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Red One - a review from a jobbing DP.


Adam Frisch FSF

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maybe we are just in a transition period, like in the 30s' when film makers just started to move into colour films, and a lot of film makers thought it's not good and others understood it will take time to learn this tool, and indeed it took some time...

It's not really the same. With colour in the 1930s film makers had to put in a lot more work, care and expense to produce what was seen as a superior (and hence more valuable) product.

 

DI generally allows film makers to put in less work, care and expense to produce what is essentially the same product.

 

(CGI as part of a DI certainly does allow producers to produce images that would have been impossible or extremely difficult in the past, but most DI work doesn't involve this, simply using computers to replace traditional photochemical and optical procedures).

 

Like many other computer based technologies, while it allows skilled artisans to be more productive, it also open the door to computer-literate but otherwise relatively unskilled punks, with the inevitable result. There is a danger it will eventually do to the film industry what word processors did to the publishing industry.

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It's funny how much everyone hates the little chubby HVX on this forum, what did it do to you? haa.

 

 

Anyways, I have shot with the f900 and, knowing I can rent it from AbleCine for just a bit more than the Red, I would GLADLY do it. The f900R, even while being 8 bit in the end, seems to have more DR, and be less noisy (especially in tungsten) than the Red.

I will trade more DR for "35mm depth of field" anyday. I know it's a big selling point with the Red, but I would rather have more detail in my midtones and blacks while underexposing a bit..

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Anyways, I have shot with the f900 and, knowing I can rent it from AbleCine for just a bit more than the Red, I would GLADLY do it.

i own HDCAM and RED cameras and both have advantages. i cannot agree with you after >1000 hours shot on each system. Both have advantages. For full-features and cinema work the red would be preffereed often here.

 

The f900R, even while being 8 bit in the end, seems to have more DR, and be less noisy (especially in tungsten) than the Red.

I will trade more DR for "35mm depth of field" anyday. I know it's a big selling point with the Red, but I would rather have more detail in my midtones and blacks while underexposing a bit..

if you are not able to shoot and expose correctly for the red, you should book a training or leave the DoP/cameramanposition for someone more qualified.

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So..

 

Unfortunately a nice interface does not a camera make.

 

First of all - image quality. Irrespective of resolution, the Red does not produce very nice images. It's something about the clippy whites that screams video a mile away. And no matter how much you protect for the highlights, they'll come bite you at some point. Just look at Che - all the shots in the jungle show really ugly clipped highlights in the dappled lighter bits. Check out the trailer. It's almost worse than on most other cameras.

---

 

Hi Adam,

 

I`ve shot a whole feature for the big screen with RED in 4K for a 4k-DI. To sum up what I had to do, regarding my tests, was that I reduced my whole exposure range to 5 stops. Which is obviously a bit castrating... in the end, with all digital cameras you need to use the noise reduction and compressor tools of the DI-suite, with RED more than with others. Especially with night shots, the cam isn`t probably the best choice for night scenes - but it works, if you treat it with "care". Now, I will shoot a second feature, also 4K-DI.Masterneg...and again with RED, not because I had the wish to use it, but because the production owns one. Now, I will leave some of those "safety thoughts" to the past, I will light it more freely. Unless the system will improve, which will be so, we have to keep an eye to the light levels, but one day it will be usable like a film emulsion.

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Hey Adam,

 

It was great to read your post and the thread that it has created.

recently I did a test on the Red for a Short film, I tested the camera under all kinds of lighting situations, in some point in the testing The director and me both looked at the monitor, then the director approach me and whisper:

"I can't understand it,the picture doesn't look good, it's not supposed to be a camera with 4K, a camera that competes with 35mm film?" I answered: "you just read my mind...".

 

Oron.

 

I am just a humble film student, but the video feed from a 65mm camera probably also looks "crap".

 

Even I know with the RED that the 720p is a preview only (and a poor one at that). If you really want to see what you're getting, an ARRI D-21 or Panavision Genesis with a proper LUT on set it probably closer to what you want...

 

... anybody correct me on this?

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if you are not able to shoot and expose correctly for the red, you should book a training or leave the DoP/cameramanposition for someone more qualified.

 

I don't think there is any need to accuse someone of incompetence because they express a preference for one camera over another. I've shot features with both 900R and Red cameras, and in many ways prefer the 900. Ease of use, weight, monitoring and established post pipeline are all major points in its favor.

 

The Red may have slightly more resolution and 35mm DoF, but these are not the only factors in choosing a camera system.

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No, you're absolutely right - this is a common misconception. The realtime video preview on a Dalsa Origin looks (looked?) awful as well - actually, the Origin preview was probably worse than the Red.

 

Not that the finished images are actually all that nice, either, though.

