Here comes a slightly updated overview of how much weigth your shoulder, your tripod or your rig is supposed to handle. Always keep in mind extra weight for mattebox, filters, cables, transmitters etc.
Thanks to Adrian T. for permission to reproduce his table.
Scott Simmons wrote an open letter to cameratechs, Please label tapes and disks: An open letter to DPs, camera ops, DITs. He pleads to label tapes/harddisks in the following matter:
a descriptor of the project date of acquisition resolution w/ progressive or interlaced frame rate acquisition codec camera used contact information for questions notes
So a tape label might look like this:
Fluffo corporate video
6/25/09
1080i
29.97
HDV
Canon HV20
Michael Bey cell 555-1212
director shot 24p
All pretty reasonable, and should be adopted as common practice. Actually, I would suggest adding ratio, operator and sound information.
I prepared a simple form in the popular .pdf format that you can download here: Tape card
I also added a line for ratio, pre-filled some standard values, and added some info as to sound. Feedback is very welcome!
You can print out a couple of these sheets, cut them in fourths and have them in the camera bag. Even when you are in a hurry, you can quickly give valuable information to the hard working editor. (If you have an inkjet printer, it might be an idea to get those labels photocopied, so that they will survive the rain you and your camera will have to endure.)
Dear editors, it would be great if you could give us camerafolk some feed-back about the raw footage. Both what you liked (we are humans, too), what is useless, what would make your life easier, and any other form of constructive criticism. (And if you could make a copy of the finished edit in the highest possible quality, you are entitled to some serious cameraman love 
)
Solargraph by Pekka Salminen
I’ve done some pinhole camera experiments in my younger days, but Justin Quinell is our age’s master in this technique. Have a look at his collection of multiple-month exposures, which he calls Solargraphs.
He also built a miniature camera, letting you expose from within the mouth. And he even sells those little cameras for next-to-nothing.
And do visit Junstins homepage, where you’ll find lots of other goodies, including instructions on how to build a 720-degree camera out of toilet rolls.
Hungry Man/Grey London has made this new commercial for Toshiba, employing 200 hidef cameras.
20.000 gigabyte of data. 2 1/2 million individually renamed frames. $4.7 million dollar.
Some background footage:
Production Company: Hungry Man LTD
Director:Â Mitch Stratton
Editor and editing company:Â The Whitehouse / Christophe Williams
Post-production company:Â The Mill
Music: Crystal Castles – Air War
Voice-over: Kira Lauren
(from the Press Release)
A week ago Thursday I took a drive to the airport to pick up our camera directly from the friendly FedEx crew. Back home two hours later, I genuinely enjoyed putting together all the bits and pieces. No mentionable problems there. Love the fact that RED uses paper, not plastics for wrapping. Very green & cool.
Am again surprised at the high built quality of everything. Solid feel, not too heavy (maybe going to the gym in preparation for delivery has helped, too).
Because of the sudden rise of the dollar, we had to slim down our package, one of the things that went out was the ET Arri base plate. Having read about the wobbliness of the shoulder dovetail, I was very happily surprised at just how steady it did connect the camera to our Sachtler Video 20 III head. As a light-weight setup, I would see no problems using this on paid work.
The 7″ Pro LCD (the only thing I have splashed out on — besides the camera) is gorgeous, lightweight – and I love the ability to be able to control camera functions from it. Would love the function to re-assign the two brightness buttons to something more usable. Some banding, but I can live with that.
Since Birger turned out not deliver on his promise, I am glad to have ordered the Nikon mount. This came not installed, but thanks to Douglas´ youTube video, installation was a breeze (one of the many benefits of having kids is ready availability of balloons; and yes, I did use a red one). The only change is that now you have to unplug the i-cable connector.
Besides my lovely set of Contax Zeiss primes, that I cannot yet use, I have a cheap, old, dusty, crappy, plasticy Nikon zoom with stuck aperture blades. But heck, I could throw it on. Did a few pans around the room, and could already enjoy just how better the camera handled the highlights and contrasts than any camera I could afford before. Would love the option to have the histogram displayed while changing the shutter angle.
By now it was Time For Some Sleep.
