RED Point and Shoot?

[BRANDON JAMESON]

The motion picture industry has always prided itself on technicians who combine technical expertise with creative and practical experience to get "professional results".

It is highly disheartening and incredibly insulting to imagine that professional tools and equipment be required to "dumb-down" for the masses.

The reason that so many folks on here complain that their images look like crap is because they KNOW crap about what they are doing.

ANY crew member, from a brilliant DP, Director, Gaffer, Grip, Colorist,Cam OP, DIT or Make-Up Artist has the same level of understanding and expertise of their craft as a brain surgeon has for his skill and ALL professions would be compromised if amateurs took control of them.

Just because you can buy a professional piece of gear and plug it in doesn’t mean you can make it work.
Actually, most of the time, it just makes you dangerous.

What REALLY has to change AT THE CORE, is the notion that lower price-points, which now allow for more "democratic" access to professional tools, ALSO requires a shorter or any less rigorous amount of education,commitment to your craft and practical experience.

That mindset is ludicrous.

RED or any professional instrument can never be, nor should it be, "point and shoot", there are plenty of options for those looking for an easy way to make acceptable pictures.

There WILL be substantial learning curves for any and all hard and software that goes into any professional endeavor, and by definition, that's what distinguishes the expert from the amateur.

Sure, there could be a easy-to-understand book written for RED, like Barry Green wrote for the DVX series, but make no mistake about it, Panasonic did NOT write their own, nor should RED be expected to go beyond a user's manual for their products.

The amount of sheer laziness of some users of this forum, who imagine that they can ask the same questions over and over without even scanning the forums first for the answer or expect to be 'spoon fed" a professional's savvy and skill set through a post or two, amazes me.

IMPO,only time, education, a willingness to do your OWN research to get your questions answered and practical experience are the ONLY way that adding your unique innate creativity will matter in the least to achieving “professional” results.

As with any skilled trade, you will only get as good you are willing to give.

 

[Terry VerHaar]

One notable point regarding your, umm, rant - bad brain surgeons kill people; bad movies, well, they just are a pain in the ass.

Hey, here's a thought, maybe a better analogy is that poor filmmakers are like poor proctologists! :smiley:

 

[Adam Welch]

I completely agree with everything you said Brandon. To be a true professional you must continue to educate yourself and hone your skills. Your learning never ends, but you must be willing to take the time and effort to learn. I do not consider myself a "professional" yet, but I take what I learned in school, what I see everyday at work, and what I do during testing to continue to educate myself on the professional equipment I decided to buy. If I really wanted thing to be "dumb-down" I would not have spent the kind of money I did.

 

[BRANDON JAMESON]

One notable point regarding your, umm, rant - bad brain surgeons kill people; bad movies, well, they just are a pain in the ass.

Hey, here's a thought, maybe a better analogy is that poor filmmakers are like poor proctologists! :smiley:

OMG HYSTERICAL!!!!

 

[John Marchant]

Terry, I worry what that makes good filmmakers

 

[Mike Kushner]

i don't disagree that good photographers make good looking images. I've got the look of my Epic fairly dialed in and find it pleasing. The Red Camera skin tones and color space have gotten much better since the early days, but would agree with some of the folks that it takes more work to make it look good than other competitor's cameras. Since its Raw, the camera doesn't have the same built-in processors and curves that a Canon or Panasonic might have and as a result it is more time and work and effort to get pleasing images. It works great if you are Peter Jackson or Ridley Scott and have a year of post production. For those of us in TV or advertising with quick turn arounds, I find raw cumbersome to deal with. I've met some pretty successful print photographers who work for Sports Illustrated or National Geographic and from my conversations with them, they don't shoot raw much unless its a magazine cover or a special project. The reward of latitude is just not worth the trouble in my opinion for quick turn projects, especially if the lighting is controllable. Hope they create a solution for ready to edit files soon. The detail and high frame rates are great, but the raw workflow creates too many hassles for the pay off, in my opinion. Producers are seeing that there are many choices and starting to dictate what formats will keep their post costs and time down and still deliver high resolution footage.

 

[Craig McNicoll]

You are afraid that cameras will get so easy that anyone will be able to do what you do? Don't worry. You are so much more than the tools you use.
Anyone can buy a set of paints and paintbrush, for cheap! That does not make everyone a painter. Still, I would never discourage anyone from trying.

 

[Christopher Mills]

Point and shoot secondary issue... Labor supply and demand

Point and shoot secondary issue... Labor supply and demand

Aside from the skill level needed to achieve a good picture, there is another concern:

If owning AND understanding how to use your high quality image capture device makes you a DoP, and it becomes simple to learn, then we are sure to have more DoPs than are needed for the commercial projects created in the world.

I think we are on track to have the average annual financial return from having a RED (or a Sony, Canon, or Arri) be comparable to the average annual financial return for being a competent but unkown actor-- very low, and requiring some other profession to support you.

Right now we are having a flood of people who dream of making a profitable career out of film making... and who think that owning the tools gets them in the door... Most of them are at best going to make a brief financial return on photographing terribly unwanted projects in high gloss detail for people who can not get past the doorman to get their movie into profit.

That doorman is the distribution and exhibition system, who have all the product they need right now, thank you very much.. because you have a viewing public that doesn't want to see beginner's scripts with amateur actors and no art direction, thank you very much...

What of reality TV, you say? Oh, you guys are so not invited to shop your show to the people with infrastructure to exhibit the ideas they have already floated past advertisers... never mind what your costs are and final image quality is..

Some are going to apply a great set of tools to corporate and industrial film-making, but at a lower cost to image quality ratio than that genre has ever seen before... and yes, that will mean lower financial rewards to the people currently in that market.

I think the paints and paintbrush analogy is valid.. and extends to that a talented and dexterous artist needs and always has needed PATRONS to be a profit making craftsman.

I am not bitter.. I do make a living in the media industry, and have done so for over 20 years, in a wide variety of crafts with a wider variety of tools.

There are many people more skilled and experienced than I, and I hope to learn as much as possible from them in my lifteime.

 

[BRANDON JAMESON]

Very cool points, Christopher.
THe cream always will rise to the top....but in the meantime, the new generation of film making gear has unleased a boatload of questionable results on SO many levels of the workplace.

 

[Christopher Mills]

but the opportunitites include....

but the opportunitites include....

Since you really do need support to shoot...
All those newly minted DoPs do in fact need someone to pull focus... someone to mix sound.. someone to light their project, and makeup artists to make the talent look good

 

[BRANDON JAMESON]

+1

Lets be clear though, owning a camera does NOT make you ANYTHING more or less than a CAMERA OWNER.