Twenty398

This blog has been a little quiet for 2009, due to my hard work writing the first and only book on the RED camera. RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera is finally done and available now! From the official press release:

“With the release of the RED ONE™ digital cinema camera, the possibility of recording stunning, cinematic-quality images with an affordable camera became a reality. Now that the industry has embraced the nascent technology and added new tools and workflows, filmmakers—from independents on up—are leading the charge on establishing new rules.

Here to guide newcomers and RED veterans alike, popular trainer and filmmaker Noah Kadner picks up where the manual leaves off. You’ve got the basic operations down and now you’ll learn how to use the camera in a production environment and discover the various options in post. Using a clear, objective approach, he offers best-practice advice on utilizing RED’s proprietary tools, explains the workflows for Final Cut Studio, Avid, and Premiere Pro, and gives workaround solutions where needed. Well-known filmmakers and industry leaders share their own bleeding-edge production methodologies throughout, offering a rare view into this exciting new world of filmmaking.

Here are just a few things you’ll learn to do:
•Build a RED package that fits your budget
•Set up for sound recording and learn which audio tools to use
•Achieve the optimal exposure using RED’s onboard tools and external gear
•Edit your footage with step-by-step instructions for Avid, Final Cut Pro, and Premiere Pro
•Work color correction into your HD, film, or Web projects
•Prep your project for output and archive your footage
•Learn from pros such as Rodney Charters, ASC (DP, 24), Simon Duggan, ACS (DP,Knowing), Albert Hughes (Director, The Book of Eli), and many others using RED”

For more info, visit the book’s homepage here:
http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321617681

To order direct from Amazon, visit this link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321617681?ie=UTF8&tag=callboxlive-20

Here’s a little piece from DVICE.com:

The SCI FI Channel’s Sanctuary is the first television series in North America to be shot entirely on the revolutionary RED One camera. The crew up in Vancouver, BC, were kind enough to show DVICE how the camera’s insane resolution and tapeless recording system let them keep all their work in the digital domain — and at four times the resolution of HD.

Video and more after the jump:

http://dvice.com/archives/2009/01/how_the_red_one.php

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24p, 4K, digital cameras, filmmaking, high-definition, indie, indie filmmaking, native, new techology, RED, redcode, workflow

Here’s a nice little piece from Digital Facility on PlasterCITY Digital Post’s RED Workflow, which they’ve been perfecting ever since the camera first came out. Here’s a quote from owner, Michael Cioni:

“We’re seeing a lot of production companies and DPs make use of the RED camera because of image quality, compact design, cinema lenses and overall lower costs. RED footage makes up a significant portion of our work,” says Cioni. “As early adopters, we’ve worked closely with the RED team to design and deliver powerful end-to-end tapeless and tape-based workflows. SCRATCH is the ideal post tool for RED footage because it’s the only software that can deliver real time results of color grading, down-converting and window-burn dailies from a soft-mounted firewire drive.”

For the rest of the story click HERE.

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More random observations working with RED and Premiere CS4. Some of these might be obvious issues for folks who work with Premiere all day long, for me it’s been a while. Now on the Quad Core with 4GB of RAM(still below the reported min requirements but this is more machine than most folks have already).

1- Performance needs to be tuned carefully. Got a nice little G-RAID feeding footage and still seeing a lot of dropped frames with all quality settings set to defaults. With resolution set to Quarter, Quality to Medium, Chroma DeNoise Off, Debayer set to Leading Lady(might want to change that to something a bit more understandable in terms of quality) and OLPF Compensation off- I get nice smooth frame rates and the footage looks pretty solid.

2- 16:9 Performance suffers a bit more. 16:9 has always been a problem for REDCode playback because it doesn’t scale nicely down from 4K the way 2:1 does.

3- Load times for complex projects can be long. I’ve got one project with about 2 hours worth of .R3D files that takes forever to load if it loads at all. It’s a little scary to see the progress bar sit there at almost loaded, forever.

