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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Scarlet for idiots?

Here you go I posted this like a year ago:

Increase the Fstop/Tstop number on the lens and more things come into focus. Note: the image will get darker.
Decrease the Fstop/Tstop setting on the lens and less things are in focus. Note: the image will get brighter

The ISO is how sensitive your sensor is. (ASA means the exact same thing).

The longer (aka the larger the number before mm) on the lens the flatter things look and the slower they seem to move towards and away from the lens. When moving the camera from side to side or panning things seem to move faster the 'longer' the lens is.


The shorter (aka the smaller the number before mm) on the lens the larger things appear and the faster the subject will seem to move towards and away from the lens. When moving the camera from side to side or panning things seem to move slower the 'shorter' the lens.

Daylight is blue. Most bulbs are orange. Put a combination of the two in a shot and it'll be noticeable. Gels can be used either on daylight sources (Color Temperature Orange) to correct to it be like a bulb. (Examples would be a window, HMI (a high powered daylight colored type of light) or special flourescent bulbs called Kinos.) Gels can also be used to correct a conventional bulb to match daylight (Color Temperature Blue or CTB gel). However note that all these gels make your light darker.

Don't use standard flourescent bulbs. They're greenish They flicker and they're ugly.

When shooting a scene try to keep the direction of the characters facing consistant. Aka Person A -> <- Person B. You can think of a line between two people talking. Don't cut from a shot on one side of the line to the other without moving across the line during a shot or cutting to right on the line and then across.

Same goes for things moving. If you have a car racing across the screen from left to right... make sure you show the car in the next shot driving from left to right again (otherwise it's driving in circles).

When cutting from different framings or different angles make sure your shots are noticeably different not just "slightly" different. If you cut from say the full face to only slightly closer it'll look like a glitch and won't be sufficiently different to register as a new angle.

24 frames per second is standard cinema. It looks a bit stuttery.
30 frames per second is standard television. It looks more smooth.

A 100 watt light bulb at 5 feet is the equivalent of a 400 watt bulb at 10 feet. If something is twice as far away it's 4 times dimmer.

Shutter speed is how long each frame is exposed for. The faster the shutter (The bigger the number on the bottom aka 1/48 of a second, 1/1000 of a second) the sharper the image is and the less motion blur there is... also the more stuttery and jerky the image appears. Note: the faster the shutter (aka the shorter the exposure) the darker the image.

Sometimes people such as myself measure shutter speed in "degrees". You can ignore these people they're idiots. ;) But if you don't want to ignore these people I recommend learning this simple equation.

1 over ((360/angle)*Framerate)

So 180 degree shutter means 360/180 * (let's say 24 fps standard film speed) = 2 * 24 which = 48. Put a 1 over it and you have 1/48th of a second.

The larger the degree of the shutter the slower the shutter (or another way to think about it the longer the exposure).

With a specific lighting setup you can balance the 3 things (sensitivity of the sensor, F-Stop on the lens and shutter speed). Each has a trade off (amount of noise in the image, how much is in focus and how stuttery things moving are).

Hire a good DP. They'll be able to bring their creativity and technical experience to produce the best possible image. Hire a good crew. Tell them what you want to see and they'll 'do the math'. Hire a good editor they'll be able to possibly salvage your project if you messed it up. Don't be afraid to ask questions of everyone around you and you'll be fine. It's the acting that counts.
Click to expand...
 
Also buy this:
http://hollywoodcamerawork.us/

Also grab an SLR and start shooting now. You'll learn everything you need to know for less than $1k.

Then you start on an adventure in post production that simply put isn't easy. There's a million formats a million and one workflows and applications and an impossible number of permulations there-of. But there's also a million and one books on the subject. With native REDCode support you'll just copy the R3D Files off the CF Card into a folder. Open your editor of choice. Import them into your 'bin' or your 'footage' or your 'assets' and then drag them onto your timeline.
 
I have skimmed through the thread, and it is to be expected that a low cost camera like this is going to attract a variety of people with varying levels of skill for different levels of work. Helping them is the mature thing to do.

The auto function suites running around in certain documentary work, or just as a quick way to get you near enough, and then maybe do some fine adjustment. it depends on the job you want to do and the quality you want. Not everybody is a one in thousand top cinematographer, and Red probably could not make enough money selling to just that market. 50-90%+ of purchasers might not even be good cinematographers.

Saw "Knowing" last night, heard that is was shot in Australia. It was great to have a nice clean grainless picture (except for the slight grain in the transfer) but the color was muted. I can understand what the director was trying to achieve, stark, dark and moody. I am a bit of a fan of the slightly popped bright (but with low lighting contrast) colorization you usually find in Panavision films (as an earlier example) and cheap DVD players. The flat yellowing of the skin tones reminded me of the girl in Gold Finger. The color was muted, but less so in green, with bright colors still bright. Dark scenes inside were really contrasty (the isolated small lights of the scene contributing to this effect) from one side of the face to another, really showing the ability of the Red. I was impressed with the first cabin scene where the headlights shine a spot on the cabin, and you think, they are using a spot to get the lighting level up, but then notice that the flashlight of the main actor also seems to be lighting up part of the scene, which is good (unless it was a HID based torch).

I have not seen many Red shots but they all seem to have similar effects to the above, and I have noticed this is some other digital video cameras. So the question, is this normal for the Red after colorization or will it perform significantly above this? Is there any Scarlet footage to examine?

