Car Rig

Dave Green · December 10, 2008

I may be being overly paranoid here, but I'm wondering if anyone has experience of rigging a Red One to a car?

How well did the camera cope with the vibration and abuse? Are there any things we'd have to be aware of that may not be obviously apparent?

Thanks.

David Mullen ASC · December 10, 2008

I may be being overly paranoid here, but I'm wondering if anyone has experience of rigging a Red One to a car?

How well did the camera cope with the vibration and abuse? Are there any things we'd have to be aware of that may not be obviously apparent?

Thanks.

The camera acted fine on car rigs... it's the hard drives that didn't work well, so we had to get a bucketload of CF cards.

Dave Green · December 10, 2008

it's the hard drives that didn't work well.

Ah, thanks for that.

Matthew Rogers · December 10, 2008

We shot a short film earlier this fall on a hostess tray hooked on a 1950's Belair with no problems. But like David, we used CF cards. It sucks to have to keep changing CF cards, but that's the game unless you can get 16GB cards or wait for the RED Ram drive.

Matthew

Alfeo Dixon · December 11, 2008

How well did the camera cope with the vibration and abuse?

Abuse?!? It's called production. RED should understand this term like real production camera manufactures do. We don't work in a vacuum or a nice R&D lab room.

Michael Collier · December 11, 2008

Put one on a hostes and on a hood mount. Like was said before, just use the CF card and you'll be fine. HDD may skip some frames from vibration

Dominic Cochran · December 11, 2008

Abuse?!? It's called production. RED should understand this term like real production camera manufactures do. We don't work in a vacuum or a nice R&D lab room.

They do understand this. The camera is a tank. Just use the 400' mags like you normally would on a car mount. Oops, I mean CF cards(same recording time).

Matthew Rogers · December 11, 2008

Abuse?!? It's called production. RED should understand this term like real production camera manufactures do. We don't work in a vacuum or a nice R&D lab room.

Why the heck did you post that? From both mine and David's post above you should know that it does fine. Yes, the Red Drive can only take so much abuse, but that's true with ANY hard drive. I doubt that there are many cameras (both film and digital) that a man could stand on an not fail. However, I have seen a picture (and I can't find it right now:() of someone at RED standing on the camera body without a problem. I've thrown my camera around and the only issue I've had with something failing is the battery plate--and that's a bad vendor part issue rather than a RED design issue. RED is a real camera manufacturer and is currently spanking everyone else. Yes, the Genesis may have an extra stop of DR, but how much does it cost (if you could even buy it) and what's the smallest form factor you can get it into for shooting (seems like a big, heavy camera.)

Matthew

Dave Green · December 11, 2008

Thanks everyone.

Oh, Alfeo, I'm not sure where your reply came from, but those were just my words. Nothing to do with Red at all.

Jamie Metzger · December 11, 2008

They beat me to the punch....get TONS of CF cards. 4k RC36 = +/- 4 minutes of recording time. It takes 8 minutes to download the footage using a USB card reader (get a firewire one to help save time), so having 6 would be great. More is better. Develop a system so that the digital loader can communicate with the 2nd about which cards can be downloaded and which are meant to be formatted. This is very important. Keep a few spare cards on your person.

Alfeo Dixon · December 12, 2008

Sorry guys, too much wine before that post... I've been dealing with RED since #42. I've dealt with a lot of early headaches due to this.

My last RED job was all hand held and steadicam. While we had plenty of RED's batteries, they kept shutting down the camera nearly every time my AC passed the camera to me in handheld. I'd say I lost about 10% of my day waiting on reboots. Not to mention the few times it just failed.

Very modular yes, but alot of the design makes no sense for production... kinda like what Dalsa did. Our cameras have been evolving over decades and none of these new manufactures are seriously not getting it.

Evolution of the tools is really for another thread, so I wont get into that now.

It's a great camera, but a very young company. Seriously, my only problem with car mount was the RED owner being onset and questioning my rigging and not wanting to drive too fast... It's a perfect example of people asking me if the can look through my still camera D1x w/ f2.8's 28-70 & 70-200. Big f--kin' Camera and Glass and they would hold it with their finger tips like its fragile... GRAB THE THING... your not gonna break it by holding it, but you will if you drop it!

Point being, we tolerate this these inefficient design flaws because its the latest greatest technology... bah humbug, it would not be tolerated if a film cameras mags kept jamming or loosing sync.

Not to mention as an operator, we have to make it work no matter what the hell production of the boss throws our way...

Edited December 12, 2008 by Alfeo Dixon

Matthew Rogers · December 12, 2008

My last RED job was all hand held and steadicam. While we had plenty of RED's batteries, they kept shutting down the camera nearly every time my AC passed the camera to me in handheld. I'd say I lost about 10% of my day waiting on reboots. Not to mention the few times it just failed.

Whatever camera you had had the old style battery plate that did a poor job at holding the battery on the plate. Contact RED about getting a new plate and all your issues will be solved. I had the same issue until I got a new plate. Since then, haven't had a single power outage.

It's a great camera, but a very young company. Seriously, my only problem with car mount was the RED owner being onset and questioning my rigging and not wanting to drive too fast... It's a perfect example of people asking me if the can look through my still camera D1x w/ f2.8's 28-70 & 70-200. Big f--kin' Camera and Glass and they would hold it with their finger tips like its fragile... GRAB THE THING... your not gonna break it by holding it, but you will if you drop it!

That's what insurance is for. I don't really mind my rental gear being thrown around if it's by pros--but that's because what looks like being thrown around isn't even close.

Matthew

Alfeo Dixon · December 12, 2008

Whatever camera you had had the old style battery plate that did a poor job at holding the battery on the plate. Contact RED about getting a new plate and all your issues will be solved. I had the same issue until I got a new plate. Since then, haven't had a single power outage.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Too many inconsistencies all over the place. I'm not an owner, just the end user that has to deal with it.

That's what insurance is for. I don't really mind my rental gear being thrown around if it's by pros--but that's because what looks like being thrown around isn't even close.

Pros don't throw gear around... they only throw it at assistants. ;)

Saul Pincus · December 12, 2008

As a director and producer I spent six weeks shooting a feature with the RED this fall. In that time we spent a day on a process trailer and also made a few shots using car mounts.

We would have liked to have employed the CF cards, but we ran into an interesting anomaly: we were shooting with anamorphic lenses in RED's 4K anamorphic setting but the cards wouldn't format. The RED would consistently display an error message along the lines of "media not fast enough" - so we had to keep shooting with the RED drive, live with dropped frames, and do pickups where necessary.

Over the same period, we made numerous other shots with long spherical lenses (as we carried a very limited selection of anamorphics) at 4K 2:1 and the CF cards performed flawlessly.