Visualnary

Found a great article by BSC and ASC member Roger Deakins, one of my favourite Directors of Photography.

With all our modern inventions and innovations, there are few films that manage to achieve the “quality” of Citizen Kane, though there are many that have far less grain and considerably higher resolution.

Every shot I have ever made has been a compromise in some way. That’s a sweeping statement, but true nonetheless. No image has ever been as good as the one I envisioned in my mind’s eye. Maybe that’s what keeps me going: just once, I want to see that image onscreen!

There has always been a disregard for preservation, whether it’s preservation of a historic site, the Dodo, the polar bear, or a film like Sid and Nancy.

The animators who “photographed” [Wall-E] worked in a three-dimensional world and covered the action in much the same way as a live-action film, but the directors of photography, Danielle Feinberg (lighting) and Jeremy Lasky (camera) – separate positions you might note – used no emulsion, no Fresnel lamps or diffusion, no Steadicam, no geared head, nor any other live-action tool. Nevertheless, theirs was a stunning cinematographic achievement. It’s true they had an advantage – they never had to battle fading daylight, conceal a light’s source or hide dolly tracks – but I would not hesitate to recommend them for ASC membership.

Read the full article here.

Tags: asc, blog, bsc, deakins, di, digital cinema, dp, overview, technology

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.

Mounting

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.

Day 2

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.

Some thanks

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)

Tags: 2k, 4k, camcorder, camera, delivery, digital cinema, experience, first, impression, r1, RED, red one

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.

More “beyond HD” cameras

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.

Reduser down?

Not down, but moving to a new server. Today this popular site is only accessible via http://205.234.135.241/forum

Tags: alternative, camera, digital cinema, down, epic, kit, package, r1, RED, red one, reduser, scarlet, shipping, upgrade

It’s probably been in the cards for a while, but we have ordered our Red One camera. Sometime before the end of the year (fingers crossed), we’ll be able to churn out pictures at such high resolution that they can be used for digital cinema. We’ll be able to use variable frame rates. I’ll be able to chose from many different lenses. We’ll be able to tell our stories better.

Just to give you an idea of the firepower of this camera, look at this picture, showing proportionally the full size of the Red picture, and in comparison that of Standard Television 4:3. It is about 6 times the resolution of even High Definition Television. And it meets or succeeds the specs for digital cinema (Norway is aiming to become the first country in the world to be completely digitized in cinemas.)
But it is not stopping here. Red One is also a very low-noise camera. Here is a 1:1 crop from an image exposed at ISO 2000. Click on the image to see it in full. (Read more about this here.)

This is nothing short of amazing, and will enable us and many other documentary makers to tell stories that simply couldn’t be told before. Brace yourself for a whole new world of clarity.

For comparison, here is the same 1:1 crop at a modes 320 ASA/ISO:

And for further comparison, here’s a framegrab from our current camera, a Sony DSR-570, which is the best DVcam money can buy. Properly exposed. You’ll see noticeably noise in the background. More than the Red even pushed to the extremes.

(Framegrab from our Documentary “Words and Shadows” with the former prime minister of Norway, Mr. Odvar Nordli.)

Here’s an interesting example of what you can do with high-speed filming (though I would have used more fill- and eyelight):

Action Figure slow motion video from Stig Nordas on Vimeo.
I am looking forward to learning, and to push myself to new borders.

Tags: 2k, 3971, 4k, build 16, comparison, digital cinema, Film, future, hd, patience, queue, RED, sd, waiting