On Set with Red: A Weary AC’s Rant

[John Sprung]

You wouldn't put a Red right next to the machine guns on a fighter plane

like the Arri 35's were meant to.

 

They were acutally designed primarily for hand held use. With the magazine on top and the motor extending downward, they're too tall to mount inside the wing of a fighter, like the American 16mm GSMO. I've seen one mounted in the cockpit, look around for "Die Deutsche Wochenschau" for August 14, 1940. If you find an old Arri with original factory green paint instead of black, that one was originally made for the luftwaffe.

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[John Sprung]

The point about years of R&D is fair, but the Arri II you use today is pretty much as it was in 1938. 71 years. Count 'em.

 

When you get it right the first time, you don't need to change much:

 

Magazine upgraded from 200 to 400 ft.

Pulldown changed from eccentric screw to cardioid cam

Shutter increased from 120 to 180 degrees

Viewfinder enlarged from Academy to Full aperture, removable eyepiece and elbow introduced

Constant speed and crystal motors in addition to the original wild motor

High speed version

Variable shutter version

Built in sync generator

Steel bayonet mount, later PL hard front

 

Did I miss anything?

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Chris Keth]

Electronics companies don't necessarily purposefully release half baked products. Software has gotten to the point of being so complex to certain degrees its impossible to find all of the potential problems or even know what problems to look for.

 

Especially when they have no experience in building cameras. Given that, I suppose it's a miracle the RED is useable at all, even though it is 15 or 20 firmware builds later.

[John Sprung]

Especially when they have no experience in building cameras. Given that, I suppose it's a miracle the RED is useable at all, .....

 

They've been learning as they go. A certain very good still camera company tried, too, and didn't do nearly as well. They still haven't realized their mistake in not having 24 and 25 fps. At least the Red guys got that one right. ;-)

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Hal Smith]

^^ :)

 

Testing cameras on planes with machine guns next to the cameras, should be the bare minimum test for performance and reliability....if that could only happen :(

 

BMW said it best: "we've tested our cars on the most enduring courses, and the most opposite extremes, under the harshest conditions; knowing that you will probably never go to locations like these, or need the functions we've built into the cars; but it's good to know that you have those options."

 

Not the exact quote, but I tried to get the point across.

 

Speaking as a former boy racer; Real racers get a bang out of what happens when someone shows up at a race track with a street car that someone has put a rollcage in and hung a set of racing wheels and tires on it...having believed the manufacturer's marketing hype that their Super Whammo 2000+ sports sedan is a thinly disguised race car. After two laps of practice the SW2K+ is usually parked somewhere off the race track with clouds of smoke and steam being emitted from every single automotive orfice waiting for the tow truck to haul it back to the pits. After many tens of thousands of dollars of additional investment the SW2K+ might return to the track ready to run a race or two...finishing at the back of the pack. Repeat the infusion of money process and eventually the SW2K+ might finish well in a race.

 

Remind you of a certain camera named after a primary color?

[Brian Dzyak]

Not everyone has embraced the RED:

 

[Stuart Brereton]

No rotating mirror? Machine gun like sound? No video tap and you call that "worked properly"?

 

Parallax viewers worked just fine for Operators for many years, and in the Silent era of 80 or 90 years ago, it didn't matter how much noise a camera made. No Video Tap? Well as video wasn't to be invented until the late fifties, it's hard to see that as a design fault. For that matter, there are people who regard video assist as a design fault....

[Matthew Rogers]

You've got to remember that with film, there are two designers, one of the film and one of the camera. While with the RED, it's one maker designing both the camera and the image (plus some post-production.) When you consider this is their very first camera, it's extremely impressive. When you consider the competition, it's really impressive. Is the camera perfect? No. It's got it's fault that will be improved on with the Epic. Will that camera be perfect? Probably not. But is there one film camera that you can't find at least one fault with? I doubt it.

