RED CAMERA

[Matias Nicolas]

Hi, Im shooting a feature film with this camera in 2 month aprx... the camera is arriving in 2 week to the production company... only the body is arriving, ... does anybody knows the perfetc configuration for the camera? follow focus, mattexox.. rods? bridge plate... on board monitor?

_you can use an inalambric video asist? and follow focus ?

thanks !!

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

One thing that seems to get overlooked is a measuring tape hook...since (at least with the REDs I've worked with) there's no definitive focal plane mark on the body of the camera.

[Nathan Martin]

as long as you have the production base it will run all standard 19mm accessories, as far as the video assist goes it has 2x sdi outs and a 720p out. The connections are real dodgy as they are some kind of mini mount and you have to use a very flimsy mini to bnc cable to get you image, but there is a good breakout box that you can get from Element Technica

You may want to order at least the LCD, and preferable the EVF as well, as all the menues are a little annoying to get through with just the rear lcd display alone. Plus the EVF seems to be really well made, someone told me they heard it was an accuscene evf in a red housing.

 

There are a lot of places making fairly well priced aftermarket accessories for the red now so if you google around for a bit you should find a whole bunch of goodies.

 

As Jonathan said, the tape hook is an additional accessory and worth its weight in gold for your focus puller.

[Chris Keth]

Nathan hit it on the head. That breakout box is essential, in my opinion. It will prevent lots of monitor downtime due to poor design.

 

Add the viewfinder and LCD and arri support equipment and you have a pretty decent camera.

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

The connections are real dodgy as they are some kind of mini mount...

 

"Lemo"

 

I don't mind the lemo connections, so long as you have the bars around the body of the camera to velcro/tape to for strain relief, they're fine. It is kinda tough at first, to figure out which connector goes with what at first glance, just label stuff.

[Chris Keth]

I don't think lemos are the right choice for monitor and sound connections that are plugged in and out repeatedly all day long. If I was assembling a package, I would definitely get the breakout box.

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

I don't think lemos are the right choice for monitor and sound connections that are plugged in and out repeatedly all day long. If I was assembling a package, I would definitely get the breakout box.

 

Right, I was actually referring to just the viewfinder & monitor connections. The breakout box is a definite must.

[Nathan Martin]

ah the monitor and vf, yeah i wasnt saying there was any problem with them, lemo and fischer connections are great, i was talking about the minature vision out cables.

The mini xlr audio connections arent so bad, but the vision is aweful.

 

I might also sugest a good viewfinder bracket, the arm that RED sells with it is good but not sturdy enough for something your putting pressure on all day. Plus as soon as it sags a little bit your horizon is out and you feel like your operating drunk.

[Matias Nicolas]

OK , cool, but the thing is that they won't buy accesories, the production will rent them here , in my country ... So , can I use arri accesories ? and, the most important thing... its posible to use a WRC-1 ? or a preston? or another wireless follow focus? cause I wil be shooting very long and difficult long take, and Im sure I will need wireless... thanks !!

[Brian Drysdale]

OK , cool, but the thing is that they won't buy accesories, the production will rent them here , in my country ... So , can I use arri accesories ? and, the most important thing... its posible to use a WRC-1 ? or a preston? or another wireless follow focus? cause I wil be shooting very long and difficult long take, and Im sure I will need wireless... thanks !!

 

I'm not sure what the production company counts as accessories, but you're going to need the various plates to mount the bars onto the camera and the top rails with at least the LCD mounting bracket. Once you've got 19mm bars you can mount the standard film kit. You'll also need quite a few batteries (6 RED batteries seems to be recommended + a couple of chargers), because the RED is power hungry. On the job I worked on they used the large 12V lead acid battery blocks and it went through about 3 or 4 in a day. BTW The RED just dies without warning using these.

 

The RED body on its own doesn't work, it's only part of the set up - it's rather like buying a 35mm film camera body, but then not buying the risers and mags (or in this case the digital equivalent - if you're using CF cards, you'll need several of them). The breakout box is essential.

[Matias Nicolas]

ok... tomorow im going with the dop, operator , to "meet" , test and see what is the red camera ! ... thanks for the info ..!

... nobody answered me, but I think there is no possibility to use a wireless,... unless you use it with an independent battery ...: a guy running 3 or 6 feet away from the cameraman puling the cable that powers the motors and the receptor ...

