Digital Video - December 2007 - (Page 40) FIRST LOOK (continued from page 24) RED ONE be able to convert Redcode Raw to any “normal” codec they have installed on their Windows XP or Intel Mac system. That includes DNxHD, DV, ProRes, DVCPRO HD, uncompressed— whatever works for your needs. Still image format support will include Linear, Rec 709, or log gammas as well, so if you need TIFF, OpenEXR, Photoshop or DPX sequences for your higher-end workflows, you’ll be covered. And, of course, you’ll be able to crop/scale/rotate/reposition as needed in Redcine—named such to make it clear that this is the equivalent of your one light telecine transfer. In other words, it’s how you get your source material (film vs. Redcode Raw) to a more usable format. Red and Apple have promised us full native Redcode Raw support in Final Cut Pro, meaning you’ll be able to directly ingest and edit native files with real-time effects, and be able to transcode directly to ProRes as well. We were able to connect to a Cine-tal display via HD-SDI for on-set monitoring, and in other tests connected to a DVI monitor via HDMI for a lower-cost solution—I like the flexibility of options to handle whatever budget level is appropriate for the day. While crew set up another shot, I walked a CF card over to Offhollywood’s table, where Mark put it into his laptop, scrubbed through the footage in Red Alert!, found a good frame and extracted a 4K still. He opened it up in Photoshop, asked me to tweak it, and I spent maybe 30 seconds color correcting it. Then I called the director of this $300,000 shoot over to look at the still on my 30-inch Cinema Display we’d brought along. The director stared at the image intently for about 3 seconds, smiled, and said, “I want THAT.” Later he pointed at the Red next to the ARRI 435 and teased the 20-year veteran film DP that this is what he’d be shooting his next commercial on. LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT Another thing I like about Red is that since it is a tapeless workflow, there is no deck, not even a pricey ingest device. Most other high-quality cameras record to high-end tape formats, requiring high-end decks. Instead of a $100,000 HDCAM SR deck, you use a sub-$100 CF card reader to get the footage into your NLE or VFX system. In terms of media management, the Red system works like Panasonic’s P2: its small, solid-state cards have to be offloaded to somewhere, be it a laptop or laptop-attached drive. Once the Red Drive ships, you’ll be able to record up to two hours of nonstop 4K, but, again, you’ll have to manage the data. Also like the P2, it’s up to you to archive your source footage data, since the recording media is too expensive to put on a shelf for most jobs. Depending on the budget and criticality of the footage, anything from DVD-Rs (an 8GB card fits onto a duallayer DVD) to hard drives on a shelf or data tape cartridges will be used by Red customers. I’ll be helping my clients figure out what is fast, big and reliable enough for their own needs. Video traditionalists may decry these workflow steps and archival overhead, but, compared to film, this is cake. Part of this depends on whether you consider Red to be a video camera, which it isn’t, or a film replacement, which it’s more akin to. But, with Red, there’s no expense for stock, developing or telecine. Data archiving is peanuts as compared to high-end videotape dubbing, so while it may be more involved, it’s less costly. In summary, I’m excited about Red and my first few weeks with it. Jim Jannard and company have delivered on the kind of camera I’ve been hoping to see for years, utilizing all the latest technology at a price point that blows the competition out of the water. Better yet, you don’t have to have expensive, heavy iron to do post with it. Commercial productions, along with narrative and documentary filmmakers, now have a new tool that’s priced for the indie market, but delivers results that top-end users (including Peter Jackson and Steven Soderbergh) are praising. DV Mike Curtis runs HD for Indies (www.hdforindies.com), a website and consultancy specializing in HD, 2K and 4K workflows. www.dv.com Director of photography Paul McCarthy, with Offhollywood’s Pederson behind, shoots a chase sequence with the Red from an Action Camera Cars crane at 30 mph. After each shoot, we brought the footage back to Offhollywood’s post facility and worked on smoothing out the early kinks in the workflow. At the time of first delivery, only 2:1 was working, not 16:9, so I made some custom converters to scale and letterbox to 16:9 with windowburn for editorial—one quick-and-dirty for dailies for speed with windowburn, another higher-quality for online. POST At Offhollywood, they were cutting in Final Cut with 1K proxies and EDL conforming into Scratch, Assimilate’s color-grading tool that can read the 4K Redcode Raw native files, and access all the dynamic range the Raw contains. When I got back to Austin, I was using the converted ProRes HQ files I’d made, and could have simply color corrected with those, but I chose to go with a higher-end workflow. I exported an EDL and conformed to the 2K DPX I’d made in New York. Once Redcine ships and is freely available to all, anyone will 40 dv december 2007 http://www.hdforindies.com http://www.dv.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.