 

RED, at least, has gotten the glass market moving. There seem to be 6-7 makers who are releasing new prime lenses. Everyone has got to admit that's a good thing!

 

Matthew

[Phil Rhodes]

I was speaking earlier today to an extremely experienced practitioner of the optical components rental trade, and I can only report his opinion that Red has done anything but get the PL mount lens market moving. What it's actually done is create a situation where rental houses are constantly asked for sets of lenses and nothing else, which isn't really a sustainable business model given that they don't usually have that many more sets of lenses than they do camera bodies.

 

That and the fact that the Red folks generally want everything for free. That of course is just an attitude thing, but it does seem to be a very typically Red attitude thing.

 

P

[Bruce Taylor]

^^ :)

BMW said it best: "we've tested our cars on the most enduring courses, and the most opposite extremes, under the harshest conditions; knowing that you will probably never go to locations like these, or need the functions we've built into the cars; but it's good to know that you have those options."

 

I usually avoid the RED threads, but I saw your quote Jamie, and felt the need to respond: BMW is lying to you. I have been repairing and servicing them for 30 years, and they make HUGE errors, they're just really good at covering them up. They bought back a TON of cars when the 7 series last debuted in '02, because of the lemon law. Reprogramming exceeded 8 hours and caused data connection meltdowns from the heat generated by the quantity of data moving down the pipe. Many early cars required multiple reprograms. They have delayed introduction of the new 7 because the diagnostic hardware is so complex they haven't been able to make it work reliably in the dealer environment, and they can't release the cars if they can't be fixed when the inevitable software glitches surface.

 

Next to those realities, the RED doesn't sound so bad!

 

Bruce Taylor

BMW Master Tech (and Russian camera guy)

[Chris Keth]

For that matter, there are people who regard video assist as a design fault....

 

Coughcoughamencough.

 

At least I sometimes feel like that.

 

 

Phil, I couldn't agree more about the "want everything for free" ethic of RED shows. I don't know why that is but, in a strange turn of events, it's got me jobs twice now. I was called about a focus pulling gig, I passed because the pay was too low but I told them very frankly, "Call me back when you fire your focus puller." Two different productions did it and paid me what I wanted because they were sick of going home at the end of the day with so many soft shots from their cheapo focus puller.

[Hal Smith]

I..............they can't release the cars if they can't be fixed when the inevitable software glitches surface.

Bruce Taylor

BMW Master Tech (and Russian camera guy)

 

It's the "Top Down" German engineering culture.

 

I've got a friend who now runs the worldwide support network for a major manufacturer of high tech professional audio gear. They've been developing all sorts of digital signal processing audio software for their gear for years. They've got software engineers working for them who are the kind of geniuses (genii?) who in previous jobs did things like write sonar software for Navy submarines.

 

They got bought by a large German company. Now any and all new software, including minor patches, has to be approved by three German Dr. Ing's in Munich who have NEVER written a line of audio software code. As a result, to keep the products from cratering the American software engineers either have to risk their jobs to accomplish a small fix or just give up and wait for Munich.

 

I'll bet anything that BMW is doing the same thing to their software line engineers. The only time German "Top Down" engineering worked well was the American space program where Werner Von Braun was working with a lot of Americans who respected his talents but didn't let him manage the projects directly. I worked about 75 miles from Huntsville in the 70's and knew people at Marshall Space Flight Center who had great stories to tell about the "Germans". The stories usually were something like the Germans wanting to build something that required 75 hours of machining to make...that a perfectly good substitute could be bought locally at an industrial supply store.

[Stephen Williams]

But is there one film camera that you can't find at least one fault with? I doubt it.

Matthew

 

Hi, Matthew,

 

As a film camera is just a box that runs the film, if it works then that's about it, no dropped frames, complicated menus or long boot times to worry about.

