Digital Video - December 2007 - (Page 24) FIRST LOOK RED ONE can set ISO, white balance, gamma, saturation, etc. in camera on set or location it doesn’t really matter. All of those things can be changed in post. Unlike posting footage from other cameras, where you are destructively editing already-baked-in decisions, with Red, you are making adjustments to the source Raw material. The best way I can describe it is the difference between making a Levels, Curves and/or Hue/Saturation adjustment on a Photoshop file, versus having Adjust Layers for all that stuff. The first way, the way most cameras follow, permanently alters the image. Red’s way is to have non-destructive, editable parameters you can adjust at any time. For those that have worked with Raw images from a DSLR, it’s exactly that kind of image manipulability, but with some high quality compression thrown into the mix. (This also implies that many of the tasks a traditional DIT would do on set aren’t required.) Reviewing the first day’s worth of Red footage back at Offhollywood, we realized that we’d been overly cautious—shots that were clipping whites at ISO 320 might be fine at ISO 250 or 160. We learned to keep testing. Throughout the week, it was a back and forth process. I’d hang out and occasionally advise as Offhollywood shot; we’d post it converting with Red Alert!, then I would discuss best practices for future shoots with Pliny Eremic, Offhollywood’s director of operations. That first day, we didn’t use the Exposure Assist, a/k/a false color (or “Predator Vision,” as I later dubbed it). When activated, this tool shows up on the EVF or LCD. It converts the monitored image to black and white, then overlays a color to indicate exposure levels. Darker areas are in a range of cooler colors (dark to light shades of blue), and brightly exposed areas are shown with hotter tones (yellow, orange and red). Darkest blue indicates underexposed areas, and red indicates clipped whites. This allows you to look at the EVF of LCD and not worry about whether the display is accurately representing the difficult extremes—you just watch out for red clipping areas and iris accordingly. By the time we were doing camera tests for a New York director (which turned into a sync test for one of the major movie studios), we were wedded to that false color for exposure, and wishing it was already one of the pre-defined assignable hot buttons on the side of the camera. Later in the week, Offhollywood was invited to a big-budget 35mm cosmetics production to shoot some Red footage side by side with 35mm film: the ultimate test. By a quirk of who was there doing what that day, I ended up operating the Red, alongside a fully rigged ARRI 435 35mm setup. False color made it easy for me to properly expose, and the focus assist (a button on the side of the camera zooms in previews 200 percent) helped me nail focus with a very shallow depth of field. Considering that I’m a post guy and had never operated camera on a serious, “for real” set, this was comical—but it served as an excellent example of how easy Red has made it to shoot good images with the camera. (continued on page 40) We only had two cards per camera, but with the right gear we were able to offload faster than real time—so it wasn’t a problem, even when shooting full cards and swapping out for time-lapse shots. The $900 Red Drive (two small RAIDed drives in a cameramountable enclosure), which should be shipping by the time you read this, will allow for two hours of continuous shooting. This was all practice for the next morning, when we drove to New Jersey to the Driver’s East stunt driving school. By 10 a.m., Offhollywood was rolling footage in broad daylight, with the two cameras, a Canon 300mm prime and Red’s own 18-50 T 2.8 CF zoom. Red One #7, parted out on a cart. The highly modular system was designed to allow the user to configure it to suit individual needs of their production. SHOOTING WITH RED The Offhollywood crew went carefully about their day—metering for exposure and bracketing, then picking a favorite shot by scrubbing footage on a laptop running Red Alert!. The whole shoot was so run-and-gun they couldn’t baby-sit each shot, but they did get over an hour of footage in five hours of shooting. The crew decided to underexpose to protect the highlights. The reality of Raw shooting hadn’t set in yet. When describing the look of Red, I had repeatedly heard high-level industry folks say variations of “It isn’t film, it isn’t HD—it’s something else.” As it turns out, shooting Red is like that too. From the sensor forward, you can treat the Red One like a film camera—it uses PL mount lenses, it has shallow depth of field, and hence it benefits from the presence of a focus puller. The sensor should be treated like a high-resolution DSLR shooting Raw at high frame rates. The only things that matter when shooting in the field is the stuff on the lens—your focus, iris, composition. Everything else that you’d set on a traditional video camera? It literally doesn’t matter in terms of the image quality you’ll have in post. “Throw out what you know about shooting HD,” Mark said when the day was done. Red is its own animal, not quite like anything else out there that I’ve shot on or posted with. While you 24 dv december 2007 www.dv.com http://www.dv.com
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