dino g
Well-known member
Job: Midnight Sun
Type: Feature Film
Format: Red Weapon 6k 6:5 2x & 6K WS
Shoot Dates: October 12-November 10, 2015.
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and surrounding areas.
Cameras: Red Forged Carbon Fibre Weapons #27 & #65 + Epic X Dragon #00031 + Another Dragon Provided by Drone guys.
Lenses: Master Anamorphics, Kowa Annamorphics, Alura Zoom, Master Primes.
Talent: Patrick Schwarzenegger, Bella Thorne, Rob Riggle, Quinn Shephard
Director: Scott Speer
Director of Photography: Karsten "Cra$h" Gopinath
Gaffer: Chris Meakes
Key Grip: David Askey
1st AC A Unit: Nick Watson
DIT: Dino Georgopoulos
In keeping with a long tradition on Reduser of sharing information from my shoots particularly when I am using cameras that are not widely available, here is a quick breakdown of what happened on our job.
I have already posted some pictures on a different thread and filled up my instagram @dinogeorgopoulos over the last month with almost 100 shots of BTS, so I will spare you a thread full of slow loading pictures.
What I want to share are 7 main points.
Reliability of the system/cameras
Temperature Regulation
Auto Black Balance
No Noise
Fool Control
Red Mini Mag Performance
Workflow
Reliability of the system/cameras
I have had my Weapon #27 since the end of July and it has worked here and there, but this particular job was the first job that lasted more than a week. The camera came off a 3 day Toyota Commercial which had the camera mostly on a Russian Arm car shooting the 2016 Toyota Lineup in and around Portland OR. So it can be said that this camera worked continuously for 6 weeks without one glitch. Weapon #65 on the other hand was literally picked up at the factory by me the day I left for Canada. It had never been powered up before this job and did not go through the Normal QC process we put them through at Keslow. I took it raw and unfiltered....
That being said, they both performed flawlessly. A Camera #27 went through 65 Red Mini Mags in 23 shoot days and B Camera #65 went through 62 Mini Mags. Each mag was filled to over 60% on each load sometimes as much as 100%. I generally find the red mini mags much faster to download and quicker to format, but more about that later. The camera configurations included the use of a Keslow Magic Box which allows for hot swapping of power, time code in, and GPIO with 8 x arri type 3 pin power ports. each camera had a preston Fiz on it as well as a cinetape with horns. A camera was used in a hand held mode and also in steadicam mode. handheld used the red 7" touch screen onboard and the steady config used the 5" red touch screen monitor. The 1st AC had a very nifty manfroto tripod with a small HD attached to it and a Bolt receiver. the camera had the Bolt transmitter and I have to tell you I was very impressed with that system as it has come a long way. I can't remember a time when we had to wait for the monitors to pair. it was up continuously. for the most part i used the Red monitor to control the cameras and rarely if ever used the side control panel, just a creature of habit more than anything i guess. I also used the fool control on my iPhone 6s Plus to change parameters and metadata, that system is just awesome. on the A camera we used the monitor mount on the side with the adapter and on the b Camera we used an adapter with the top monitor mount. both worked perfectly without issue.
We black balanced the cameras at prep and never had to do it again. the cameras worked 14-16 hours a day and we kept them continuously powered up that entire time. ( it is cold in Canada so we figured we would keep them nice and warm all day). More on temperature below. The B Camera was set in a hand held mode for the entire shoot, although it did go on sticks here and there, it was also configured with a 7" touch screen monitor as well as an onboard monitor for the AC.
Now for 8 years I have been on the forefront of red camera technology. as most of you know, i took delivery of my red one #0031 in the first week they were available, I was the third person to get an epic and just about the 3 person to get a weapon that wasn't named fincher or soderbergh. with each generation of these cameras the reliability and out of the box usability goes up. the red one took about 18 months to really be ready for primetime, which was actually good for me because it required my presence to work properly and therefore i worked a lot. the epic was much much better but had its moments in the first couple of months, particularly with the prototypes i had in paris on "to the wonder"....but this camera, the forged carbon fibre weapon...it is perfect out of the box. we had it in hawaii in march and it was great and now in canada for a month and it worked perfectly every day, every hour, every roll. i think we may have had to reboot the camera 3 or 4 times in the entire month for some sort of issue and mostly that was related to the third party gear that was attached to the camera.
Roll after roll, hour after hour, day after day and week after week, the camera stayed powered, kept shooting and kept rolling. We had it in cold, hot, rain, almost snow, on cranes, on drones, on boats, on planes, on dollys, on trains, underslung, overslungs, way up high on stands, underwater, on beaches and rocks and hanging off cars. perfect, perfect, perfect.
I can't say enough about the reliability of this system. It WORKS!
Temperature Regulation.