 

P

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As for reading up on the Red about its IR problems, no, that wasn't something I'd come across. Maybe I should have researched more and trawled forums before I took out a professional camera into the field, but I actually don't think I should have to do that. If this is a often encountered problem with the Red, then the IR filters should either be built in or come with the kit. Or, one could perhaps even more cheekily demand that such things simply should not be prevalent in a professional camera.

 

Im going to take a punt Adam, and suggest that it's not an IR related problem (although this does exist as well)

 

If i recall, you were lighting tungsten in a studio. I can't imagine you were using a lot of ND's. Did you actually record any footage with your weird colour shift and check it in RedCine ??

 

I'll bet you'll find it would have gone away. The quick and dirty monitoring on RED often leads to yellow green casts in skin tones in slightly underexposed areas (on monitoring only though). As soon as you process it, you'll find it won't be there. I call this the "going green in the gills effect". I've had to explain several times to Directors that it won't turn out this way once processed. It gave me a fright during tests, but once I processed the footage it resolved itself. I'll bet you'll find it's the same.

 

As for the other issues.

 

I think you won't get into trouble if you think of RED as a very high resolution video camera - with all of the problems that video cameras have.

 

jb

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We did check it and it was as bad there as on screen. However, I did use a lot of ND indoors. I had also gelled the tungsten units with full CTB to get it to daylight (as the camera seems to favour that) and maybe in combination with the heavy ND-ing they freaked out. When we removed the ND's the problem disappeared. I could have just stopped down, but that meant I'd have to shoot at a stop of T8 or something, and that's not my style. I pretty much always shoot wide open or close to it. As I recall it we even tried with the Pola, and that didn't help either.

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I think that if one needs to shoot a classic drama short or feature without any SFX, I will definitely will push for film... 100 years of amazing film making proves it works and I never heard cinematographers complains film is not good... so why I need to change it???

 

Adam also talked about the fact he like the simple interface of the Red more than the Sony pro camera, I totally agree! But again I was thinking:

“hey, I like it when I don't have 100 menus to mess around with... Oh god how I miss film! just push a button for it to run and be happy to know from the start that it will look good.”

 

It reminds me that a few years ago I saw in the cinema the new version of “Apocalypse now” and was thinking: “this cinematography is amazing, it looks amazing, why we are trying so hard to change this format?? hell, it looks better from 95% of the film I see today in the cinema and it was made in the late 70s' ”.

 

So to conclude, I Wish filmmakers(directors, cinematographers, producers)will stop being concerned by the format and try to be more into making a great master peace.

And if a good camera will come along that they want to use because it will better there film, please use it.

 

And one last point: everyone is doing DI's this days and are comparing them to the Red footage. I think 50% of the films doing a DI are not really gaining anything... Have to admit I most like the cinematography from an era that no one knew what is DI, and still the films looked great on the big screen.

The last film I saw that has prove to me that point is “The diving bell and the butterfly”.

 

So I'm asking the ones that shoots lots of features, why to use a DI in every film? Why not to keep it simple? And to bring our abilities through good film making, are you not agree that system that we chose to work in are changing the way the film will be?

 

Cheers,

 

Oron.

 

Oron. I totally disagree with your position of "keep things as they are". All the world is changing, technology is advancing at high speed, and cinema is one of the environments that has not had so many modifications. There are lots of cons when using film, and these things together are starting to make changes.

People have to learn for years to imagine how an image would look after processing. That, for me, is old.

Change is good, and is always not so easily accepted by the people. Because most of you are so used to film, that now an earthquake seems to be coming.

 

I have a Kodak leaflet, where there are questions like "why should I use film for my project?", and the answers are nothing but crap like "it will help you to get exactly what you ever imagined". Reading it gives you the sensation that if you use film, you will be able to play poker with god.

It's not that I don't like to film, I did film a lot, and I understand that film is still (a bit) better than the newest digital format. Change is necessary for all of us to improve.

There are lots of new things that people is learning about digital formats, video, or people from the video industry are learning about film, and that's just great, for our minds and lifes. It's just good to see it happen, learn, discuss, understand.

I've been recently learning from a DP here in Argentina who talked about his experiences, and he told me that most of the material he had shot on film could have been shot even in HDV (referring to the weakness of the scripts, content and all that).

 

I am not saying that film is bad and digital rules. I am saying that there is no reason to say "keep on film, why d'you want tha' digital thing?".

 

Cheers,

Rodrigo.

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"So..

I've now used the Red One with build 17 and build 18 quite a few times on both commercials and music videos, big and small. I've shot with it in both Los Angeles and London.

