Keith Alan Morris
Well-known member
Today I just test screened my film Gutter King in Orlando at the Premiere Cinemas 14. It was just me, my DP, and my DIT. We did a myriad of tests on a Barko 100 2k projector with a huge throw (big 300+ seat theater). The long and short of it, a HUGE relief. The footage looked utterly, jaw-droppingly amazing. The surprise: how competitive even the 1k version looked! I would like to give Jannard a cigar. Rest assured, if you haven't screened in a theater yet, and you merely kind of know what you're doing like us and don't have a ton of financial resources at your disposal, your Red footage can still look great and compete with anything out there. The possibilities are now, officially, endless. We frickin' played off a frickin' laptop people! I am so happy with my purchase.
Read on for the details.
TEST 1
For the very first test, I wanted to see worst case scenario (and the deck we needed was at the Obama rally). Usually, when you submit to a festival, your film is seen on a lousy DVD with lousy projection in a makeshift room (Sundance, Cannes, etc) and lousy sound. So we screened in Theater 3 on a "worst case" overhead projector--like the ones they use in college classrooms or for the digital ads before the trailers. The footage actually looked better than expected! The colors were muddled, the aspect ratio was a little off, the sharpness was off like expected (a DVD and a huge room), but the sound was perfect. Bottom line, it was totally viewable and the average viewer was not turned off. The theater owner said it looked as good as some of the stuff they play regularly.
Background: We shot the film in May on Build 14, then did a month of weekends in Aug to wait to take advantage of slow mo and the better dynamic range of Build 15 and 16, plus speed ramping etc--and shot it all with nikon lenses in mostly natural and existing light. Upon viewing, we could immediately see the difference between the builds. Build 16 had a detail, a richness, a dynamic range that blew away build 14. Damn I wish I would've waited to shoot the whole film on Build 16. Oh well.
We shot all nat sound so far on the Red with a crappy $100 Azden boom no less, but it still held up fine--that screening. The audio blew us out of the back of the theater it was so good. Problems: We could not tell in our edit bay the bass issues we were in store for. Every little problem on my rough mix I could hear and more (my audio post guys haven't started yet bc we are still tinkering with picture lock). I come from the mindset that you MUST have a supervising sound producer and do a final mix on a real dub stage, so please don't flame me. I know. But I wanted to see what I could get away with because I knew that there are other filmmakers not techies out there that could benefit from this test. You CAN do it all alone, just test test test.
Today, during test 3, the sound was not good. Before I get into that though...
TEST 2
Show East was here in Orlando last week. For those that don't know, its a convention for theater owners etc. I was at a graphic design conference next door and was bored sh*#less, so my friend and I snuck into Show East through the kitchen (kinda how I save money at Cannes in the old days) and we hit the motherlode! I knew there had to be something Red-related somewhere, and looked all around. Way in the back, Sony was showing off their 4k projector (85k) in a fancy-pants theater. The Asian girls at the velvet rope were checking badges, but they could see my excitement, gave us a program and let us in. (Trick is to always keep moving.)
I'm sure people have talked about it ad nauseum on this board, so I will keep it to a minimum. (I was not one of the lucky ones who have been to NAB etc.) They played stuff shot on 16mm, then 35mm and IMAX (Batman) and some animation, which actually looked the best (Madagascar 2?). The respectful thing to do they actually DID, which was show RED footage last, as if it were the big feature attraction. It looked by far the best. (They had a great slide early on that showed that a big throw would not effect 4k footage. True? How so?) Anyway, it was nice to see footage in 4k projection of my fellow RedUsers clips that I've only seen on my computer monitor. Bravo! Looked better than Batman, IMHO. I then proceeded to rip into the head Sony guy for not showing enough Build 16 footage. Time to update that reel, Sony! He agreed, sheepishly. Then gave me a card. Nice guy.
TEST 3
Because the Sony theater was only 5 rows and I was in the front row, I was still skeptical. What would a whole feature with all its ups and downs look like in a real theater, especially after all this work we're all doing? We set up a 2nd test at Premiere Cinemas 14--who is now nearly all digital--they will not even have 35mm projection anymore by the end of the year! They said they got a great deal on the Barko 100 and are getting the Barko 250's soon. I asked him how much and he wouldn't divulge. I did tell him the Sony 4k projectors are 85k and he coughed alot.
So, anyway, we dragged in my Burly Array, my macbook pro, and my hdmi cable. We hooked into his Barko100 with the hdmi cable. His sound with a weird mini to xlr adapter. He hit play.
Cue angelic music. Ah aahh!!!!
I was elbowing my DP so hard I think I bruised him. It looked perfect! And we're testing 1k footage here, not even that! I couldn't believe my eyes. I ran next door to the stupid dog movie and it looked just as good as that! Maybe better! C'mon! So now I have to kidnap a movie star. I knew it would come to this. (Just not so soon.)
Ok, back in May we started editing without making quicktime wrappers, just straight off the "M" proxy clips. Big no-no I have since been told, but those clips were so tasty and they worked and were ready to go, so whatever. A quick 1pass color correction in FCP too! This test was straight from a Quicktime conversion ("none" compression) of those "M" clips, it came to a 250GB file, and its not even 1k--actually only 752x356. Now, after seeing that, I don't want it any sharper than that because I don't believe it could look better than that and I might cry like a little girl.
So, the day of the dude with a camera and a laptop making competitive-looking films is here (edited the whole thing on a laptop just to see if i COULD). Oh, its supposedly been here for awhile--I can hear the haters saying--but not really, not until RED.
I was going to do a 2k Master myself, buy the tower, make an EDL, the whole nine. But when I took my DP out to lunch afterwards today, I asked him, do we really need to? What if we saved all that money and spent it on marketing and going to festivals? Ha!
