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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 :)

This camera IS a joke.

Visceral_IvaN said:
One moment...

I am currently typing this whilst on the final legs of an EIGHTEEN HOUR SHOOT with our Red One at 4:15am here in Tokyo. Red has been running nearly NON STOP for that entire time. We have recorded well over THREE HUNDRED TAKES.

And not one codec error.

In fact the entire crew had started to completely lose their minds far before Red even looked like losing its. It just keeps running. It honestly puts that creepy anthropomorphic Duracell Bunny to shame.

Not only are we getting gorgeous pictures (doubly so given the hotness of the models on our shoot) but we are getting these gorgeous pictures of gorgeous women without any problems for almost 18 hours straight...

Now, it MAY BE that Red performs better under the influence of jaw dropping french models. I know I do.

But realistically todays successful outcome was most probably due to the fact that we know what we are doing.
Click to expand...

half naked french super models are elementary for this cam.
The cam doesnt like to shoot 70 year 250 pound ladies and ergo shows the codec error....

you work with K.I.T.T. ....treat it like that
 
I've lost it in middle of this thread - total confusion - is it just me?
 
I said this in the other post but I will reiterate it here for your sake David. If a new build is put onto the camera and that build for whatever obscure reason doesn't go on correctly you will experience all the problems you've listed.

It is the responsibility of whoever rented the camera to you to test it thoroughly and this is where you have been let down, not with the camera.

Paul
 
PM sent to you CJ.

CJ Roy said:
Jesus Shawn. This the exact kind of fanboy attitude that makes my job on sets all that more difficult. Instead of attempting to help or sway someone who had a horrible experience with the Red, you slam him? Call him a troll? Accuse him of having no decency? Are you f*cking kidding me?

The camera has problems. To deny that is to shut the eye of reason. Your response helps no one and conveys that Red owners are too sensitive to have a sensible discussion on problems with said camera. Ignoring the problems solves nothing. Berating directors/DP's/crew who had a bad experience is insane, and reflects more on you than them.

What you're failing to understand is that the good majority of working entertainment industry people, do not live here/read every post and are not up to date on the intricacies of the camera. To problem solve the camera, you almost HAVE TO live here or hire an expert. The RED DIT/Techs have to be the liaisons from the camera to the filmmakers, regardless of how uninformed the filmmakers are. Camera owners ARE the experts on the camera. The clients are not. That should be looked at as an opportunity, instead of inflaming the legitimacy argument about this camera's usefulness in the real working, world.

As mistaken as the director is in regards to "a camera is a camera", "just push a button", we cannot simply jump down a Red customer's throat for not knowing the camera. We have to help them to understand that this is a different beast, and like a 35mm camera, you would not, or should not, send an unfamiliar dp/crew with a new camera without someone who KNOWS the camera. A lot of customers see the upfront cost and don't understand the benefits of it. We have to fix that. Inflammatory responses simply do not benefit the RED community and solve nothing.
Click to expand...
 
All this thread (and the other thread posted by the DP) tells me is that I will only ever rent my RED provided I am coming along with it as a DIT, camera op, or DP. There is simply too much going on right now with RED's development to allow users to rent a RED like it's an HVX. Or to expect them to "learn it overnight"

However, clearly RED (when used by people who know it and have worked with it) performs quite well - well enough to be shooting all over world. That means owners who know their equipment.

People interested in shooting RED via renting should take note of this experience. You have to ask yourself why you'd rent a RED from a rental house when you can hire a real person who knows the camera with HIS RED camera. This is the way you want to do it. There are plenty of people in NYC that now have this camera. Allocate the money and get the person and the RED. In a way the person is more important than just the camera. When things stabilize more down the road maybe this won't be as important.

But for now - hey producers - this isn't an HVX. Your DP won't be able to just pick this up and go. Otherwise you'll get this experience and will be :bye2: :help:

Our reservation number is up and we're trying to decide if we are going to take the plunge. We're making the call really soon. If and when we do - we will be looking to work heavily in the indie-NYC scene. We want to work on exactly these kinds of productions. Our mission would be to help to leverage the tool that RED is to people who would normally be shooting on an HVX, EX1, etc. And YES that means we have to create a price that is pretty low so these guys can afford us. No RED experience necessary because YES we will be on set with you. You can do the art and we'll make sure the tech is taken care of. This means you'll get to use RED and get great 4K images without the :help:
 
Gentlemen,

I thank all of you who had posted serious replies (and to those who didn't, thank you too or something).

No more aggression and annoyance, I am interested in being in touch with the members of this community and learning more, because I am still excited about this camera and its potential.

So I am starting to form this conclusion, please tell me what you think:

The camera, while excellent on many levels, is not perfect yet and one might run into lots of technical troubles with it on a set without a Red tech, but that if a red tech was around we would have had problems solved much faster.

Is this correct? I am not a novice guys, I worked with film and Hi-Def on a professional level many times before, and in the past if I had trouble with a camera on set, it was because the camera was obviously screwed up, but what happened here was different in that the camera was working just fine a lot of the time and at what seemed very random, being problematic. These dropped frame things didn't happen only on the drive, they happened on the cards too, and the problems didn't stop all together when we switched to 2:1, they were less but they still occured.