4-The unsupported format warning is a little bit annoying. Essentially you drag your entire RED folder into CS4’s project window for a quick import. It sorts through, pulls out the .R3D and ignores the other files in the folders, such as the digital magazine profiles. However it then complains about these being unsupported formats. The option to never warn me about this again would be greatly appreciated.

5-Spanned clips are not marked. For example, if I have one long take that the camera split into several .R3D files, each shows up in the project as a separate clip. It’s smart enough to join them back into a single take but it would be more useful to automatically either- only import the first .R3D of a spanned take or make an obvious note in the project window that a clip is spanned.

6- It seems reasonably easy to crash CS 4.0.1. For example if I have one clip open and I bring up another and scrub through it that will give me a SPOD and then hang. Brings back those somewhat scary memories of the old Premiere which I spent years on and battled crashes and hangs every step of the way… but this is different. Right? More later….

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24p, 4K, adobe, os x, RED, windows, premiere, native

Been working a little more with RED in CS4. I had a little bit of trouble exporting a finished RED edit. I’m now updating the Adobe Media Encoder CS4 now, which should hopefully do the trick.

Scott Simmons is on the case as well with some more in-depth tests and performance analysis with Adobe CS4’s new native RED .R3D plugin which you can check out here.

http://www.scottsimmons.tv/blog/2008/12/11/kicking-the-tires-on-r3d-editing-in-premiere-pro/

Scott also provided a nice link to Adobe’s Dave Helmly who has a 30-minute video and text description of the best workflow practices. It looks like Adobe has its eye on being out front with the RED post workflow and it’s a very welcome development. Grab a coffee and then check it all out here.

http://blogs.adobe.com/davtechtable/2008/12/native_red_camera_files_cs4.html

And to back up a bit, here’s an older post from Studio Daily looking at a beta version of the plugin and its potential implications last summer.

http://www.studiodaily.com/blog/wp-trackback.php?p=622

along with their current update:

http://www.studiodaily.com/blog/wp-trackback.php?p=756

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24p, 4K, adobe, os x, RED, windows, premiere, native

So I’ve spent the last evening and morning playing with the new RED native .R3D plugin for Adobe Premiere CS4. Some initial observations:

1- It actually works as advertised, drag drop and edit .R3D. I’m sure some serious magic is happening behind the scenes but it is one of those holy grail moments.

2- Performance is slow. Here’s the min requirements:

Minimum System Requirements
3.0 GHz Quad core system with 8GB RAM
Hard drive with 40MB/sec sustained throughput is required; RAID striped array recommended
Windows Vista 64 Service Pack 1 or Mac OS 10.5
Premiere Pro 4.0.1 update
After Effects 9.0.1 update

Now I’m running this on a 2.6 Ghz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM and I can load .R3Ds, hit play and see stuff. Playback loses frames and ultimately freezes(though not crashing). It’s about the same as you get in FCP working from the M proxies on this sort of machine.

3- The Global RED decoding settings are a little clunky to call up- requiring a right-click on a .R3D clip where a System Preferences pane would be more apropos. But that’s a minor nitpick.

Next up I’m working on the 3Ghz Quad Core Mac Pro we have sitting here. I’ll expect to see performance take a big leap with any luck….

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24p, 4K, adobe, os x, RED, windows, premiere, native

An exciting moment for the RED workflow world- native support for .R3D files has arrived. So don’t just stand there. If you’ve got Premiere CS4 for Mac or PC, go get it.

http://www.red.com/support/index

Provides native REDCODE media (R3D) support for Premiere Pro CS4 (4.0.1 and later) and After Effects CS4 (9.0.1 and later). Includes: REDCODE importer (v1.3.0), After Effects Settings Dialog and workflow guide. Note: Supports RED ONE cameras up through Build 18.

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Director Steven Soderbergh shot two Che Guevara films back to back on the RED camera last year. Both are scheduled for release this winter, just in time for Oscar season. Filmmaker Magazine caught up with Soderbergh in post-production to learn how he handled RED’s challenges in editorial and finishing. Here’s an excerpt:

“It‘s a dangerous time,” jokes Christian Zak, the vice president of Independent Feature Films at Technicolor. “Everyone is talking about the price of the camera, but they‘re not looking into what goes into making a professional finish. It‘s like when El Mariachi was made for $8,000. Well, yes, but how much had to be spent to properly finish it?”