So well ... see ya !

[Jamie Metzger]

ok... tomorow im going with the dop, operator , to "meet" , test and see what is the red camera ! ... thanks for the info ..!

... nobody answered me, but I think there is no possibility to use a wireless,... unless you use it with an independent battery ...: a guy running 3 or 6 feet away from the cameraman puling the cable that powers the motors and the receptor ...

So well ... see ya !

 

There is an auxillary lemo port on the camera that supplies 12v. Don't know if that would help you.

 

As far as configuring the camera; I tell people all the time; it's like a ne camera every shoot. Because of the software and hardware configurations; it's always on the move.

 

If you will be shooting in a country that will make it difficult to get spare parts...etc I reccomend getting atleast 4 lemo monitor connectors; they work for both the evf and lcd. I don't know how long your shoot is, but you should definitely stock up on accessories.

 

Recently I used the red with 15mm studio to mini adapter rods. Worked out fine with a 4x4 mattebox, plus we had the options to use 19mm if we needed bigger aks.

[David Regan]

Yes definitely multiple monitor cables as Jamie recommended. The RED shoot I'm currently on has gone through several of said cables.

 

Be aware the 12v power as mentioned is 4 pin lemo. So if you want to use say a Microforce zoom control or some such accessory that typically uses the 3pin fisher, get an adaptor.

 

And also if you don't get an HD compatible monitor and are running a BNC out of the SDI breakout box (again highly recommended) get a downconverter or something similar for your monitor. In our case we run a BNC out of the SDI into a box then then sends out an HDMI signal to the monitor.

 

RED currently has a RAM solid state drive we have gotten in addition to our RED Drive from time to time, which has been great for car mount shots etc...because as you should be aware, it is not a good idea to use a RED Drive on shots with lots of bumping, as the drive will probably drop frames.

 

Good Luck

[Matias Nicolas]

ok thanks !! ... Im going in a few minutes, I will ask for all this info... the breakout box, the extra batteries... etc .... thanks !!

[John Sprung]

On the job I worked on they used the large 12V lead acid battery blocks and it went through about 3 or 4 in a day. BTW The RED just dies without warning using these.

How many amp hours were those batteries? A friend of mine used some big block batteries, and found that they could do a day on two of them, swapping at lunch time. But you have to live on the dolly for that to be practical. The other alternative is the "V" lock hot swap adapter and keeping careful track of how much time you have left. BTW, I just scored a couple really big inductors, so I have the stuff to build an XLR hot swap box.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Brian Drysdale]

How many amp hours were those batteries? A friend of mine used some big block batteries, and found that they could do a day on two of them, swapping at lunch time. But you have to live on the dolly for that to be practical. The other alternative is the "V" lock hot swap adapter and keeping careful track of how much time you have left. BTW, I just scored a couple really big inductors, so I have the stuff to build an XLR hot swap box.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

 

I believe they were 12v 34 Ah lead acid. The 1st A.C. said they normally ran the RED for about 5 hours, but these particular ones didn't seem to last quite that long. The only other batteries supplied were IDX 12v 6.6 Ah (98 Wh) which I gather run the RED for an hour, unfortunately, these were being used to power an Astro and other accessories.

 

We ended up using the block batteries all the time, even for the Steadicam shots - the grip had a fun time carrying the battery. I was operating the Steadicam and its 4.5 Ah batteries just wouldn't have lasted.

 

The power downs weren't a big deal on this particular shoot, although the boot up time was over a minute - longer than I was expecting from a build 15.

[John Sprung]

Yeah, 34 Ah should have given you 5 hours. Those batteries might have been getting old. There was a company at CineGear this summer that's going to make a 60 Ah battery. A pair of those should be plenty safe for a day's work.

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Matias Nicolas]

hi !! sbdy knows places in usa , to buy used equipment? follow focus, matteboxes.. etc.. and that I can have acces via internet? with web page

?

[Matias Nicolas]

hi !! sbdy knows places in usa , to buy used equipment? follow focus, matteboxes.. etc.. and that I can have acces via internet? with web page

?

 

 

... We tested the wrc, and you can supply power to the motors, cause, the wrc comes with a small cable you can conect to the red batteries... !

