Elhanan Matos

I believe an S.two OB-1 or a codex onboard recorder with a couple mags usually rents for the same price as the camera, but then you also need to get a download station, the codex being very expensive, and the S.Two a little cheaper. You also need to factor in the cost of hard drive space, I believe uncompressed raw recording over T-link is about 750GB per hour. I'm in the process of planning a test to see if shooting uncompressed is really advantageous over pro res. I'm guessing that for most things it won't be, and for VFX heavy shots it will be.

Sounds like your hand unit rolled while you were changing lenses...

If you're using a mac I would highly recommend you learn how to use the terminal; Using just a plain old mac with osx (or PC with linux) you can copy safely and quickly using Rsync then create an MD5 checksum and compare it using diff. Sounds a little daunting, but if you're serious about data managing, then you better learn it.

I just got home from working on a commercial our "A" Camera is a Genesis, but today we brought in an EX1 as a "B" camera. We shot with the camera tethered to an SRW deck, so that we can record 10 bit 4:2:2 (At least I was told it was 10 bit, I had no time to test it and I had no idea we were even going to shoot with the camera until late last night). Everything worked great, and the camera is very easy to work with, if you've ever worked with any other CineAlta camera then you'll be pretty familiar with the menus nomenclature. I was able to match it to our Genesis in minutes (it wasn't a perfect match, but pretty damn close). I wouldn't say the camera is perfect though, recording to a $85,000 deck gets you a great picture, but when recording to the built in SxS cards the compression is noticeable, although still amazing for 35mb/s and $6500! I was so impressed I'm considering buying one myself.

The 17 inch panasonic is a great directors monitor, I would never rely on it for lighting unless I'm working with a camera that has a lot of dynamic range, like the F23, Genesis or Phantom. I'm planning on buying one myself because it's really cheap (sorry Adamo 2,600 is very cheap compared to 26,000) and rents for a decent amount of money. The new Sony BVM LCD is great, the CineTal is a fantastic monitor, and the new E-Cinema monitors might be worth checking out.

If your DP and Director don't mind having more depth of field then the F23 is the only tape based camera I would shoot with. If they would like to have 35mm depth of field then the Genesis is the current choice. If they are willing to shoot on a hard disk system then the Origin is probably on the top of the list, although it should be noted that the camera would only work comfortably in studio mode.

David Deahl... www.bigdeahl.com the guy works non-stop.

I just bought a 2007 Audi A6 last September and I love it unfortunately I've been 1,500 miles away from it for over a month now and I'm having some kind of German car withdraw. I'll also recommend everyone out there to stay away from Nissan Altimas.

Sorry I don't think rational conversations are possible in these forums. Yes film will probably eventually become obsolete, but RED will have nothing to do with it, and it definitely won't be as soon as you expect it to be.

The Santa Fe workshops are probably the best (and only) workshops you should take if you are serious about taking a workshop. It's the best place to learn about everything HD if you need to learn fast (within 1 week) although if you have access to the cameras and you are willing to put in a lot of time with the cameras and a lot of time studying everything about them and HD online, then you can save yourself the $5,000 (not sure if that's still the price, but thats what it was three years ago). I have been to a few of the Santa Fe workshops myself, but as a volunteer most of the time and once as a presenter with the Cine-Speedcam. And I learned alot from just sitting in on a few of the presentations. If you do decide to go make sure you participate, ask a lot of questions and get as much hands on experience as possible, it's the only way you'll commit everything you learn there to memory.

I'll be shooting some tests tomorrow morning with the S-Log and the different color modes available, I'll try and see if our post dept. can digitize the tape for me later on and I'll be sure to share the results with everyone.

Call a camera rental house in your area and ask if you can come in and shoot some tests on a "Cine Alta." Otherwise you'll be spending more money on the training seminar for two than an actual camera rental.

John, I understand exactly what you are saying and agree 100%. I wasn't aware that programs like photoshop did any processing to the image when you zoom in to 100%, if it does are you aware of any program that can?

