James Mathers
01-24-2008, 06:29 AM
I'm coming to the end of the first week on a modest Indie feature shooting with my RED camera, #30X. It has not been without some small bumps and idiosyncrasies to work around, but the pictures have been beautiful, and overall I would say things are going well. The project is low budget, but was designed to be; not exactly "My Dinner With Andre", but quite dialogue intensive, with only a few locations. It's stars Tess Harper, Lea Thomson, Ernie Hudson, Ed Begley, Jr., and Vincent Spano, (who is a Digital Cinema Society member and very interested in the new technology).
With long dialogue scenes, it was a challenge to "roll out" every 4 minutes, and have to reload. We also found that out of our first 150 cycles between 8 cards, that 3 takes had data errors which caused a loss of at least part of the material. We were aware of these problems in time to cover ourselves after transferring the cards to RAIDS, verifying, and playing them back in within minutes via RED Alert and Quicktime.
Midweek, however, we finally received our backordered RED drives, which has been a great boon to the production; we can now roll many times longer between reloads. We are still only using about a fifth of the drive's capacity, (perhaps 30 minutes out of 150), at this point until we gain more confidence, so we can playback and verify the data before moving too far along. The RED drives, however, have been 100% so far, and ergonomically work so nicely into the system; easy on and off of the camera, and quick downloads into the RAIDs. From now on, we will only be using the CF cards when we need a very small camera, and when there is a lot of gyration or vibration which could cause problems for a spinning drive; however there isn't much of that on this picture.
The camera stays mostly on a jib arm which I use a lot as part of my style, set up in studio mode with an Angenieux Optimo 17-80. It's a very fast system, without the need for constant lens changes, and the Optimo, at T2.2 is about as fast as the standard speed Zeiss primes which I keep in a smaller, hand holdable mode on the B-camera, (which is mostly there for back-up and hasn't seen too much action so far).
For data backup, we are going to a 5 Terabyte eSata RAID, (we have two of these, probably enough to hold all the data for the movie), and also to two secondary smaller drives, one simultaneous via eSata, and another via Firewire 800. One of these goes to the editing room and the other travels to the lab, FotoKem, which also makes LTO-2 data tape backups before being recycled.
We are also scheduled to visit the lab on our first day off to see select takes opened in RED Cine and projected in the FotoKem DI room. I feel that if a project is intended for the big screen, it is a necessity to at least occasionally view the work projected to see any issues that might not be apparent on the relatively small on-set monitors.
Now if only I could get my EVF's, the final backordered item from RED, I would be styling. We have been working around it with an onboard HD monitor for the Operator split off from the Directors feed, but it's cumbersome with extra wires, power considerations, and weight.
So far, so good, and I'll keep reporting as time permits.
James Mathers
Cinematographer
President of the Digital Cinema Society
Los Angeles, CA
With long dialogue scenes, it was a challenge to "roll out" every 4 minutes, and have to reload. We also found that out of our first 150 cycles between 8 cards, that 3 takes had data errors which caused a loss of at least part of the material. We were aware of these problems in time to cover ourselves after transferring the cards to RAIDS, verifying, and playing them back in within minutes via RED Alert and Quicktime.
Midweek, however, we finally received our backordered RED drives, which has been a great boon to the production; we can now roll many times longer between reloads. We are still only using about a fifth of the drive's capacity, (perhaps 30 minutes out of 150), at this point until we gain more confidence, so we can playback and verify the data before moving too far along. The RED drives, however, have been 100% so far, and ergonomically work so nicely into the system; easy on and off of the camera, and quick downloads into the RAIDs. From now on, we will only be using the CF cards when we need a very small camera, and when there is a lot of gyration or vibration which could cause problems for a spinning drive; however there isn't much of that on this picture.
The camera stays mostly on a jib arm which I use a lot as part of my style, set up in studio mode with an Angenieux Optimo 17-80. It's a very fast system, without the need for constant lens changes, and the Optimo, at T2.2 is about as fast as the standard speed Zeiss primes which I keep in a smaller, hand holdable mode on the B-camera, (which is mostly there for back-up and hasn't seen too much action so far).
For data backup, we are going to a 5 Terabyte eSata RAID, (we have two of these, probably enough to hold all the data for the movie), and also to two secondary smaller drives, one simultaneous via eSata, and another via Firewire 800. One of these goes to the editing room and the other travels to the lab, FotoKem, which also makes LTO-2 data tape backups before being recycled.
We are also scheduled to visit the lab on our first day off to see select takes opened in RED Cine and projected in the FotoKem DI room. I feel that if a project is intended for the big screen, it is a necessity to at least occasionally view the work projected to see any issues that might not be apparent on the relatively small on-set monitors.
Now if only I could get my EVF's, the final backordered item from RED, I would be styling. We have been working around it with an onboard HD monitor for the Operator split off from the Directors feed, but it's cumbersome with extra wires, power considerations, and weight.
So far, so good, and I'll keep reporting as time permits.
James Mathers
Cinematographer
President of the Digital Cinema Society
Los Angeles, CA