After Soderbergh shot Che on the first two manufactured Red One cameras on location in Spain, Puerto Rico and Mexico, he worked closely with Zak to set up a postproduction workflow across Soderbergh‘s New York City office and 10 Technicolor facilities around the world. Zak estimates that the total footage for both films came to about 120 hours, or about 10 terabytes of data, which had to be backed up and moved around physically on hard drives and digital tapes because the files were too large to transfer over a network. “When you start working in this type of workflow, you really need an experienced data manager on set and as part of the postproduction process,” Zak said.

More after the jump:

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/fall2008/redone.php

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Adobe has made no secret of their intention to natively support .R3D files directly in Premiere CS4. It looks like they’ve taken a step closer with the release of Premiere 4.0.1 with that ability supported. The one piece of the puzzle missing is the actual plugin from RED itself that’s necessary to complete the picture. Soon? Details from Studio Daily.

Native RED R3D support: Both Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 version 4.0.1 and Adobe After Effects CS4 version 9.0.1 provide a true file-based workflow for RED R3D files, without transcoding or rewrapping, via RED’s beta plug-in available at www.red.com/support. Native handling of RED R3D augments Adobe’s existing support of Sony XDCAM EX, Panasonic P2, and AVCHD tapeless formats, providing users with software-only HD workflows from capture to output. In addition to downloading the RED plug-in, customer must update their software to Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 version 4.0.1 and Adobe After Effects CS4 version 9.0.1, accessible for free throughout the Adobe update manager in the Help menu of the applications. To learn more about RED workflows with Adobe video solutions go to: www.adobe.com/products/premiere/pdfs/red_adobe_cs4_beta.pdf

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Here’s a cool Steampunk music video shot on a RED One with some awesome pyro effects. The amazing thing is they never light any actual fires. According to Deadworkers.com Director, J.D.

We discovered a fun trick to make something look like it was on fire. We cranked up the exposure and the red channel until the smoke started looking likes licks of flame. The smoke helps it be a little more convincing because she can interact with it. The downfall of the footage is when she moves out of the path of the light. Our next test will include someone tracking her with a Fresnel to illuminate the smoke as she moves around. We are also planning on hitting the environment with a bright light so everything isn’t super dark.

We discovered this effect completely by accident. I have to attribute part of the discovery to the fact that the red gives me so much control over the footage due to the raw format. We took some shots of a rusty boiler and i wanted to make it look more rusty so i was cranking up the red channel. The I started showing off the cool stuff you could do with redcine and cranked up the exposure, suddenly the smoke started looking like fire.

There’s a motion clip here:

http://www.deadworkers.com/jenny/ReadMe.html

Before and after the effect:

and more stills here:

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=23188

even more stills here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8780798@N03/

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24p, 4K, digital cameras, filmmaking, high-definition, indie, indie filmmaking, new techology, RED, scarlet, epic

Happen to be in New York City? You’ll want to pass by the Gizmodo Gallery at the Reed Annex this December 4-7th The RED One will be joined by countless other iconic gadgetry such as the iPod and Apple Phone prototypes from Frog Design. Here’s the lowdown:

We’ll have a lot more than the 1983 Apple Phone prototype at the upcoming Gizmodo Gallery. Perhaps you were interested in getting a good look at the famous Red One camera? That’s good, because we sorta know a guy.

The Red One camera was never really interested in capturing HD video (1920×1080). Instead, the system’s Super 35mm-sized Mysterium sensor captures footage at 4K (3626×2664) in precious RAW format. The camera starts at only $17,000, but once you get it fully loaded, the system can approach $80,000. Sound like a lot of money? It is. But seeing as it doesn’t require purchasing or developing costly film and it still manages to nip the heels of 35mm quality, the Red One represents the democratization of an ever-opening Hollywood system.

For more details visit:

http://gizmodo.com/5093557/at-gizmodo-gallery-the-red-one-camera

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24p, 4K, new techology, photography, RED, museum, new york city