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

RED has followed Avid and Apple in pulling out of the NAB show in Vegas this April, citing a lack of availability of working prototypes to demonstrate. According to CEO, Jim Jannard,

RED has decided to skip NAB 2009. We will hold our own RED DAY when we feel we are ready to present the new systems and when they are fully ready to showcase. Date and location will be announced in future.

A minor delay by a major part vendor will not mean much to the delivery schedules but would mean too many non-working prototypes at NAB… which we find unacceptable.

In other words, RED doesn’t want to come to NAB without substantially new product to show and prefers to focus resources and time on completing their already announced products. Personally, I’m a little sad to not see them there this year. As an early believer in RED it’s been a nice opportunity to check out their gear and chat with the folks who actually make it. Also, NAB arguably holds a greater significance for RED than some of the other companies who are leaving or have left the show, for a number of reasons:

Having a presence at the major electronics show of the year on the international stage is a good way to develop customer relationships and demonstrate a long-term commitment to the industry. Shows like NAB also present a key networking opportunity, not only business-to-business and business-to-customer, but also customer-to-customer.

There are likely to be a lot more customers to reach at NAB- when travel budgets can be justified by all the other vendors and contacts to be seen at once vs. their making a special trip only to check out RED. In this present economy, travel budgets are tighter than ever.

RED’s been going to NAB for only 3 years while the others have been fixtures for decades. Thus, the cachet companies like Avid and Apple are likely to earn at this point by going is relatively small in the scheme of things next to a newer player like RED.

RED’s not as diversified in other trade shows or in advertising and marketing as the others. Their primary publicity machine is in print articles, word of mouth and Reduser.net. There are no RED Stores in the world other than their main HQ, nor do they run TV or print ads like Avid, Apple or the other remaining camera companies.

RED’s also been closely associated with NAB. They made their initial debut at NAB in 2006 and showed the first working cameras and footage a year later at NAB 2007. 2008 became the opportunity to announce new hardware such as the Epic, Scarlet and RED-RAY drive. The show gives them a platform to present their case as the alternative to the other camera companies such as Sony, Panasonic, Thomson, Canon, JVC, etc.

Of course, RED’s never been a company to play by the rules or follow others’ leads. They have promised to hold a RED Day (presumably at their HQ in California), ‘when they are fully ready.’ As always, covering RED is covering the expected.

Technorati Tags:
24p, 4K, digital cameras, filmmaking, indie, indie filmmaking, RED, redcode, NAB

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

Technorati Tags:
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.

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

Here’s the mission:
Cut a 7 minutes short (While Waiting… Facebook group here, Teaser here. Reduser discussion here.) in FCP and finish in Color with the new RAW workflow.
Deliver DCP master with Compressors Quvis Wraptor plugin

Sounds pretty simple really!
Cut. Send to Color. Grade. Render. Send to compressor. Cinema bliss. That’s what it says on the package, right?

Well, if this workflow really works that well, I’ll be sure to report!

But I have a hunch there’s a couple of hurdles along the way. I would love to be proven wrong.

I’ll first walk you through what’s been done thus far.

The short was shot over a week, this summer in Norway. Principal photo was Ingri Fjestad. All shot on RED One, most in B16, a couple of night shots with B15. (Yes. I know that’s odd, but that’s how it is). The cam was natively ballanced throughout most of the shoot (5600k/320ASA) to get the metering right.

All but the same night shots were shot on an old set of Cooke Speed Panchros. The 18mm was vignetting like a real over-done post FX.
The night shots were shot on ARRI/ZEISS ultra-primes.

Mostly it was shot in 4k 2:1, but there are 3k shots in there.There’s also a couple of simple composites in there, and primary delivery is 2048×858 DCP.

I cut the piece from the M proxies. When the Color workflow emerged, I re-conformed the cut to H proxies with Hans Georg Dauns excellent Clipfinder, and have just recently locked the cut.

