM who made the amazing deals possible.

 

[Tom Visser]

The basics of film making have nothing to do with any one specific platform. I don't think it is necessary to have RED in the curriculum. However, since RED may very well revolutionize the (independent) film industry (other segments to follow), it may become relevant in the future. When that does happen, then the HS should consider procurement, but I don't think they need to act upon trends and changes in workflow that might happen, but should instead utilize the existing workflows and technologies and bring the focus back to technical and artistic skills which are more or less platform independent.

 

[Stephen Gentle]

Hey I'm just telling you what my old high school told me. I remember my senior year, my school's TV Production program got a ton of money and my teacher was trying to think of what to spend it on. I tried to convince him to maybe get some HD cameras like the XH-A1 or something and he said that it was too much money and we had already had like two or three cases where he had to get cameras repaired due to wreckless students. So instead he spent the money on some editing suites with Avid systems (He did want some Macs with Final Cut, but the school for some stupid reason didn't want to buy Macs).

So its not that I don't think that high school students aren't advanced enough. I mean shit, my old school is editing in Avid and I still don't know the first thing about Avid. And I would love it if high schools would start using more advanced equipment like Scarlet. I would have killed to even be shooting anything in HD back in high school, nevermind 3K. But you also have to look at it from another point of view.

Sounds kind of similar to my situation - the school got six workstations with Avid Xpress in about 2002, as well as six PD-150s. But the thing was that they decided that it was too hard to use, and instead installed Premiere 6.0 on them... So this meant that by the time I came through, HDV cameras were out of the question, even though you could pick XH-A1s for about the same price of the cameras they had. But they just didn't have a workflow that would work with them. They didn't even upgrade Premiere, because of the retraining involved... So in my final year, one of the other more advanced students and I were editing on our own systems at home, using Premiere Pro CS3 and After Effects, while the other 70 or so students were still on Premiere 6...

I can definitely see why they didn't use Avid though. I would never have much to do when everyone else was editing, so I ended up walking around helping people. I just couldn't believe the number of exceedingly simple things I had to help people with. There were certainly people who grasped the workflow, but I would say that the number would have been less than 10% of the cohort. When it comes down to it, I think Scarlet is a bit too advanced for most people who did high school film class.

And they're still using Premiere 6.0.

 

[David Rasberry]

For a high school class, putting 6 $1k cameras into students hands beats putting 2 $3k cameras into the same setting. Ready access, easy work flows, and simple operating procedures will get newbies farther down the road in a semester than having the latest cutting edge technology.

 

[Roberto Lequeux]

For a high school class, putting 6 $1k cameras into students hands beats putting 2 $3k cameras into the same setting. Ready access, easy work flows, and simple operating procedures will get newbies farther down the road in a semester than having the latest cutting edge technology.

Totally...I couldn't agree more. I just assumed that by considering Scarlets they had more than enough for several HMCs due to the need for workstations that could handle r3d.

 

[bobaandy]

Well you also have to take into account the cost of each camera. Would you really trust a $3000 to $4000 camera in the hands of some retarded teenagers with no respect for expensive equipment? If it were a college, I could understand, but not high school.

Hi,

We trust high schoolers (from freshmen all the way up) with half a million dollars of equipment on a regular basis, including four $50k camera kits, even handheld.

Problems are very rare. Even the most disrespectful kid perks up and changes his ways once you tell him how much this stuff is worth, and he has to pay if he breaks it (False to a point, of course. But it gets them thinking.)

 

[David Swan]

Avid's not difficult. I taught myself Avid, and last year I had a couple of 11 year-olds cutting a 30 sec commercial on AXP on my laptop, and I'm not even a pro, just a serious enthusiast (And the school's A/V guru).
BTW this talk of school's film units is making me green with envy, as we're too small to have anything like. Hell, I'm the school's film unit!
Dave

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

Interesting reply's, thanks guys. My original view was the work flow would be easy enough for a high school to use, but from what I'm hearing now, it isn't.

I've been involved in a TV project including middle school and high school students for two seasons.

For student with true interest age is not a problem but an advantage. Their mind are like sponges. If a teacher does his/hers job right and not intimidate or alienate students those who are really interested will learn faster then adults.

If the budget is very limited I would rather pick quantity vs. picture quality in this case.