My only disappointment besides that faulty mini to xlr hookup that killed the speakers from behind the screen (theaters fault)---one of our small investors was 'sposed to show but he flaked. I wish he could've been there to see it! Damn. I wish my dad could've seen it too.
So Redusers, get out there and shoot shoot shoot! Send me any questions. If I can't answer em, I'll have a techie try.
Keith
Read on for the details.
TEST 1
For the very first test, I wanted to see worst case scenario (and the deck we needed was at the Obama rally). Usually, when you submit to a festival, your film is seen on a lousy DVD with lousy projection in a makeshift room (Sundance, Cannes, etc) and lousy sound. So we screened in Theater 3 on a "worst case" overhead projector--like the ones they use in college classrooms or for the digital ads before the trailers. The footage actually looked better than expected! The colors were muddled, the aspect ratio was a little off, the sharpness was off like expected (a DVD and a huge room), but the sound was perfect. Bottom line, it was totally viewable and the average viewer was not turned off. The theater owner said it looked as good as some of the stuff they play regularly.
Background: We shot the film in May on Build 14, then did a month of weekends in Aug to wait to take advantage of slow mo and the better dynamic range of Build 15 and 16, plus speed ramping etc--and shot it all with nikon lenses in mostly natural and existing light. Upon viewing, we could immediately see the difference between the builds. Build 16 had a detail, a richness, a dynamic range that blew away build 14. Damn I wish I would've waited to shoot the whole film on Build 16. Oh well.
We shot all nat sound so far on the Red with a crappy $100 Azden boom no less, but it still held up fine--that screening. The audio blew us out of the back of the theater it was so good. Problems: We could not tell in our edit bay the bass issues we were in store for. Every little problem on my rough mix I could hear and more (my audio post guys haven't started yet bc we are still tinkering with picture lock). I come from the mindset that you MUST have a supervising sound producer and do a final mix on a real dub stage, so please don't flame me. I know. But I wanted to see what I could get away with because I knew that there are other filmmakers not techies out there that could benefit from this test. You CAN do it all alone, just test test test.
Today, during test 3, the sound was not good. Before I get into that though...
TEST 2
Show East was here in Orlando last week. For those that don't know, its a convention for theater owners etc. I was at a graphic design conference next door and was bored sh*#less, so my friend and I snuck into Show East through the kitchen (kinda how I save money at Cannes in the old days) and we hit the motherlode! I knew there had to be something Red-related somewhere, and looked all around. Way in the back, Sony was showing off their 4k projector (85k) in a fancy-pants theater. The Asian girls at the velvet rope were checking badges, but they could see my excitement, gave us a program and let us in. (Trick is to always keep moving.)
I'm sure people have talked about it ad nauseum on this board, so I will keep it to a minimum. (I was not one of the lucky ones who have been to NAB etc.) They played stuff shot on 16mm, then 35mm and IMAX (Batman) and some animation, which actually looked the best (Madagascar 2?). The respectful thing to do they actually DID, which was show RED footage last, as if it were the big feature attraction. It looked by far the best. (They had a great slide early on that showed that a big throw would not effect 4k footage. True? How so?) Anyway, it was nice to see footage in 4k projection of my fellow RedUsers clips that I've only seen on my computer monitor. Bravo! Looked better than Batman, IMHO. I then proceeded to rip into the head Sony guy for not showing enough Build 16 footage. Time to update that reel, Sony! He agreed, sheepishly. Then gave me a card. Nice guy.
TEST 3
Because the Sony theater was only 5 rows and I was in the front row, I was still skeptical. What would a whole feature with all its ups and downs look like in a real theater, especially after all this work we're all doing? We set up a 2nd test at Premiere Cinemas 14--who is now nearly all digital--they will not even have 35mm projection anymore by the end of the year! They said they got a great deal on the Barko 100 and are getting the Barko 250's soon. I asked him how much and he wouldn't divulge. I did tell him the Sony 4k projectors are 85k and he coughed alot.
So, anyway, we dragged in my Burly Array, my macbook pro, and my hdmi cable. We hooked into his Barko100 with the hdmi cable. His sound with a weird mini to xlr adapter. He hit play.
Cue angelic music. Ah aahh!!!!
I was elbowing my DP so hard I think I bruised him. It looked perfect! And we're testing 1k footage here, not even that! I couldn't believe my eyes. I ran next door to the stupid dog movie and it looked just as good as that! Maybe better! C'mon! So now I have to kidnap a movie star. I knew it would come to this. (Just not so soon.)
Ok, back in May we started editing without making quicktime wrappers, just straight off the "M" proxy clips. Big no-no I have since been told, but those clips were so tasty and they worked and were ready to go, so whatever. A quick 1pass color correction in FCP too! This test was straight from a Quicktime conversion ("none" compression) of those "M" clips, it came to a 250GB file, and its not even 1k--actually only 752x356. Now, after seeing that, I don't want it any sharper than that because I don't believe it could look better than that and I might cry like a little girl.
So, the day of the dude with a camera and a laptop making competitive-looking films is here (edited the whole thing on a laptop just to see if i COULD). Oh, its supposedly been here for awhile--I can hear the haters saying--but not really, not until RED.
I was going to do a 2k Master myself, buy the tower, make an EDL, the whole nine. But when I took my DP out to lunch afterwards today, I asked him, do we really need to? What if we saved all that money and spent it on marketing and going to festivals? Ha!
My only disappointment besides that faulty mini to xlr hookup that killed the speakers from behind the screen (theaters fault)---one of our small investors was 'sposed to show but he flaked. I wish he could've been there to see it! Damn. I wish my dad could've seen it too.
So Redusers, get out there and shoot shoot shoot! Send me any questions. If I can't answer em, I'll have a techie try.
Keith