 

Stephen

[Andy_Alderslade]

I'll bet anything that BMW is doing the same thing to their software line engineers. The only time German "Top Down" engineering worked well was the American space program where Werner Von Braun was working with a lot of Americans who respected his talents but didn't let him manage the projects directly. I worked about 75 miles from Huntsville in the 70's and knew people at Marshall Space Flight Center who had great stories to tell about the "Germans". The stories usually were something like the Germans wanting to build something that required 75 hours of machining to make...that a perfectly good substitute could be bought locally at an industrial supply store.

 

German engineering is the best, Mercedies, Volkswagen, Bosh, Audi, Arri!

 

Anecdotes don't always reveal a general truth: NASA for the Apollo missions spent over a million dollars developing a pen that could write in space; the Russians used a pencil!

[Hal Smith]

German engineering is the best, Mercedies, Volkswagen, Bosh, Audi, Arri!

 

Anecdotes don't always reveal a general truth: NASA for the Apollo missions spent over a million dollars developing a pen that could write in space; the Russians used a pencil!

 

We went to the moon with our $1,000,000 pens...The Russians sat on the ground trying to figure out why their N1 moon rocket boosters were blowing up. The Russians were still blowing N1's up after the fourth flight test and gave up. The third flight test of Saturn V was the MANNED Apollo 6 mission to lunar orbit and back

 

 

We had teething troubles getting the five F1 rockets at the business end of the Saturn V boosters to behave, the plumbing was so complex it took time to resolve all the problems. The Russians used THIRTY NK-15 engines for the primary booster of the N1 system. They never could get all the complexity to work right. Five million dollar pens turned out to be a better solution than thirty 20 kopek pencils.

 

 

Sometimes the only way to accomplish a huge task is to throw so much money at it that there are no loose ends.

 

I bought a control panel from one of the Apollo moon mission simulators years ago. It had push button switches across it labelled "S1C, SII, SIII, SIVB, etc" , the various rocket stages of an Apollo mission. The panel was part of a bank of equipment racks that had a large IBM computer built into it. On inspection I noticed that the switches had an electrical solenoid on the back that remotely could operate the switch. I asked one of my Marshall buddies if he knew what that was all about. He said it was because on launch the computers at the Cape controlled all the stages of the rocket BUT if the computers failed there was a master over-ride that turned all the automatic operation off and the staging could be controlled by a human being. There was absolutely no electrical connection between the computers and flight control once the over-ride was engaged. Those switches probably cost a small fortune each but the overall design built-in to the system another layer of redundancy and safety.

 

 

 

I gave the panel to a high school space science club years ago, truth is I wish I had kept it now.

[Matthew Rogers]

As a film camera is just a box that runs the film, if it works then that's about it, no dropped frames, complicated menus or long boot times to worry about.

 

But what does menus and long boot times have to do with actual operation of the camera? When the camera is doing what it's supposed to do, it does a very good job, just like a film camera. But when you start talking about ergonomics and what not, that's when there are more issues. Even the RED as a basic body does far far more than a basic film camera. Consider video taps for film cameras while the RED has that built in (although, don't some Arri cameras come with a tap built in?) When you just consider RED as a start/stop run camera, it works pretty well. But when you start adding all sorts of monitoring features, and external things (timecode, audio, etc), the RED is doing 10x times more things than a film camera, and to be honest, can not be compared on a 1 to 1 basis. I'd really like to see Panasonic or Sony do the same image quality, resolution, body size, and price as RED.

 

 

Phil, I never said anything about the lens RENTAL market. That is an entirely different thing. The lens making manufacturing market is changing, and now it looks like there are going to be more options in both primes and zooms. Rental houses are going to have to change their angle and probably focus more on accessories than cameras (which cameras cost them much more than accessories when it comes to digital cameras.) The market is changing, figure out how to deal with it and adjust. Personally, over the last year I have given a rental house business that without my RED I would not have given because I would be sticking with broadcast HD lenses.

