My first RED shoot...

[zak forrest]

So why the 53 fps? (as opposed to 55, or 50?) was that the magic number for a flickering light

 

[Anders Holck]

Anders, I was only looking at the resolution of the posted pictures. I was not criticizing your abilities as a DP/Director.

Thanks, but can you really judge resolution from a 720p heavily web compressed JPEG?

You definitely need commendation for making a movie for $24 K with all that specialty lighting.

It's a 5 min music video...so I guess I dont get commendation after all?
(BTW. I didn't say these shots were special. I just wanted to share them with the community because I was glad I finally got to shoot something myself on the camera. Besides test charts et al.)

Could you have shot the whole movie in 24 Frames per second x 4K resolution ?

Sure but I wanted the added gravity of the higher speed. Our project rate was 25 fps by the way not 24. Europe, you know....
The project is heading for 576p so even with a nice downscale yo wold be hard pressed to spot the 3k shots beside the 4k.

Also, in the second photo, is the light supposed to be from a natural source (eg. moon/sun) or from artificial source(s) ?

I would imagine those bright lights were from the dope greenhouses the duke has outside he's castle. Arc lights are very poplar with the druglords. Or whatever....

A crane for the lights wasn't within budget and those were 2 x 4k HMI's btw not a 18k or something. They are at 70' distance, thru a mild frost.
Now where was my helium ballon when I need it
[/QUOTE]

 

[Anders Holck]

So why the 53 fps? (as opposed to 55, or 50?) was that the magic number for a flickering light

Hi Zak. Í think yo missed this:

On my Red with a reddrive 3k 2:1 tops out at 53 fps. Why shoot 50 when you can shoot 53?
We used flicker free HMI and Kinoflo so no flicker issues at odd speeds.

 

[zak forrest]

HA. Yes I did miss that. Thanks Anders. Yeah I would do the same!

 

[Mark Pedersen]

at what point does Chuckt just get banned? I used to think it was the fan boys giving him a hard time, but he's just a jerk.

I think the pics are pretty, regardless

Agree! On both counts.

M

 

[Steve Murray]

Rudeness

Rudeness

First of all, I do not see the wow! in any of these. Are you saying these photos are better than photos from other video cameras? But they are definitely not better than 35 mm film, in my opinion.

What is your real name? And which booth will you be working at NAB so we can all come by and say hello?

Thanks.

Enzo

 

[Mat@imageWork]

Hi Anders,

beautyfull work.

But don't you something in the contrast associate with the extreme definition of the camera, that's looks unorganic? It's like we are close enough to see every piece of chair, make-up etc...I just shot a commercial last week and I have the same feeling: too much details, too much contrast...I don't know what we are missing. Camera give 10 to 11 stops. Every digital camera give the same feeling, but not photo camera like hasselblad with a numeric back.

To my opinion, we need to improve the dynamic range in digital cinematography. 35mm stock have not a linear reponse to light. I think we need at least 12-13 stops so we can ajust feet and shoulder of the numeric linear curve. This my opinion, probably people here have a better knoledge.

 

[Anders Holck]

I find the original 3k files pretty organic. I shot ISO400 to get more lattitude in the highlights.

I did scale these shots down using bicubic sharper in Photoshop which did introduce some edge ringing.

Remember these shots were just run through Redalert and scaled in photoshop. I think the final grade will make them look much more filmic and organic

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Anders, have to say (again), your shots are WAAAAY cool, and you're grabbing the beast by the horn and taming it sooo well with those low-light AND blue-colors.

I would love to hear more about your own roundtrip tool!

Gunleik

 

[Anders Holck]

I would love to hear more about your own roundtrip tool!

There is not so much to it. Pretty decent alpha software, works like it should with a pretty interface. Some bugs still to fix.

Crimson was so great that I chose not to perse making it commercial.

If I chose to fix the few bugs I might offer it for download for free, but at the moment I'm pretty busy with work and making a few other tools.

Now a "send to redcine" integration in FCP would be so cool, right?

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Yep. Definitely, AND with a "Send to Color" for DPXs from RedCine as well...

Good thing is that it's solveable, but (for me @least) it still involves one manual routine I'd love to get rid of...

Gunleik

 

[Michael Morlan]

Anders,

Incredibly beautiful. Excellent use of directional soft light. Did you bounce/throw anything back in the eyes on any of the shots?

I'd be curious to compare the best-light image directly off camera with the stunning final images you posted.

Again, stunning work.

Michael

 

[Frank Weeks]

Anders,

Do you mind telling us how you lit the tight shots along with #1?


Thanks

Frank

 

[Jannard]

Anders... terrific work. Were there any problems on the shoot we should be aware of? The workflow issues will go away with a bit more time just like other problems have been solved in the last few months.

This is really great stuff.

Jim

 

[Anders Holck]

Anders,

Do you mind telling us how you lit the tight shots along with #1?