What I like about the Red is its friendly user interface and the clear way everything is labelled and displayed in film terms, not ENG-style crap like the Sony's insist on. It also looks pretty sturdy and by all accounts seems so too.

Unfortunately a nice interface does not a camera make"

 

Interesting how aesthetic viewpoints differ. Is it just human nature or is there a fair amount of politics involved ? Varying combinations of both I suspect.

I have, in the last 30 years used most cameras and film stocks you might want to name. As of the middle to late 90's I have shot many films, television etc, on all of the digital cameras out there. End of 2007 I used 2 Vipers to shoot a feature called "Skin". Thought they were certainly better than the 900 Sony's I had a lot of experience on.

I have never owned a camera as my work constantly shifted between super 16, 35 and then in the 90's digital came into the mix as well.

I heard of the RED camera project from Andy Quested, head of BBC HD R&D. After researching it as well as I could, including speaking to some of the engineers involved in developing the camera I decided to place a deposit on a RED 1 system. It showed the promise of being the one camera that I could use on doc's, features and the odd commercial.

Got it in June 2008 and will never look back. From Build 16 onwards I love everything about the image it produces. It most certainly does not look like video. Given the choice on my next feature, which is a large budget film, I will most certainly choose RED before 35mm, not because I own one (it has already paid for itself) but I know I can produce a better looking film, given the look we want to create.

So, two very different view points, both from working professionals.

 

Dewald Aukema SASC

www.dewaldaukema.com

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I think it's a mistaken premise that doing a D.I. equals being less artistic. It's just a tool like anything else. How it is used makes it art or not. Finishing a movie photochemically is not some badge of artistic merit -- plenty of crappy movies have been finished photochemically. The level of technical difficulty in creating art does not equate to artistic merit either, otherwise a simply-lit shot could not be as artistic as a shot with complicated lighting.

 

Hi David,

 

I was wondering if you could share your experience with us now that you have taken the RED all the way to film print via D.I.

Are you happy with the results? Did you make any adjustment in exposure or lighting to favor your workflow? would you say, it's very similar as the f900 and other digital cameras?

 

Thanks David, I would really appreciate it.

 

Francisco

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We never got quite out to the final print, there have been some roadblocks to the final finish, not technical ones.

 

My general impression has been that the RED creates fine images for cinema use but it has some issues to watch out for -- it has a certain "personality" to factor into your shooting.

 

But the real problem isn't so much the camera or the recording... it's the steps after that. The dailies people, the efx people, and the D.I. people all struggled to come up with a workflow, and none of them used the same tricks. This can be a real problem -- the efx people said they did no color-correction to the converted R3D files, yet all of the efx shots were delivered a stop darker than the non-efx footage around them. So clearly they did something different in their conversion compared to the D.I. facility.

 

Ideally the D.I. facility would have done the conversions and handed them off to the efx people, but the efx people had to start months before a D.I. facility was hired.

 

Our D.I. started out with two LUT's having to be applied, one from the RAW conversion to something like "film space" and then the viewing LUT, but the double-LUT started to create quantization artifacts (just in the display) so they decided to scrap their dual LUT and create a single LUT and we started over. Both the D.I. facility and the efx people were scratching their heads over the RED color space, it vaguely seemed to resemble Rec 709 but with less saturation. But obviously this could be due to the conversion settings.

 

You see, part of the problem is the whole metadata concept because the D.I. and efx folks weren't sure to follow it or ignore it. I just wanted the Apple ProRes Quicktime dailies to follow the metadata (which sometimes they transferred over and sometimes, not.)

 

I kept telling the D.I. folks to ignore it, that they should be working with the basic "RAW" look of the converted files. But the conversion software they were using, they tell me, asked them to select settings like ASA, color temp, etc. -- you couldn't just convert the footage without picking some sort of delivery parameter. So I don't know if they picked the right settings or not.

 

As D.I. places get more familiar with RED footage, this will be less and less of an issue, but for now, it's still a bit under development.

 

I think an HD camera like the F900 is more easy to slip into common HD post workflows, so the whole process is more predictable... but in terms of look, I think the F900 is fairly distinctive-looking, whereas the RED has more of a filmic look, partly because of the 35mm depth of field, but it is also less edgy-looking, less electronic.

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I kept telling the D.I. folks to ignore it, that they should be working with the basic "RAW" look of the converted files. But the conversion software they were using, they tell me, asked them to select settings like ASA, color temp, etc. -- you couldn't just convert the footage without picking some sort of delivery parameter.

 

Yes, just like coming in with film negative and going thru a scanner or telecine, there isn't a "one size fits all" setting to use. What you want to do here is get pretty close to your final look, without tying your hands.

 

BTW, how did they convert the two LUT's into one? Was it strictly math, or did they do it by eye?

 

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

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