Next day in the office I updated to Build 17. Turns out you need a magazine to do that. Luckily an hour later the friendly postman dropped by with 4 8gig cards from Lexar. On the first attempt at updating I got the rocketio error. Remembering that this might be connected to the CF module (all the hours on reduser were not wasted), I took out the CF card and re-inserted it. Now it worked. Bootup is 10 seconds faster than on build 16. LOVE the 1:1 zoom function. Occasionally, when switching modes, the screen turns black.
When I tried the black shading, the camera just eternally displayed the Matrix screen (nice touch, btw) until the battery died half an hour later. Through trial-and-error I found out that you have to format the magazine at first. Suggestion for build 17 release: before black-shading, check that the magazine is formatted. Even better: when an unformatted magazine is inserted, give automatically the option to format it right away – heck, I would love the option of automatically formatting whenever the magazine is empty. (I know I will get scolded for this suggestion…) Another suggestion: in the maintenance menu, display the date/time of the currently used black shading functions.
The same postman also brought an adapter cable that allowed me to hook up the camera to one of our 24″ dell editing screens. Not perfect colours, but great for the director.
Finally I could do some recordings. Even with my crap lens, the picture quality is just light-years ahead of what similarly priced cameras can deliver. I am soooo thankful that we could skip the HDV crap.
When we went from a small miniDV camera to a fullsize DVcam camera, that step was evolutionary. Two years back I thought the next evolutionary step would be an HD camera. Then I heard about RED. First it sounded too good to be true. Glad it wasn´t. Very, very, very glad.
This camera loves power. The electrical one. It sucks a battery that would´ve lasted half a shooting day on the DSR570 empty within an hour. So I ordered some more batteries.
Also ordered a 2.8ghz MacBook Pro, but that will take 2 weeks. Anecdotal evidence proved that a MacBook air is not suitable for field-use :o)
Well, that wraps up my first and second impressions of this ***-kicking camera. Thanks for reading.
Jim – for making his vision a reality. It really shows that this camera was not made by a company whose goal is to make a profit, and does so by making good cameras. RED is about making awesome cameras and then (and only then) turning it into a profitable business. And having fun along the way.
Redheads – everyone at RED for building this revolutionary (pronounced “badass” in Jarredian) camera. I don´t know you, but I command you! Thank thee! Keep it up.
Jarred – for Reduser. Without it I would not only be flabbergasted, but wouldn´t have met all the people I already have. Thanks to everyone participating on this forum.
Justin J. – for keeping up with my “occasionally” changing order. Thanks for all your help.
Douglas Underdahl – for (still) being the only one that actually delivers an alternative, non-warranty-voiding mount. Douglas went further out of his way and sent me a GDX (sp?) mount without before I sent him mine, thus avoiding my camera sitting around for 2 weeks. His mount arrived today, installation was a breeze and the original mount is sent off today.
Brandon – for jumping to my rescue and sending me his better Nikon lens. Arrived yesterday and our RED rocks even more. I can only imagine what it will be like with the Contax lenses.
Gunleik – for letting me play with his RED and thus sealing my fate. We reserved our camera a few days later. Enthusiasm does rub off.
Are – for tipping me off about the contact at FedEx that not only sped up the import (all paperwork was done and all fees paid while the camera was still in transit) but allowed me to pick up the camera from the airport, thus giving me a whole weekend to play with the camera.
Hunter – for making this light-weight solution for the battery. I finally can put it to use :o)
We finally took the plunge and paid for our RED One camera, 40% more than it would have been a few months ago, 20% more than a few weeks ago. But these are turbulent times, and even at 140% the camera is still a steal.
I had to slim down our package, and for now we will get the camera with a Nikon mount, modified by Doug Underdahl to accept G/DX lenses, the base production pack and the CF module. I´ll pick up some Lexar 8gb UDMA flash cards locally. For power we will use our IDX and Globalmediapro batteries. Tripod will be a Sachtler Video 18 III head.
So, fingers crossed, next week will be very RED immersed for me, lots of trying and testing and pushing buttons.
On other RED news, November 13th the California based company will reveal details of their next two camera offerings, the pro-high-end Epic and the run-and-gun Scarlet. RED has already said that this will be their biggest announcement ever. So, sit tight and don´t buy that HDV camcorder yet.
Not down, but moving to a new server. Today this popular site is only accessible via http://205.234.135.241/forum
While working on some render jobs, I used the downtimes to do a little redesign of this blog. Hope you like it.