 

Matthew

[Adrian Sierkowski]

Well many film cameras did have built in audio.. and Matt, my Arri still has built in time code.... which can record out to film. I think the main point most people are making here is that with most other manufacturers we don't need x upgrades to get everything working properly. Now, granted, most other peoples aren't working in the same economic condition as RED, or producing products for the same prices, but I feel that's a different argument. The RED does things well, I suppose, but I still, like many others, feel that it should have been working much better when it first arrived. Now, one can make the argument that it was so "new" as a tool that these things are bound to happen. I recall a quote from Jurassic Park, "when they opened Disney Land in 1956, nothing worked!" and this can also apply to the RED inasmuch as it is a new taxonomy of a camera (24fps DSLR with PL Mount, essentially), but at the same time, one must wonder and question what a few more months of intensive field testing would have accomplished.

In the end, every camera made, like every any-thing is a platform which can be improved by 'newer' systems. I think we will all be quite happy if/when RED's new lines of cameras learn from the mistakes they DID make with the One and produce a more robust system.

[Brian Dzyak]

Anecdotes don't always reveal a general truth: NASA for the Apollo missions spent over a million dollars developing a pen that could write in space; the Russians used a pencil!

 

 

You're another unfortunate victim of Republican "Rovian" style scare tactics. The truth about the expensive pen vs pencil "argument" is clearly documented and a summary of it is here if you're interested in reading more than "shocking" headlines:

 

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

[Stephen Williams]

But what does menus and long boot times have to do with actual operation of the camera?

 

Even the RED as a basic body does far far more than a basic film camera. Consider video taps for film cameras while the RED has that built in (although, don't some Arri cameras come with a tap built in?) Matthew

 

 

Hi Matthew,

 

I cant work because I am waiting for it to boot (or fail to boot), or it just reboots for no reason.

 

I often don't need or want a video tap, I just want to rrun the camera. With a DSLR I can pick it up & shoot, same with film cameras. Hopefully Epic & Scarlet will fix many of my objections.

 

I often shoot watches, the middle of the shot must be at 10 08 & 38 seconds, it the camera does not run the shot will have to be reset waisting upto 2 hours. Never once in the last 15 years had the Mitchell fail to run or drop a frame, I only will shoot 400' in a day so shooting RED is more expensive to start with.

 

Stephen

[Chris Keth]

But what does menus and long boot times have to do with actual operation of the camera? When the camera is doing what it's supposed to do, it does a very good job, just like a film camera. But when you start talking about ergonomics and what not, that's when there are more issues. Even the RED as a basic body does far far more than a basic film camera. Consider video taps for film cameras while the RED has that built in (although, don't some Arri cameras come with a tap built in?) When you just consider RED as a start/stop run camera, it works pretty well. But when you start adding all sorts of monitoring features, and external things (timecode, audio, etc), the RED is doing 10x times more things than a film camera, and to be honest, can not be compared on a 1 to 1 basis. I'd really like to see Panasonic or Sony do the same image quality, resolution, body size, and price as RED.

 

I like the red as much as the next guy for it's pricepoint but you have to compare it 1:1 to a film camera because that is the competition. Any modern film camera has a nice built in video tap these days. Modern film cameras can be supplied with timecode from the audio cart which is read to film. The film is scanned and the timecode is automatically put into the TC track and can even be automatically put in sync with corresponding TC picture in a non-linear editor.

 

The only huge difference is that film cameras are more expensive to rent and feed and you won't record audio on the same media with a film camera. For that extra rental cost, you get greater ruggedness and dependability (with the gap closing with every firmware update), greater over/underexposure lattitude, better ergonomics for both the operator and assistant, and the ability to overcrank without reducing resolution.

Edited March 29, 2009 by Chris Keth

[Keith Walters]

Anecdotes don't always reveal a general truth: NASA for the Apollo missions spent over a million dollars developing a pen that could write in space; the Russians used a pencil!

