Variety strikes again...

[Liam Hall]

Hey Ted, don't worry about it. Sometimes, you've just got to laugh at peoples' ignorance and stupidity. Today, I lost a job to some idiot with a flip cam. I laughed, I had to...

 

[Elsie N]

Stephen - I don't claim to be an expert in anything, but I have spent a few years kicking around marketing. Historically, marketing is often broken down to the "Four Ps" - one of which is PRODUCT. A lot of people think of marketing as just advertising but the whole marketing process starts with knowing the needs of your target customer and designing a product to best meet those needs. I think you nailed it when you pointed out that RED started in the right place - with a great PRODUCT. Without that, no amount of promotion, aggressive pricing or "cool" advertising is going to make a product successful. That doesn't mean RED can skip all those other steps and processes, but it sure makes selling easier when you have a product that people lust after because it solves their problems and meets their needs!:thumbup:

Heh, heh,... and don't forget the cool unsolicited testimonials.

 

[Peter Strietmann]

Vajazzled
Arrogant
Ridiculous
Inane
E'erclear
Tante
Yuck

 

[christopher witzke]

Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I probably didn't provide enough information... I really meant a film that is made and shown in a festival setting after post being complete.

What I'm curious about is if the story is good and the post work is less than top-notch, would a distributor (knowing that the movie could be re-cut from original RAW footage and then run through post) bid more based on that bit of knowledge or would they only bid based on story?

It has been my understanding that many festival movies are put through a complete makeover before release, and I was just wondering if starting over with original unprocessed RAW footage might not be preferred.

Just depends -- the majority of distributors do not want to spend a dime beyond the minimal that they have to to get the movie distributed, and will usually charge the original production company for their costs to complete the "deliverables" -- in other words, they say they will pay you "x" amount for your movie, minus whatever you didn't spend in the first place to get the film to a final state, so you in effect end up paying those costs, not them. Or if you are a net profit participant, they may take those finishing costs out of any profit generated so the point at which you start making money gets kicked down the road (sometimes forever.)

Now a big distribution company, if they feel very positive about the box office potential for a movie they bought, may decide to invest more money to improve the product, some new visual effects, redone color-correction, new sound mix, whatever, though again, they may find a way of charging those costs back to the original production by subtracting that amount from any money paid to the production, and if not that, definitely subtract those costs from any profits they owe you.

 

[Elsie N]

Just depends -- the majority of distributors do not want to spend a dime beyond the minimal that they have to to get the movie distributed, and will usually charge the original production company for their costs to complete the "deliverables" -- in other words, they say they will pay you "x" amount for your movie, minus whatever you didn't spend in the first place to get the film to a final state, so you in effect end up paying those costs, not them. Or if you are a net profit participant, they may take those finishing costs out of any profit generated so the point at which you start making money gets kicked down the road (sometimes forever.)

Now a big distribution company, if they feel very positive about the box office potential for a movie they bought, may decide to invest more money to improve the product, some new visual effects, redone color-correction, new sound mix, whatever, though again, they may find a way of charging those costs back to the original production by subtracting that amount from any money paid to the production, and if not that, definitely subtract those costs from any profits they owe you.

Thanks David,

Just the information I was looking for.

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

I am not surprised by this article.

Bottom line, RED is the leader right now. And Epic is hot out of the gate with two of the largest movies being shot on it.

Publications tend to make the leaders into the bad buys, and the competition into the underdogs.

Ted, think on this for a moment.. You guys have made RED the favorite, and now ARRI, SONY, and PANASONIC are the underdogs.

Pretty amazing I think.

Trust me, the people that count are not paying much attention to this article

Jay

 

[Steve Das]

...the majority of distributors do not want to spend a dime beyond the minimal that they have to to get the movie distributed, and will usually charge the original production company for their costs to complete the "deliverables" -- in other words, they say they will pay you "x" amount for your movie, minus whatever you didn't spend in the first place to get the film to a final state, so you in effect end up paying those costs, not them...

This is correct...someone from my school sold a documentary
for a million. Distributor said the festival version was good enough as it was
to be released. Director wanted better sound..so he had to pay the
extra $150,000 for better sound. His reasoning was his name was on it
so he wanted everything to be good quality. It worked out...as he
got hired by someone to direct another documentary.

 

[Mark Andersen]

I love the Skin tones I get from the Red MX.

 

[TedRed]

Thanks all. Nice to know that many out there do "get it"

Graeme, David, Mark and the many others that have chimed in here with additional info to make the points so clearly and elegantly about why we do what we do is very beneficial.

Wonder if anyone from Variety has noticed this group groundswell from all of you, and that they can't just put such a skewed story out there without being called out on it.