Let´s see who is first to guess all 4 cameras used in the header graphic?
In the past months I have written about a number of upcoming exciting technologies, namely the ability to enhance video using high-res stills, a new lens that will allow you to chose the focus in post production and of course an on-line lens cleaning tool.
Video sensors have a lower contrast range than film, meaning how much darkness and highlights they can record. This manifests itself in blown out windows, and noisy shadows.
Video sensors also have the tendancy of getting an always increasing pixel count. 4k cameras are already being sold by the thousands, and next year will see 3k video cameras aimed at the mass market and professional cameras exceeding 5k resolutions. At the same time digital cinema maxes out at 4k resolution (with many cinemas opting for the more affordable 2k solution). Technically, it is possible to make 16k cameras. But isn’t that just overkill?
Well, some smart minds have come up with a novel concept. Rather than using the extra – but essentially unneeded – resolution as such, why not use it for something else, more useful. Why not cover every other pixel of the sensor with a tiny ND (neutral density) filter? That way one could extend the contrast ratio of that sensor by several stops. Thus yielding a higher contrast ratio than film.
This is exciting!
Robots are also on their way into our lives. One particular type of robot will be of great help for documentary film makers, and other shooters out in the wild. A robotic dog that acts as a mule.
BigDog runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, and carries a 340 lb load.
Pretty much every web site nowadays has some video on it. Soon every company will have a presentation video, and manuals are getting pushed aside for instructional videos. And now, e-ink is taking a first leap into mainstream. Esquire will distribute 100.000 copies of its October magazine with an e-paper cover that includes moving type.
In other words: the demand for quality images increases; at the same time novel tools for their creation are added to our palette.
Exciting times, indeed.
Save on foodRed has just released their newest firmware for the camera, featuring not only many new features (such a loop recording for 10/30 seconds – this is great if you are waiting for something to happen. You just leave the camera in loop, and then when you push record, you get the last 10 or 30 seconds as well) but a greatly improved noise floor. Here´s a quick test done by Alesniak that shows the difference in the blue channels, comparing the current with the previous build.
Here´s a full list of all the major improvements:
* New .R3D file format – requires the use of new versions of QuickTime Component, RED ALERT and REDCINE (not currently available)
* Digital Signal Processing optimization.
* Image Compression Optimization.
* Support for 4K 16:9 recordings in REDALERT and QuickTime based applications.
* Fixed high detail scene codec errors in 4K 16:9 recordings.
* Fixed polarity of audio recording relative to MIC and / or LINE inputs.
* Improved audio sample to video frame synchronization (lip sync accuracy).
* Reduced RED-LCD display tearing on last few lines in 4K record / playback.
* Addition of REDspace and RAW viewing modes.
* Updated file name structure to eliminate duplicate file names.
* Addition of Pre-Record (10 sec or 30 sec loop) mode.
* In-camera 1080p playback of REDCODE RAW .R3D files.
* Improved display precision and color response of RED-EVF and RED-LCD.
* Seperation of Sensitivity (ASA) and Exposure (Compensation) parameters.
* Extended exposure times of up to 1/2 sec enabled in TIMELAPSE menu.
* Added RED-EVF control over Audio, Shutter, ISO and Varispeed parameters.
* User programmable Tonal Response Curves menu.
* Look Around available on HD PREVIEW outputs when LCD and EVF are active.
* Improved video Genlock (Tri-Level Sync) lock for 23.98, 24.00, 25.00, 29.97.
* Added 1.85 and 2.40 Safe Action and Safe Title Protection Guides.
* Improved indiction of image magnify mode with new “X” cursor
* User programmability of A, B, C keys and USER 1, 2, 3, 4 keys
* Allow return to last menu position before exiting menus, when SHIFT-SYSTEM is pressed
* Disabled auto-reset of reel counter on change of project time base.
* Decreased boot time. Roughly 68 seconds.
* Also need new FCP Log & Transfer plugin (will be available soon)
* Red Alert will not loose audio tracks when re-generating QuickTime reference files
* QuickTime codec now supports full resolution reference files and full render quality output
Most other camera makers would make you buy a new cameras for all those new features. At Red it is not only downloadable, but the download is for free.