[Gil Wertheim]

I would look on reduser.net a forum dedicated to the red camera

[Nathan Martin]

running a wireless ff is fine, I was running a bartech on red the other week, but we were running off the rigs power, i have heard from a few sources that you can run power from the camera through the lemo accessories out, however if there are big fast pulls then the load becomes too high for the accessories power supply, so i believe most people have been running power from the d-tap on the redbricks.

[Rory Hanrahan]

The batteries do run out fast, though they also charge fast -- make sure you have more than enough, especially if you're running the EVF, LCD, RedDrive and a wireless focus, etc. By the way, the D-tap is on the battery mount, not the brick itself, so if you're planning on using the batteries for running a wireless director's monitor for instance, it will need a V-mount (rather than going D-tap to 4-pin) or another power solution.

 

I'd suggest going with the 16GB CF cards, as the limitations of the 8GBs (~5 min @ 4K) mean that you may be reloading after each take (and the AD will positively love you for that?). If you run with a RedDrive, try to get 2, that way you can offload at choice times during the day without slowing down production (unfortunately due to time, we've occasionally been doing unverified dumps during the day, then verifying later when we have time -- never formatting the RedDrive if the info has not been verified). I'd also suggest never running the RedDrive all day without dumping footage, even though you have the drive space -- if there is a drive failure you've just lost a day of shooting.

 

I highly recommend UltraLights (look for them at FilmTools) to replace Red's Israeli arms. Their arms are great for the LCD, but totally inadequate for the monster EVF. Plus, with the tinker-toyish (read: customizable) UltraLights you can make one hell of an extension eyepiece (one of the benefits of the Red's modular design).

 

Also, get yourself a USB snake light. It can draw power from the camera's USB port and make an awesome lens light (though due to the length of your standard USB lamp, this may only reach to the dummy side).

 

If you're running a video signal to Sound, talk to them about their input capabilities. Red only outputs via HDMI and HD-SDI, and in my experience most sound mixers use standard def monitors (they only need this for a frame reference). You may want to invest in a down-converter / breakout box or a monitor that can loop through and down-convert. If you're rolling with HDMI look into a repeater. I have very little experience with HDMI for pro applications (this is my first time doing that), but the signal falls apart after 35 feet or so, and being closely tethered to the monitor? sucks.

 

If you don't get the breakout box for the side of the cam, definitely get backup adaptors for the mini Video out taps and the mini-XLR sound inputs.

[Matias Nicolas]

ok ... good info ! ... Last friday we made a list about accesories to buy... we couldn't convinced the producer to buy the breakout box, cause its cheaper to buy more of those mini cables bnc... !...

[Jason Anderson]

The red package I used was Red rock micro: matte box and follow focus. The follow focus has a bit of annoying slack in it, the tolerances in the gear box could have been a little better. The lens gear became lose at one point. We ending up just super gluing the lens gear to its pin so it would no longer be and issue. The matte box is good, some of the bolts became lose on the eyebrow.

 

The battery charger is sort of a piece. We had to constantly monitor it to make sure it was still charging. Also the batteries seem to overheat, and refuse to charge until they cool down. Also the contacts on the battery charger don't seem to always line up perfectly with the contacts on the battery, you really have to finesse it and put the battery charger in the correct position to keep the battery from wiggling. Red is supposed to offer a fix for the charger, the owner of the camera I used hasn't sent theirs in yet.

 

The 18-50 mm RED lens we used was decent, however the gearing feels rough on the barrel for iris, focal length, focus. I have never seen a lens that felt that rough. The close focus is very good, you can nearly touch the lens.

 

The RED is fairly heavy after you add on everything, we used a gel bicycle seat cover on the underside for hand held shots, probably somewhere between 35 and 40 pounds depending on your configuration.

 

We hooked up the monitor with HDMI, I wish there was a better way to secure it to the camera, we tied a knot around the camera handle so the cable would not damage the socket.

 

Jason

[Matias Nicolas]

ok..! and how does the camera crew team is working on your countries ? : cameraman + focus puller + second assistant + loader and video assist ?

... or there is no loader and the second assistant downloads all the info to a computer? cause in the project I m going to shoot in a month, the DoP called an hd operator , cause he is a bit nervous about working in video he always shots with film !!... So , the hd operator is going to download all the material to a Mac ... So my second assistant will only be there to give me the lenses and help me sometimes with some focus marks...

but I think we should work with a loader... not with an hd operator... what do you think?