+ Ted

 

[jonnycom]

Hey Ted, Nice post, I was just talking to you last night about what feels like a focused campaign of animosity toward Red but that article seems obviously biased. I can't imagine anyone in the industry not being aware of the massive and growing influence Red is having on productions both super big and very indie.

I wonder who is behind it....

John

 

[Tim Hole]

Well my thoughts on it are pretty much the same as any REDuser but maybe I have been trapped in the FX quadrent too long but a camera is meant to capture the best of what we place in the frame. The lighting style, lens characteristics, camera settings are all part of the production process to create that imagery.

If you want a specific look, use a specific camera...or use a camera that is malleable enough so you can expose it in the best possible way and then enhance it either onset or in post.

RED to me is the latter. Although by nature it has a look, that look is down to the colour science as well as the imaging sensor and the processing. But what RED does for me is to give me the best possible starting point and I can then busy around creating my look and style.

Anyone who makes a decision on a camera from an article like this is not worth my attention...but it does add to the noise and bad press. Luckily there are some influential people making films on the system who don't need to say how they feel about their experiences with the camera just show the output and that is statement enough.

 

[Leo Sardello]

Variety is a good source for certain kinds of information. Technology has never been the kind of information they are good at reporting. I would call it historically abysmal actually. It’s disappointing to see such a bias from them though.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Well I think part of what we're seeing is inertia. Out of the box I was always pretty frustrated getting good skin tones with RED. You could get there but it was a labor of .... something other than love. I say the same thing about my 5D though too, so the comment hat Canon has had years to perfect their color in the article I find false as well.

But with REDColor2 combined with REDGamma2 it's just popping out a much more appealing starting point and is getting much closer to something like Kodak. I still think film has a slight edge in the out-of-box color response, not scientifically but aesthetically however RED is really closing the gap.

So yes The Hobbit, Spiderman and Pirates of the Carribean are shooting RED and they're going to look amazing but if you're an indie production looking at footage on set there was that harsher, punchier, yellower look out of the box. And as RC2/RG2 filters out into the mainstream consciousness I think you'll see those kinds of complaints slowly evaporate. Then again some people still haven't refreshed their perspectives on RED since it shipped and haven't seen as far as it's come--but I would wager they're a small minority.

 

[Mark Allen]

Don't fret too much about it, Ted. The internet is doing to Variety what your cameras are doing to Hollywood.

That was quotable, Jeff.

Ted - no matter what you do, it's almost impossible to have stories in magazines and newspapers come out how you want it. Even if it's an article just about you or your company and nothing else there will be things which you are shocked to read.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

From my experimentation, skin tone is more about lighting than camera. Look at the Milk Girls - their skin was great, even with our very earliest raw development software. Sure - you can get a great result a bit quicker today, but well shot, well lit footage has always looked good since even before day one.

Just like RED has zero control of the plots of the movies shot on RED cameras, we don't control lighting, post, or grading decisions either.

Graeme

 

[Omar Saad]

Hey Ted, don't worry about it. Sometimes, you've just got to laugh at peoples' ignorance and stupidity. Today, I lost a job to some idiot with a flip cam. I laughed, I had to...

Don't worry... I'm sure whoever won that gig will soon lose it to someone shooting on Hi8.

 

[Ketch Rossi]

From my experimentation, skin tone is more about lighting than camera..
Graeme

Lighting has so much more to do wit Skin tones and just about everything else, and the way certain
colors get recorded more then many know or care to know, so much so that no matter what camera, resolution or
lenses you use nothing will do you good if you don't know how to light your scenes/Subject to get the wanted results,
unless you want to have a hell of Post workflow to try and take care what you should have taken care of to begin with
before you started shooting, so yeah Graeme you could not be more right

 

[Steve Das]

From my experimentation, skin tone is more about lighting than camera. Look at the Milk Girls - their skin was great

Just like RED has zero control of the plots of the movies shot on RED...
Graeme

True..milk girls had great skin....And great camera skin tones.

The corollary of course is sometimes skin tone has more to do with a
person's actual skin and make-up than the lighting.

There's a reason why a supermodel's prime career goes from 15-25.

As for plots..maybe..a plot generator camera add-on module...

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

From my experimentation, skin tone is more about lighting than camera.
Graeme

I disagree. Take a nice film stock, scan it and then compare to the old CameraRGB/sRGB. In all manner of lighting conditions and with professional or amateur film processing. Professional scans/home scans. I think the colors and skin tones just come back far more appealing. It's not limited in the slightest to RED either, the 5D is pretty good but if I shoot on Velvia and a 5D next to each other I prefer the Velvia.

:emote_couch:

I haven't had any Alexa footage come through yet but I can understand in the abstract how if it was the case that it was giving very filmic color response people would get really excited about it. Just like I'm pretty excited about RC2/RG2 which in the couple of clips I've thrown at it get pretty close without a lot of noodling.