More after the jump… › Continue reading

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

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/

Technorati Tags:
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

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

RED’s much anticipated December 3rd announcements have arrived and with them come the usual flurry of analysis and speculation. We’ve received a huge new brochure chock full of specifications and new 3D renderings of a litany of cameras.

But what’s actually new? Well here are a few things that seem to come across(with thanks to Gunleik Groven for being such an eagle eye.)

• The fixed-lens Scarlet, clearly aiming at Sony/Panasonic/Canon cameras has shown up with a price- $3,750 for the complete kit.
• RedCodeRGB-1080 scaled from full frame sensor. This was a previous anounced feature of the Red One, and is still supposedly coming in a separate build.
• Epic-X, a nicely priced upgrade path from Red One. Package is $28,000-$17,500 trade-in for Red One=$10,500.
• $4,500 for the Mysterium X sensor upgrade for Red One.
• Lower compression rates for the new cameras.
• Higher maximum fps., now up to 250 (for Epic).
• Delayed delivery of most cameras – as most expected anyway.
• Anyone buying the Red One before the first Epic is delivered can use the upgrade path to Epic-X.

See for yourself here as we analyze some more.

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=23112

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

Never one to play by the rules, RED guru Jim Jannard reveals some early details in advance of the planned December 3rd announcements. First he lays a little background behind the reasons for the update so soon.

We were a bit frustrated with certain system limitations with respect to digital signal processing and REDCODE data rates inside the “brains” so we took steps to more completely control our development process from start to finish, including all aspects of the electronics design and sensor fabrication. Additionally, our RED engineering team came up with a radical new approach to overcoming some of the previous system limitations. Given all these factors, we were able to re-write the system specs, to the benefit of our customers. We felt no compulsion to keep these advances a secret. So here we are.

We have been known for being “fashionably late”. We are frankly still very new at building cameras. While we seem to have a much better understanding of what it is we are doing… there is still room for us to miscalculate. On top of that, many technological advances are occurring during the development process. We are implementing as many “changes for the better” as we can even though we are near the end of this system’s development. The incredible new specs we are announcing today does come with a justifiably slight schedule hit. Certainly worth a few extra weeks in our opinion. Hence, “Prices, specifications and delivery dates are subject to drastic changes”. Count on it and you won’t be disappointed.

Jannard also drops a nice little Christmas present to early RED One adopters, a special edition of the EPIC camera including the CF recording module, I/O module and battery module at no extra cost. It’s his way of rewarding the folks who took a roll on the dice with him in the first place. For more info, follow this link:

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=23112

Technorati Tags:
24p, digital cameras, indie filmmaking, money, new techology, photography, RED, video, indie, filmmaking

Here’s a piece from High Definition magazine about Dan Mulligan of Rogue Element Films. Dan recently took delivery of the first Sony F35 in Europe and “found himself somewhat defending the purchase ‘People have been asking ‘Why did you buy that, why didn’t you buy a RED?’”. Dan continues:

There’s still a lack of awareness of what digital is out there and not many fully understand it really. The loss leader price of a RED at $17,000 is such a massive red herring because by the time you spec it properly you’re looking at the same sort of rental costs as a decent F23 system. The F23 and F35 image quality and delivery is much better but nobody will believe you.

He boils it down to- Sony has been around longer, they support the F35 at Band Pro and some technical arguments that don’t quite hold true if you’ve used a RED One more than casually, at least in my opinion. But I wanted to put this up in the interests of presenting all viewpoints. Please sound off in the comments, is Dan right on or way off?

Read the whole story here:

http://www.definitionmagazine.com/cameras/mulligan.htm

Technorati Tags:
digital cameras, high-definition, indie filmmaking, new techology, photography, RED, 4K

If you haven’t check it out already, go visit RED Centre, a podcast series from the visual effects gurus over at fxguide.com. Some of the recent shows guests include DV Rebel Stu Maschwitz and RED’s Ted Schilowitz. Twenty-two episodes and counting.

http://www.fxguide.com/redcentre

Technorati Tags:
4K, digital cameras, indie filmmaking, RED, podcasts