The weapons uses a different system than the epic and dragon for temperature regulation. instead of targeting the core temp, the fan targets the sensor temp. as a result the sensor stays a constant temp thought the whole day and shoot. we set ours to 40 degrees and it maintained that temp despite being put in bags for the rain, underwater housings for underwater work and placed out in the freezing cold. the core temp would fluctuate but the sensor temp stayed pegged at 40. I had the cameras set to adaptive with quiet for the most part and the sound department never complained and this was a tight quarters drama with a lot of close up work and emotional scenes. moreover, we shot takes that were hundred of gigs lasting 10-20 minutes long without any temp issues. it was very impressive given the over heating issues that were part of the red one experience and sometimes showed up with epic. the boys and girls have figured this out and it is something combined with the auto black balance that now can be taken off your list of things to do throughout the day. for weapon we now can assume that the temp will be perfect and the black shading will be perfect.
Auto BLACK balance
Well I have already talked about it a bit already and in other threads, but to touch on it again, we took the time at prep, it takes about 30-45 minutes to allow the camera to auto black balance. i shot a video of it and it is on youtube. the process is quick and easy and once it is done, it is done. we never had to revisit it and quite frankly i am not sure when we will. not sure how they did it, but it works great and the results are stunning. I will talk about lack of noise next.
No Noise
So noise is never really an issue on a Crash shoot as he loves to provide lots of light, it is one of his signatures. however we did have a night scene where a truck is driving around a corner and it is pitch black out. this scene takes place about 10 minutes before first light in the morning and we shot it on the second to last night about 45 minutes after the sun set. i delivered the dailies to the editor and they called me yesterday and asked if i could re-do that scene and make it brighter. we shoot everything at 500 ISO and so for the editors I took the ISO up to 1280, opened up the mids a little and re-render the DNxHD 36. they loved it it worked perfectly and no noise what so ever. similarly, in the car commercials i spoke about earlier in this thread, that DP liked to boost the ISO to 2000 and shoot at night without lights. we did and when they brought that footage to company 3 and did the final grade, the DP told me that everything held up really nicely. so the auto black shade is not just convenient it works!!!
Fool Control
This is a must have for a Weapon, I used the program coupled with my iPhone and took control of these cameras. I entered all the metadata for the shoot including the director, dp, location info, unit info, production blah blah blah. if you have a lot of time you can also enter scene and take info. for me i just get that from the sound department when i sync the sound, but fool control makes it very easy to do it on the fly. the wifi works great and the syncing process is very easy and seamless. the amount of information you are able to control and the speed at which you can control it makes it easier to use your phone and fool control than to walk over to the camera to do the little things like change the color temp or iso. a must must have.
red mini mags.
I know they have been around for a long time, but it was one of my first jobs using them exclusively and i loved them. they are much faster to download, are reliable and are so damn cute. many times we used them until they were completely empty and never had a problem. we even lost power a few times and the mags were able to write everything right up until the power outage.
Type: Feature Film
Format: Red Weapon 6k 6:5 2x & 6K WS
Shoot Dates: October 12-November 10, 2015.
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and surrounding areas.
Cameras: Red Forged Carbon Fibre Weapons #27 & #65 + Epic X Dragon #00031 + Another Dragon Provided by Drone guys.
Lenses: Master Anamorphics, Kowa Annamorphics, Alura Zoom, Master Primes.
Talent: Patrick Schwarzenegger, Bella Thorne, Rob Riggle, Quinn Shephard
Director: Scott Speer
Director of Photography: Karsten "Cra$h" Gopinath
Gaffer: Chris Meakes
Key Grip: David Askey
1st AC A Unit: Nick Watson
DIT: Dino Georgopoulos
In keeping with a long tradition on Reduser of sharing information from my shoots particularly when I am using cameras that are not widely available, here is a quick breakdown of what happened on our job.
I have already posted some pictures on a different thread and filled up my instagram @dinogeorgopoulos over the last month with almost 100 shots of BTS, so I will spare you a thread full of slow loading pictures.
What I want to share are 7 main points.
Reliability of the system/cameras
Temperature Regulation
Auto Black Balance
No Noise
Fool Control
Red Mini Mag Performance
Workflow
Reliability of the system/cameras
I have had my Weapon #27 since the end of July and it has worked here and there, but this particular job was the first job that lasted more than a week. The camera came off a 3 day Toyota Commercial which had the camera mostly on a Russian Arm car shooting the 2016 Toyota Lineup in and around Portland OR. So it can be said that this camera worked continuously for 6 weeks without one glitch. Weapon #65 on the other hand was literally picked up at the factory by me the day I left for Canada. It had never been powered up before this job and did not go through the Normal QC process we put them through at Keslow. I took it raw and unfiltered....
That being said, they both performed flawlessly. A Camera #27 went through 65 Red Mini Mags in 23 shoot days and B Camera #65 went through 62 Mini Mags. Each mag was filled to over 60% on each load sometimes as much as 100%. I generally find the red mini mags much faster to download and quicker to format, but more about that later. The camera configurations included the use of a Keslow Magic Box which allows for hot swapping of power, time code in, and GPIO with 8 x arri type 3 pin power ports. each camera had a preston Fiz on it as well as a cinetape with horns. A camera was used in a hand held mode and also in steadicam mode. handheld used the red 7" touch screen onboard and the steady config used the 5" red touch screen monitor. The 1st AC had a very nifty manfroto tripod with a small HD attached to it and a Bolt receiver. the camera had the Bolt transmitter and I have to tell you I was very impressed with that system as it has come a long way. I can't remember a time when we had to wait for the monitors to pair. it was up continuously. for the most part i used the Red monitor to control the cameras and rarely if ever used the side control panel, just a creature of habit more than anything i guess. I also used the fool control on my iPhone 6s Plus to change parameters and metadata, that system is just awesome. on the A camera we used the monitor mount on the side with the adapter and on the b Camera we used an adapter with the top monitor mount. both worked perfectly without issue.
