The cheap RED aesthetic.

[Keith Walters]

I think the problem lies in trying to make digital look like Film. Thats like making apple juice to taste like wine. The last 2 Star Wars films were shot digitally with the sony's in the early 2000's and they looked great. Avatar looked great on the Sonys as well. From Peter jacksons blog the make up artist commented about having to make the skin redder for the Epic camera i found that strange.

 

Star Wars II was shot in 1440 x 800 HDCAM with the F900 and I thought it looked like crap personally.

Star Wars III was shot in 1920 x 1080 uncompressed RGB on the F950 and while it looked better than ep 2, it wasn't anything to write home about either. There's no comparison to the first three films shot on film 20 years earlier.

 

As Freya mentioned, only a relatively small amount of Avatar is live-action, and I thought that looked pretty poor compared to the CGI which made up the bulk of the film.

 

It was shot with these cameras:

PACE Fusion 3-D

Sony CineAlta F23, Canon and Fujinon Lenses

Sony CineAlta HDC-1500, Canon and Fujinon Lenses

Sony CineAlta HDC-F950, Canon and Fujinon Lenses

[Keith Walters]

B)

 

The secret to Red cameras seems to be designing things around the right shades of brown I reckon. Set your film in autumn and film the leaves, lots of brown set decoration but be careful, don't overdo the brown or make your browns too much, a sort of cinamon colour seems to work great! I notice many cheap commercials seem to have picked up on this lately. Great for chocolate and coffee commercials in paticular. You do need to be careful about it tho and not get carried away and be careful what shade of brown you are using, but from what I see the red seems to be all about the browns strangely enough.

 

Basically the moral of that story is love your red and embrace the browns.

 

love

 

Freya

 

Am I the only person here who has seen David Mullen's epic, "Manure" aka "The smell of success,". That was a film the Red was made for, no question :lol:

 

 

I don't know if it's the same overseas, but I've been disturbed by the number of TV commercials I've seen which have the appearance of having been scanned off WWII surplus Ektrachrome that's been left in somebody's garage for 10 years, then developed.

Funny thing is, it looks exactly like what happens when some numb-nut puts a huge stack of old-fashioned (non IR blocking) NDs on a camera which doesn't allow accurate real-time monitoring and winds up with all their footage squashed into the upper 3 bits of the dynamic range.

If it's a creative choice, it's a bloody strange one, that's all I can say....

[Jon Rosenbloom]

Bluntly, I have given it as many chances as I can, having viewed movies made with it on big screens, seen many different tests and having shot a feature with it as well, I just can not get past this disappointing result that I feel when, in general but not always, viewing footage from this camera.

 

The point of my post is to ask for others' opinions on how to best avoid whatever it might be that enables this cheap or video-ish feel that I find difficult to escape from much of the time. If you love this brand and it can do no evil in your eyes, that's fine and you can (please?) skip this crazy post.

 

I just saw another trailer for a movie that screams RED to me, even in a low-rez online version, and just had to finally ask for opinions in public. Being asked to use it again on something coming up soon (where S16 would fit perfectly but isn't an option) is adding to my reason.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/valhallarising/

 

Maybe it is too much to ask for but this thread would be more helpful if posts were from people who have used the camera on paying shoots and understands where I'm coming from. Did you find certain post/CC tips that helped in some way? Use some filters that you liked? Smoke any shots? Certain lenses help a little?

 

Just wondering what helped you so I can put it in the ammo-box of things to test out. I felt 'General Discussion' fits this post best and may help it from becoming a fan-fest but, if I'm wrong....

 

Having finally shot (a short) on the RED, I have to concur. I'm pleasantly surprised by the camera. We had many moments of looking at the monitor and being very happy with the image, but when I cut this footage into my reel right behind my 35mm work, it comes up short. It's very nice VIDEO. Here's a small gallery of 1/4 resolution grabs:

 

 

I'm still hoping for something spectacular when we go back to the digital negative and do a proper grade.

[Deji Joseph]

You mean like cider?

 

 

Freya

 

Still wine, cider would mean they are related