Why is it so difficult?

Landon D. Parks · June 9, 2005

I just got done reading the Millimeter artical on Red Riding Hood, and eyt again they talk about needed 30 computers just to operate the thing...

What makes it so difficult? It would seem to me to be a lot eaier than some of the other HD cameras, because you dont gotta worry about all the set-up controls... You just set the frame rate, shutter, ect and press the reocrd button. and even then It should be no more complicated than having one feed from the camera going to both downconverted monitors and HD montitors, and the main fiberoptic wire to a Sony SRW or something... Really I see no where that 30 computers could even come into the show. MAYBE one to one for a low-rez feed to while you shoot, so that you can bring back up scenes you just shoot to look at them again.

Even on other productions that are not so computer dependant, you still hear them talk about how much stuff was needed to make it work, I just dont see it... Am I missing something somewhere in the process of getting it from the camera head to a recorder?

Edited June 9, 2005 by Landon D. Parks

Brian Wells · June 9, 2005

I haven't seen the article you mention, but that camera has very high storage/bandwidth requirements. Something like 15 or 30X the storage/bandwidth for VariCam HD..

And, maybe they had redundancy and uncompressed playback or grading on set. There's my guess.

David Mullen ASC · June 9, 2005

Probably he was using computers for other purposes, like previz for composites.

Sure, you can take the Viper directly into an SR deck, although those didn't exist at the time they made "Red Riding Hood" (they used HD-D5 decks I believe, but same idea.)

HD shoots can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make them. Cameras that require external recorders are a little more complicated but not by much.

For something as efx heavy as "Red Riding Hood", it was a more complex shoot.

Trouble with using HD-D5 as they did is that it is a compressed 4:2:2 HD format recording a video-encoded signal, so perhaps they were also trying to record an uncompressed, unprocessed 4:4:4 HD signal into a computer for certain efx work. I don't have the article in front of me, but I know the DP, Dave Stump, and he has a lot of experience dealing with the Viper for efx shooting.

Even though you CAN record an unprocessed signal in "film stream" mode, some people like to process the signal in-camera before it gets recorded so they can change the gamma, color matrix, gain, etc., which is what they did for "Collateral." There are arguments either way, although I would tend to favor not processing the signal until post. However, the case of "Collateral", with so much night shooting, I think they wanted access to gain rather than have a bunch of dark, underexposed dailies in editing...

Landon D. Parks · June 9, 2005

You know, thats one thing about "Red Riding Hood" I never could swollow.... The whole Previz they did I can understand, but from what I read they actually had the background plates piped in behind the bluescreen somehow so the director could see pretty much what the finnished thing would look like. From what I have read, even lucas didn't do that on star wars.... And the small budget they had to do it, under $2million.... It's amazing they had the cash to pre-plan everything as well as they did, and pay an FX house to animate every background in the movie. before and after the shoot...

Edited June 9, 2005 by Landon D. Parks

Phil Rhodes · June 9, 2005

Hi,

Well, you can do that yourself in Premiere - that might be all they were looking at. There's other levels of that, do it on an Avid DS or whatever, but it's quite often done if you have the background before the shoot.

Phil

Tenolian Bell · June 9, 2005

Lucas did however have every shot prevized, with great detail. Much of the composition, lighting, vehicles, environments, and animated characters were all created before they began shooting.

I saw where Lucas said he basically shot the entire film in the previz.

Everything was so planned out ahead of time for Star Wars that they probably did not need to see the background from the previz on monitor during production.