 

So did the Americans.

 

Until a piece of lead broke off an astronaut's mechanical pencil, and instead of just falling to the floor like it would under normal gravity, it floated unnoticed around the cabin until it got sucked into a piece of telemetry equipment and caused a malfunction. Investigating the incident, engineers were alarmed at the amount of graphite dust that seemed to have found its way into everything with a cooling fan. This simply does not happen in normal gravity.

 

Realising that that small malfunction could just as well have precipitated a major disaster, they embarked on the above program to develop a ball-point pen that would reliably write in zero gravity. A million dollars may sound expensive for a pen, but remember, there was simply no easy way of testing the thing on the ground.

[Matthew Rogers]

I like the red as much as the next guy for it's pricepoint but you have to compare it 1:1 to a film camera because that is the competition. Any modern film camera has a nice built in video tap these days. Modern film cameras can be supplied with timecode from the audio cart which is read to film. The film is scanned and the timecode is automatically put into the TC track and can even be automatically put in sync with corresponding TC picture in a non-linear editor.

 

The only huge difference is that film cameras are more expensive to rent and feed and you won't record audio on the same media with a film camera. For that extra rental cost, you get greater ruggedness and dependability (with the gap closing with every firmware update), greater over/underexposure lattitude, better ergonomics for both the operator and assistant, and the ability to overcrank without reducing resolution.

 

I guess I'm not communicating clearly what I am getting at. Look at the RED from the perspective of a company's first camera. Somehow I don't think Arri's or Panavision's first camera was all that great. RED has got a lot to improve on, I don't deny that. There are plenty of things about the camera that drives me nuts. Of course, coming from the video world there are tons of things that I find much better on the RED than other video cameras (such as exposure tools, color viewfinder, adjusting how the camera body is set up, etc.) But when you consider that it took them 50+ years to get a really nice and small 35mm camera for handheld use (and maybe I don't know of camera that was actually out there getting wide usage), it's interesting that in less than a year there is a solution for the RED-the mantis. Of course, that's kinda not a fair comparison since much of the mantis design is from handheld rigs like Arri's and others (over the past 40 years)

 

I just think that the RED is very impressive for a company's first product. Especially since it seems like they've got much further in a shorter time than companies like Panasonic and Sony (Sony at least for their <$50k products.)

 

Stephen, I'm confused about you shooting watches? How would it take 2 hours to reset the watches to shoot again? And when it comes to dropped frame with the RED, even if you do drop frames (which it's really only certain situations that are fairly easy to guess when it'll drop) at least the camera tells you right away. I hated, in the video world, of getting back and finding the tape had a dropout in the tape...I don't miss those days. What happens if you do find a hair in the gate on something you just shot? What if you can't reshoot it? With the dropped frames at least you know right after the take and not when you are getting ready to move on to the next setup;)

 

It will be very exciting to see how Epic turns out. RED really seems to be starting to hit their stride.

 

Matthew

[Chris Keth]

The RED is absolutely an impressive product for the company's first try. It's very misleading to say that it took arriflex and panavision 50+ years to develop modern cameras. They developed them as new technologies and new materials became available. A modern camera owes it's small size and light weight to lighter metal alloys and carbon fibers. Video taps improved as video sensors improved, etc. You can't really fault companies for not using those technologies before they existed. They always made the best camera they could at the time.

 

RED also made the best camera they could at the time. I just think that, had they given themselves more R&D time, they could have made an even better camera.

[Stephen Williams]

Stephen, I'm confused about you shooting watches? How would it take 2 hours to reset the watches to shoot again?

Matthew

 

It's a partial relight, to get to the watch, things will need to be moved & the watch may well also move being suspended with cotton. Could be more than 2 hours depending on complexity. Hairs in the gate are very very rare shooting 4 perf (1 in 20 years), it would be cheaper to retouch the 87 frames than loose 2 hours on set.

 

Stephen