One other question. I noticed that the scarlet forum closed down at reduser and a replacement was opened at scarletuser, but now it is open again here. What happened?


Thanks

Wayne.
 
The thread seems to have grown before I posted. I was just going to go over to scraletuser to suggest the following, which might prove useful here.

I agree with Rossetta. Scarlet is going to attract a lot of videographers, hobbyist and other "newbies" compared to the Redone. It will also attract foreigners without the English needed to easily thumb through posts. So a FAQ/wiki organising the information from the threads would give them an easy quicker way to find answers (trying to look through tens of pages of old threads to find one answer, even with searches, can take so many hours as to be impractical) and stop them asking the same question a hundred times. This would also help Red in their marketing of the camera, so maybe they would like to hire somebody to write it.

A wiki is the most practical, but a FAQ can simply be a closed sticky thread where question and answers are added with links to them at the top of the thread in categories. Even a thread with subject and links to individual posts on it can easily be search with thread tools.

Rosetta said:
all im saying is that from a marketing point of view, it would have been a good idea. Very low cost, and would make it much easier for people to get into things. There is tons of info on this forum but it doesn't have not a start, no beginning and no end. For a newbie it all looks like random text. If there would have been some kind of a start-up guide, they might have sold a few more cameras... thats all I am saying.

And if not doing this for One was a mistake, not making such a guide before Scarlet comes out would be a huge huge mistake.

Do you know how easy it is to install a wiki engine?
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I should add, I am not saying that Red should write a dummies guide to cinematography, but instead a guide to work flow and using the Scarlet in general.

If they really did want to do a Dummies Guide as a marketing tool (and reduce support) they could buy the rights to an existing low volume book cheap, even customise it to the Scarlet, and publish it free on line.
 
I have noticed the red FAQ page is not rendering right on my browser, and their is actually a category structure hidden there and detailed scarlet FAQ's coming:

http://www.red.com/FAQ/category/scarlet/
 
Wayne Morellini said:
I should add, I am not saying that Red should write a dummies guide to cinematography, but instead a guide to work flow and using the Scarlet in general.
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You know, it could just be that you guys are wanting something that just isn't ready yet. We have barely seen any images from a Scarlet prototype and only one highly-compressed, low-rez clip.

RED knows they are marketing to a larger and more diverse crowd with the Scarlet. This was a big reason they established the separate Scarletuser forum. Right now, there is a big push to get Scarlet ready for production. As features are finalized, then it seems it makes more sense to start locking down the documentation and delivering more information at various technical levels.

Pretty much everything that is known about Scarlet, by anyone outside of RED, has been mentioned or touched on in this thread or at least linked to from this thread. More information will come when it is ready or RED feels it is required. As for the marketing angle or justification for a dummies' guide, RED knows all about marketing. They're pros at it.

As for the OP and Rosetta and others... I still ask the question, what is it specifically they would like to know? That's what these forums are for. There's quite a bit of entry-level discussion on these forums (and over at Scarletuser.com). Let them ask their questions and maybe us RED veterans can help or direct them to where they can find their answers.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
You know, it could just be that you guys are wanting something that just isn't ready yet. We have barely seen any images from a Scarlet prototype and only one highly-compressed, low-rez clip.
Click to expand...

Well, for me, such a guide would not be until the camera was available, so I don't dis-agree.


As for the marketing angle or justification for a dummies' guide, RED knows all about marketing. They're pros at it.
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We should not overestimate people, companies often don't get the marketing the best it could be. If we go back to the early 80's for an example, and look at what Commodore achieved. They excelled with the VIc-20 then Commodore 64 User Guides and then Programmers reference manuals. This got many people into the programming market. The competition had not got it so much before then, and Commodore only really got it because they got one person in that understood and wrote the original guide etc (and marketing from memory have his book here somewhere "Home Computer Wars"). So, this is a bit rare among people, their are many pretenders to the crown, with degrees, but few that can actually do it.

I think the suggestions for the information database (FAQ or Wiki) can save time in the long term. So maybe they are not asking about any particular information at this point, but a place (and being film people you probably get what I mean ;) ).
 
Liam Hall said:
I think you'll find it's not necessarily the foreigners who struggle with English. Incidentally, can you have 'foreigners' on the Internet?
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Liam, yes, Red is an American company with an English website and the forums that speak English, anybody that does not speak a high level of English is a foreigner to what we are saying here. Market wise, there is a big market outside the US to these people. So is it worth the extra 20% of sales. But as I found there is already a structure to the Red FAQ started.

There are people in English speaking countries that have trouble with English, but imagine how much harder it is for people in other countries to learn. And, if you mean any of us, then you might as well stop there (starting a sentence with "And" is a valid use of English, it just has fallen out of favour these days).
 
Eric Strunz said:
What?! They took out the David Mullen auto button? Well, there goes my dream of ever being invited into the ASC!

Eric
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And if you need to undo the Mullen effect, you use the Mullen Mulligan. :)
 
I'm pretty sure that RED will provide extensive documentation and support with Scarlet, especially since it will be the first RAW camera for most buyers, myself included. Not to mention that the hardware itself is different than anything else out there. It'll at least come with a user manual.

RED have been around the block with product support from the get-go both by establishing this forum and working closely to support early adopters like Soderbergh, I think it's a safe assumption they've got a plan for all the Scarlet buyers.
 
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