And yes, you don't go on a set with a 35mm camera if you never loaded film. But if you've used ten different types of 35mm cameras and you're going to use a new one, a training session should be perfectly enough on the new camera before you go on set. My crew DID this on the Red. Do you guys understand the frustration?

So no more aggression, if anyone has anything constructive to say please do. I would like to learn more about this and figure it out for next time.

David Jakubovic

davidjaku@aol.com
www.davidjaku.com
 
David-

I get the frustration, I've witnessed it first hand. But I think you've got it right in your last statement. The camera needs someone who has had experience with it, and is current with its problems, solutions and tricks.

I believe a good DIT could have steered you clear of 95% of the problems, and he/she would have been able to recognize the difference between a build glitch and a hardware one. There are tons of little things you pick up after a few days of using the camera, and most crews I've assisted have been able to run free for good portions of the day without any hiccups. Like with anything, once you get a feel for it when it's working right, it's easier to spot the problems.

Right now, there are problems with the release build. It's so new that we're still finding them and isolating them and sharing our experiences with one another. That's the beauty of this forum.

And the best part about that is, is that the problems do get noticed, most get fixed relatively quickly... even late at night on a saturday. The camera is constantly changing with enhancements, fixes and some additional new bugs. It's pretty remarkable and the potential of a constantly evolving camera, leaves you always wanting more.

I sincerely hope you give RED another shot, with a good DIT/tech next time around.

-CJ
 
davidjakubovic said:
Is this correct? I am not a novice guys, I worked with film and Hi-Def on a professional level many times before, and in the past if I had trouble with a camera on set, it was because the camera was obviously screwed up, but what happened here was different in that the camera was working just fine a lot of the time and at what seemed very random, being problematic. These dropped frame things didn't happen only on the drive, they happened on the cards too, and the problems didn't stop all together when we switched to 2:1, they were less but they still occured.
Click to expand...

It's really hard to come to terms were the problem could be. You see I've put my camera to the test in numerous commercial shoots already. It's been in extreme heat (95 farhenheit), on cranes, covered in dust. Shooting on RED raid and CF cards on redcode 28 and 36, mostly 36. I've been shooting 16:9 to 2:1 in all formats and speeds and it has literally traveled the world. I have not had one single problem at all and the codec errors that has occured in my camera has all been human errors.

I've been on build 15 - version 2.1.7 (I believe) and upwards.

Maybe it's the build, but then you claim that you were shooting 13, which should be stable.

You see somewhere along the road it's most probably possible that you guys had one thing in your settings that was f...ing it up. One little thing in any of the enable squares that you can tick.

When I went out with mine for the first time, which was literally immediately as soon as I got it. I tested every single possible situation. What would happen if I was shooting with focus assist enabled etc. Some small things had glitches and wouldn't let me record properly etc.

This could only be overseen from extensive testing or extensive research in this forum (I'd like to ad that it only took me a weekend at that was including the render time with learning REDcine and conversion times, which was 75% of th time hahaha).

I can not explain your problems since I've never experienced any frame drop. I have also never used build 13 so I can not speak for it. Hopefully someone else can.

Best of luck


Fredrik Callinggard
 
davidjakubovic said:
The camera, while excellent on many levels, is not perfect yet and one might run into lots of technical troubles with it on a set without a Red tech, but that if a red tech was around we would have had problems solved much faster.
Click to expand...

Perhaps RED should have the version numbering of their firmware label with 'Beta' - realistically we should probably consider Build fifteen to be v 0.15b or something. It is still in active development.

And yes, you don't go on a set with a 35mm camera if you never loaded film. But if you've used ten different types of 35mm cameras and you're going to use a new one, a training session should be perfectly enough on the new camera before you go on set. My crew DID this on the Red. Do you guys understand the frustration?
Click to expand...

RED doesn't really fit into existing paradigms (I try to use that word at least twice a week). It's not a video camera as such. It's not like a 35mm film camera. It's not like a high-end HD camera. It is it's own category really.

So yeah, familiarity with existing systems is important, but it'll only get you so far. And reading the manual is good too, but the camera is still a work in progress and there are issues with it and specialist things to know. Some of it could be better spelled out in the manual perhaps, but overall everyone's needs are different so it's advisable to either employ the services of an expert or do a decent amount of homework before hand (this should probably include a test shoot and edit).

In this case your rental house probably failed you to some extent if they didn't make it clear to you and your crew that the camera was a unique beast. People shouldn't just be sending it out like it's a PD170, because it's not.

Overall, in this thread and the other, the tone in the original messages was very negative, and I think on review you'll find that the response from the community was in kind, and somewhat defensive really. Blanket statements about the usability of the camera were made that were demonstrably inaccurate and blame was leveled at the camera for things that were not it's fault.
 