Thanks

Frank

The Couch(#1) and Saliva(#9)
- Kinoflo 4 bank 4 feet from above with a long skirt . (Acts as Coffin light)
- Kinoflo 4 bank 4 feet behind the couch, angled towards the back wall. (two tubes active) Black cloth on the back of the couch hides the lamp.
- Kinoflo 4 bank 2 feet as fill/catchlight 6 feet in front on the floor.
- LWZ-1 at 45mm and - Ultraprime 180mm

The Strangulation (#5 & #7)
- Kinoflo 4 bank 4 feet from above with a long skirt. (Acts as Coffin light)
- Pocket Par 400 as stray light on the back wall.
- small Lightpanel as catchlight/fill
- Ultraprime 85mm


All 5600k tubes. Camera rated ISO400. WB at 4600k. Lens at T2.6. 3k 2:1 53 fps at 1/100. Redcode 36.

 

[Tobias Straka]

That looks very opera-ish - very cool... Keep the footage coming!

 

[Anders Holck]

Anders... terrific work. Were there any problems on the shoot we should be aware of?

Thanks.

If I should point out a few things that I feel could be improved:

- Clip indicator should be in the image chain before LUT and white balance. For this particular shoot I wanted to use a bluish WB on set. This caused the clip indicator to show clipping in the blue channel at least 2 stops before the actual RAW blue channel clipped. This made it unusable as exposure aid, which is too bad because the implementation is great otherwise. I hope something can be done about that.

- The flexibility with different formats and framerates is great. The joystick is "no Joy" I'm afraid :-( As I tend to keep my battery and RedDrive close to the body it's very hard to navigate succesflly dial it without accidentally pressing up or down.

To quote myself:

1. please make it so that the fps range wraps around.
So to go from 24 fps to 120 fps you simply need to decrease by 25 stops to the left.

2.Actually I hate the little wheel so much that I think you should enable the playback control buttons to increment in the menus:
FF=+1
Next clip=+10
REW=-1
Prev clip=-10
Pressing play would still enter the VTR mode.
This would make it a lot easier to operate if the back is blocked by a disk or battery as yo can still reach those buttons from the top. The big fingerguard simply makes the wheel to hard to rotate when space is tight.

- At some point I wanted a 1/75sec shutter but it wasn't available as an option from the menu. Hope you get the time to implement this.

- On one take (Out of about 400) the Reddrive suddently dropped frames (175 to be exact) I shot 120 fps at 2k 2:1. Didnt happen again.

- Sometimes when booting the RED LCD would show blanking tearing, as if the screen update wasn't synchronized with the image buffer.

- I had a few lockups while playing back footage when I was a little impatient and pressed skip too many times. Think it's a known issue with build 15 and Reddrives. I hope you get the time to implement a better playback mode with a thumbnail index. Yo do get sore thumbs when you need to skip 50 takes backwards.

- Sometimes when rebooting (After battery change) the varispeed would toggle off. I had to reenable from the sensor menu.

- I had about two incidents where the booting process stalled at the first "booting..." text on the back LCD.

- I sometimes really missed a simple tape counter you can reset. When on the steadi I tend to use this very much to get a sense of the length. Hope there is a way to implement this.

- I really miss the Preset wheel of the HVX200. While that is a consumer cam, I could see it as a great asset on the RED ONE as changing framerate and resolution could be done with a simple dial back and forth. Maybe holding down sensor and video while turning the joystick cold shift between presets. Dont know but as the resolution, look metadata and different framerates is some of the greatest assets of the camera, it is a bit cumbersome to change back and forth.

Otherwise the camera behaved really great!
And best of all it was a joy to shoot.

 

[Frank Weeks]

The Couch(#1) and Saliva(#9)
- Kinoflo 4 bank 4 feet from above with a long skirt . (Acts as Coffin light)
- Kinoflo 4 bank 4 feet behind the couch, angled towards the back wall. (two tubes active) Black cloth on the back of the couch hides the lamp.
- Kinoflo 4 bank 2 feet as fill/catchlight 6 feet in front on the floor.
- LWZ-1 at 45mm and - Ultraprime 180mm

The Strangulation (#5 & #7)
- Kinoflo 4 bank 4 feet from above with a long skirt. (Acts as Coffin light)
- Pocket Par 400 as stray light on the back wall.
- small Lightpanel as catchlight/fill
- Ultraprime 85mm

Thanks Anders
good to know the Kinos were stable at the odd frame rate

beautiful stuff

Frank

 

[Kenn Michael]

- Clip indicator should be in the image chain before LUT and white balance. For this particular shoot I wanted to use a bluish WB on set. This caused the clip indicator to show clipping in the blue channel at least 2 stops before the actual RAW blue channel clipped. This made it unusable as exposure aid, which is too bad because the implementation is great otherwise. I hope something can be done about that.

....SNIP....

- I really miss the Preset wheel of the HVX200. While that is a consumer cam, I could see it as a great asset on the RED ONE as changing framerate and resolution could be done with a simple dial back and forth. Maybe holding down sensor and video while turning the joystick cold shift between presets. Dont know but as the resolution, look metadata and different framerates is some of the greatest assets of the camera, it is a bit cumbersome to change back and forth.

Seconded on both points Anders... Dead on.

 

[Jarred Land]

love those kinos

amazing work man.. truly stunning.

Thanks.

If I should point out a few things that I feel could be improved:

- Clip indicator should be in the image chain before LUT and white balance.

This is coming very soon...


and i love the preset idea...