Zooming in is just fine, as long as you don't zoom in past 100%. And your 46" television (not broadcast monitor) is not really the best tool for the job either.

This seems to be common with a few other CMOS cameras. They really are a pain to work with sometimes because the only way to get a decent image out of them is to gel the lights and get the color right otherwise when you're shooting with tungsten lights and you try to correct in post you start to pull too much red out and add too much blue and your image gets very noisy and contrasty. This is a problem I run into with several High Speed CMOS cameras, it can be fixed but you just need alot more light... umm almost 5 times more light to be exact (because of the CC gels).

I think everyone is taking most of Phil's posts a bit too serious, he is exaggerating quite a bit when he says the image looks like a cell phone cameras image. I believe what Phil was trying to say is that the images from the red are very soft when viewed at 100% resolution (ie. not scaling the image down) and also have a very heavily processed look to them. To me it looks like they are doing quite a bit of noise reduction as well as sharpening (or an unsharp mask) to the picture, which when not scaled down gives solid colors a very plastic or painted look to them (kind of like pictures from your cell phones, but not nearly as bad). Daren I feel like you need to lurk a bit more on this forum, well not the red forums specifically, because they're like a toxic waste dump compared to the rest of the site. And once you have looked around a bit, you will notice that Phil is quite intelligent and a great contributor to this website. As for my opinions of the Red camera, they are JUST OPINIONS! I have never worked with the red, I am only judging the pictures and video that I have seen posted online. I am looking forward to getting some hands on experience with the camera though. I have already turned down three jobs because they were shooting on the Red and I didn't feel comfortable working with a camera that I have never seen in person before.

Hey Michael, What you need to do for your low light scenes is shoot with hypergamma 3 and set your gain to -3 db. Then when you go back to a more high contrast scene go back to 0db gain and hypergamma 4. If that does not help then you should put the camera back into a standard gamma table 5 and coarse gamma 0.45 and check your shadows again, if it is still too noisy send it back to the rental house and ask them to take a look at the camera for you, because the gain might be set too high on the optical head block.

ugh... this is going to be the first NAB i'm not going to in 4 years. Does anyone know if there will be anything interesting there?

Were you shooting interiors or exteriors? How far away were the lights from the subjects? What HMI globes were you using? Were you using any Diffusion? If so How much? There are plenty of ways to get away with using HMI's at high speeds, but it's usually just not worth it.

I have never been fired, but I have heard many horror stories of other DIT's being fired... and I've gotten many phone calls to replace other DIT's. From what I can gather, it seems that most of the DIT's I have heard getting fired are usually incompetent, arrogant, or both. Any ways back to the original question... I would recommend the Santa Fe workshop if it's still around, I have attended a couple of them and met some really great knowledgeable people. And as for the DIT position being a temporary job I would probably agree, when all cameras are tapeless, and data does not need to be transferred from cards to disks and then from disks to archival tape, and HD monitors are no longer needed on set and when all cameras work exactly the same and have no menus or settings other than framerate and shutter, then there will be no need for a DIT.

I worked on a small promo for G4TV where we had some actors jumping on trampolines and we were fairly tight on the lens, we had the same problem. We found the best speed is about 500fps with a 360 degree shutter.

I'm a fan of the phantom camera right now. The work flow is not easy, and you have to do alot of work to get the best out of your footage, but it is worth it. I have my reel up online at www.studiobattlerattle.com most of it was shot on the Phantom HD. The pictures you get are absolutely amazing. By the way everything on that reel was shot by Kevin Zanit who posts here all the time.

Take a look at KEH.com, and why are you even bothering with 35mm? Go for medium format, you can get a Hasselblad 500C or CM really cheap now. I bought mine with a zeiss 80mm T* lens for about 1,000 usd.

Color grading with SR is much better than HDCAM simply because of the bit depth you have with SR... 10 instead of 8 bits. Also shooting in 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 is better than 3:1:1 obviously. I would take a look at trying to get a hold of a sony F23 instead of a 900R, having an SR deck tethered to you is a huge pain in the ass.

If theres a new set that came out recently I guess I tested the old set.