American Cinematographer - November 2008 - (Page 66)

Habitat for Inhumanity Sanctuary marks the first television series to be shot primarily against greenscreen and the first to use the Red One camera. Three quarters of any given episode takes place in CG environments. surrounding the One,” says Geddes. “I’ve been working with RAW images from my Canon 10D, shooting color-timing samples and making my own TransLites — 30-by100-foot backings — for different shows by working within the RAW mode. I always thought that if Red could make this work in the film world, it would be the best way to go, and that’s what they have pulled off — we’re capturing images in 4K RAW mode. 4K has been the optimal digital format for high-end digital-effects work, and the One gives us the best image quality for a heavy effects production.” “Typically, when we’re doing a TV show that’s shooting 35mm and doing telecine into HD,” says Wilson, 66 November 2008 “there are times when I really need more than what we got in our initial transfer, so we’ll go out and get neg rescanned at 4K.” Geddes adds, “On this show, we have the advantage in that we have 4K up front.” “We’re not delivering 4K, but it’s there,” says Wilson. “We’re delivering at 2K; we’re working at 2K and final delivery is an HDCam-SR tape.” Geddes records to an onboard Red-Drive, which is, according to Red, “smaller than an ASC Manual.” The 320GB RedDrive is comprised of two 2.5" 160GB laptop hard drives that are configured as a Raid 0. It can hold two to three hours of 4K RedCode material. But even with this ample storage, Geddes does not let the camera record freely. “We’ve approached this cinematically,” he explains. “We reload the camera probably as often as we would if we were changing out 1,000-foot mags, about every 12 to 15 minutes. We do that for a few reasons. You know how sluggish your laptop computer gets when your hard drive is full? We didn’t want to go that far to see if that would become a problem. Also, changing out the hard drives more often helps with our post workflow; we can download, test and check as we shoot, so if there’s a technical glitch, we know within a very short period of time and can go back and fix it. In fact, we’d probably still be shooting within the same scene! So far, we haven’t had to go back and redo anything. It also helps with editing, because editing gets what we’ve shot right away; they’re actually editing in parallel to the shoot.” Bergeron, the digital-effects supervisor at Anthem, devised the pipeline and workflow for Sanctuary. “I can’t tell you how many productions have called me to ask for a copy of our workflow!” Wilson says with a laugh. “Really, the key is we’re not location-based; we’re in the studio. The idea was to get the

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - November 2008

American Cinematographer - November 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Letters Short Takes Production Slate Forging a Bond The Making of a President Thunder Down Under Habitat for Inhumanity Saluting Television’s Top Talents Post Focus New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up

American Cinematographer - November 2008

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