Drums

Drums

Another interesting idea that came up early on in the day was that maybe the proximity to loudly blasted drums in the close ups of the drums and the vibrations being maybe responsible to some of the problems that the drive was having, which seemed to have gone away when we switched to the card. That seemed to have been disproved later in the day when the problems continued on other shots, but could that have possibly been a trigger?
 
davidjakubovic said:
Another interesting idea that came up early on in the day was that maybe the proximity to loudly blasted drums in the close ups of the drums and the vibrations being maybe responsible to some of the problems that the drive was having, which seemed to have gone away when we switched to the card. That seemed to have been disproved later in the day when the problems continued on other shots, but could that have possibly been a trigger?
Click to expand...

Could be. In my experience, the drive is pretty fragile. Did you notice the drop frames from the LCD's drop frame counter? And did that also show up when using the CF cards?

16:9 or 2:1?
 
When you consider that a 160GB 2.5" hard drive consist of a metal disc spinning at 5,400RPM (or maybe even 7,200) with a small head held nanometers above the disc surface and moving around hundreds of times a second it becomes pretty apparent that all sorts of bad things are possible in all sorts of ways.

In fact when you consider that, it becomes almost amazing that you can move them at all while they are operating.

Various high and low frequency vibrations can certainly affect the disc. Although it seems more likely you encountered an actual drive fault, or a fault with the cable.

Sadly, with this kind of gear, it's important to consider murphy's law and have as much redundancy as possible. Ideally that means a spare drive and cable on standby - if nothing else it provides a very important diagnostic option in quickly swapping things around to see if the problem persists.

The CF is always going to be the best option with RED - no external connections, solid-state. Next best will be RED Flash SSD when it ships. Then the drive, which is less expensive, but much more limited in it's potential application.
 
David, I apologize for not giving you the benefit of the doubt. I found your tone disrespectful and unprofessional and so my response assumes from
there. I hope your experience and disposition is more pleasant moving forward.
 
Interesting...

CJ Roy, it happened while we were shooting the full 4K but it also happened after we switched to 2:1. At first we thought that was the main problem, the drums, but then we saw it must not have been just that, but it totally could be that it started there.
 
What happened with the dropped frames was that on certain shots after we finished the shot, the camera said "shot had so and so dropped frames" (I don't remember the exact wording). Also, during the actual shooting of that shot, an error notice would come up that says something about he frames being dropped but it would still continue recording.

When we tried to playback the shot in camera afterwards, it would only go until the point where the frames dropped.

The AC has the drive and is backing up tomorrow and shipping me the footage, I left town before I managed to get the stuff so in two days I will do all the post converting and stuff and I will find out. I will need to learn how to do all that stuff, converting the material and getting it into fcp.
 
So it sounds like there could be a couple things at play here.

1. The drive may be faulty. The drive can usually handle some vibration, but not when rotating on different axis'. It's small movements, or static. It's been reported to work sometimes on hand-held, but not consistently. Perhaps the music plus any jib rotation/handheld were the culprit. But, more likely it was the drive. Did you have more than one drive? Did they both perform the same way?

2. Codec Error. This was something that plagued us in the beginning, went away for a while and now it's back. It could be a couple of things.
A) The data rate was too high for the CF card, though it should be fine for the drive)
B) Too much high-detail. Some users have been reporting this through build 13, and I believe 15. Nothing can be done with that, it's a RED problem.
C) Faulty CF cards. Jim, himself, had reported that some of the initial CF cards could not keep up with the data rates (I'll try to find the post and quote it here). The problem seemed to go away with newer cards or a few reformatting cycles of those cards.

A couple of things to note. The drives are 5400rpm laptop drives from Hitatchi, and they behave as exactly that. When you fill up and re-format, I believe it's done as a simple "erase" technique where the data is flagged to be written over, but never actually erased. As with normal drives, you can get better performance by zero(ing) out all the data, all over the disk. It could be that the particular drive(s) were used a lot, but never reformatted thoroughly. I'm just speculating here.

Post: Since a lot of what you shot was 16:9, you're forced to transcode using RedCine. Currently RedCine doesn't do very well with dropped frames. They'll show up as solid blue frames within RedCine, and you'll only be able to render out the clip until the it reaches the dropped frame marks. The drives don't simply drop one frame here or there, they drop chunks of frames. So once that occurs, you're pretty forced to abandoned the clip, or set in & out markers for it. Hopefully there's a fix coming soon. For the 2:1 footage, that will render out in RedAlert just fine, but it'll stutter where there are dropped frames. You can simply edit around those, if needed.

I hope this helps, but usually Build 13 is pretty stable. On a few sets, I've had to go back to it because 14 or 15 were behaving erratically. I would certainly inform the rental house about these problems, and perhaps they can test it out and shed some light on what happened.

-CJ
 
Great evolution. From dissent to helpfulness. Just what this community is capable of and made for in my sense. A lot of blood was shed but in the end, what remains and matters, opinions and experience have won over personnal issues and flamboyance.

Have no pride fellows, as one may find love in adversity. humility is the way. Life is full of surprises, ans so is Red...

Have a nice day and welcome to Red David.
 
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