Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

  • 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 shooting experiences

Antonio Ribeiro

Well-known member
Joined
Dec 11, 2008
Messages
407
Reaction score
0
Points
0
Location
NYC and London
Hi,

Thought it would be a good idea to start a thread on our shooting experiences with the Scarlet.

Yesterday I tried out the camera for the first time and this wasn't fiction but a promo for a late night event, happening every month at the Science Museum in London. So it was a run and shoot scenario. I still don't have the DSMC side module, so I hired some IDX batteries HL-9 (88Wh) for the gig. I also only have two 64GB redmags.

So I set up shop in an adjacent room for equipment cases and for my 17-inch Macbook Pro connected via the PCI slot to a Esata card, so I could save footage from the Redmags to both the internal disk and an external esata drive.

I was very impressed with the camera's ability to deliver very high quality footage in low light. I used mostly R12:1 (so I could get 50 mins out of each card) and shot a few shots at 6:1. All at 4K HD. I also adjusted the shutter speed to 1/24 to get more light. I was using two very average Canon mount lens (a 50mm prime and two zooms). My fan settings were 25% during record and 75% on standby.

My first impressions were that I felt the camera is definitely power hungry and in a four-hour shoot I went through 3 IDX batteries. But the footage showed minimal noise, and I used mostly somewhere between 800 and 1600 ISO and on occasions up to 3200 ISO.

In terms of powering up and down, and menu responsiveness I was so, so impressed. It's very, very fast. I love the sensitiveness of the 5" touch screen although at times it was difficult to activate the icons closer to the top corners.

I had an assistant with me which made switching the mags an absolute brise. And quick too, with close to 64GB being copied to the Macbook in an average of 7 minutes.

Auto-focus for these situations (and most really) is a definite no-no, as it is very jittery, specially hand-held (naturally).

Sound: I did some tests and I have the Wooden Camera A-box and top plate, so it's all very sturdy. This is where we had to play around a bit, but once we got it top notch, the radio mic and the K6 Senheiser phantom powered mic, did a great job. Funny enough, I found that if I powered the camera up, the two mic inputs (1 and 2) showed a red dot, but if I unplugged one of the jacks and pressed it back in again, they would turn to green and then I could see the levels (even without it I could hear sound coming in through my cans.

In terms of rolling shutter (which only happened on a few slow mo's and only when I pushed it to 60fps, 50 was fine, as it jarred with the 50Hz of computer screens and displays), all I did was play around with the shutter speed and voilá! Non problemo.

I am so glad I bought this camera. It will change things dramatically in terms of my work (yet again).

Once I have the footage I will post, although this may take me a couple of weeks as I have a pressing deadline with another job. I look forward to receiving all your comments/experiences.
 
I also just received my Scarlet the other day. First impression is that I'm extremely pleased with my purchase. Unfortunately the weather here has been crappy the last two days, but I plan to do some test shooting tonight when a friend of mine's band is doing some recording. I will post some impressions and some footage after tonight.

-mike
 
Ok, I now have my footage in the post pipeline and I am amazed by the capabilities of Redcine X Pro. I can actually play my clips in real time (without a RR) at 1/8 of resolution and do a straight forward albeit simple first cut of the film, along with First Light grading. I think, and this is a message to RED, that if they wanted to put their minds to it, Redcine could actually provide an alternative to other NLEs when cutting R3d footage. It would be great to have effects options integrated with it. Oh well, no harm in dreaming...

The beauty of doing a rough cut using RC's timeline, is that it will taker a lot less time to export all the footage I actually want to use to other NLE system.

Antonio
 
Back
Top