We black balanced the cameras at prep and never had to do it again. the cameras worked 14-16 hours a day and we kept them continuously powered up that entire time. ( it is cold in Canada so we figured we would keep them nice and warm all day). More on temperature below. The B Camera was set in a hand held mode for the entire shoot, although it did go on sticks here and there, it was also configured with a 7" touch screen monitor as well as an onboard monitor for the AC.
Now for 8 years I have been on the forefront of red camera technology. as most of you know, i took delivery of my red one #0031 in the first week they were available, I was the third person to get an epic and just about the 3 person to get a weapon that wasn't named fincher or soderbergh. with each generation of these cameras the reliability and out of the box usability goes up. the red one took about 18 months to really be ready for primetime, which was actually good for me because it required my presence to work properly and therefore i worked a lot. the epic was much much better but had its moments in the first couple of months, particularly with the prototypes i had in paris on "to the wonder"....but this camera, the forged carbon fibre weapon...it is perfect out of the box. we had it in hawaii in march and it was great and now in canada for a month and it worked perfectly every day, every hour, every roll. i think we may have had to reboot the camera 3 or 4 times in the entire month for some sort of issue and mostly that was related to the third party gear that was attached to the camera.
Roll after roll, hour after hour, day after day and week after week, the camera stayed powered, kept shooting and kept rolling. We had it in cold, hot, rain, almost snow, on cranes, on drones, on boats, on planes, on dollys, on trains, underslung, overslungs, way up high on stands, underwater, on beaches and rocks and hanging off cars. perfect, perfect, perfect.
I can't say enough about the reliability of this system. It WORKS!
Temperature Regulation.
The weapons uses a different system than the epic and dragon for temperature regulation. instead of targeting the core temp, the fan targets the sensor temp. as a result the sensor stays a constant temp thought the whole day and shoot. we set ours to 40 degrees and it maintained that temp despite being put in bags for the rain, underwater housings for underwater work and placed out in the freezing cold. the core temp would fluctuate but the sensor temp stayed pegged at 40. I had the cameras set to adaptive with quiet for the most part and the sound department never complained and this was a tight quarters drama with a lot of close up work and emotional scenes. moreover, we shot takes that were hundred of gigs lasting 10-20 minutes long without any temp issues. it was very impressive given the over heating issues that were part of the red one experience and sometimes showed up with epic. the boys and girls have figured this out and it is something combined with the auto black balance that now can be taken off your list of things to do throughout the day. for weapon we now can assume that the temp will be perfect and the black shading will be perfect.
Auto BLACK balance
Well I have already talked about it a bit already and in other threads, but to touch on it again, we took the time at prep, it takes about 30-45 minutes to allow the camera to auto black balance. i shot a video of it and it is on youtube. the process is quick and easy and once it is done, it is done. we never had to revisit it and quite frankly i am not sure when we will. not sure how they did it, but it works great and the results are stunning. I will talk about lack of noise next.
No Noise
So noise is never really an issue on a Crash shoot as he loves to provide lots of light, it is one of his signatures. however we did have a night scene where a truck is driving around a corner and it is pitch black out. this scene takes place about 10 minutes before first light in the morning and we shot it on the second to last night about 45 minutes after the sun set. i delivered the dailies to the editor and they called me yesterday and asked if i could re-do that scene and make it brighter. we shoot everything at 500 ISO and so for the editors I took the ISO up to 1280, opened up the mids a little and re-render the DNxHD 36. they loved it it worked perfectly and no noise what so ever. similarly, in the car commercials i spoke about earlier in this thread, that DP liked to boost the ISO to 2000 and shoot at night without lights. we did and when they brought that footage to company 3 and did the final grade, the DP told me that everything held up really nicely. so the auto black shade is not just convenient it works!!!
Fool Control
This is a must have for a Weapon, I used the program coupled with my iPhone and took control of these cameras. I entered all the metadata for the shoot including the director, dp, location info, unit info, production blah blah blah. if you have a lot of time you can also enter scene and take info. for me i just get that from the sound department when i sync the sound, but fool control makes it very easy to do it on the fly. the wifi works great and the syncing process is very easy and seamless. the amount of information you are able to control and the speed at which you can control it makes it easier to use your phone and fool control than to walk over to the camera to do the little things like change the color temp or iso. a must must have.
red mini mags.
I know they have been around for a long time, but it was one of my first jobs using them exclusively and i loved them. they are much faster to download, are reliable and are so damn cute. many times we used them until they were completely empty and never had a problem. we even lost power a few times and the mags were able to write everything right up until the power outage.
