HD For Indies

ouch is all you can say if your another company
 

Ha! It's a public apology from Jannard, very nice touch. 5K images AND a sense of humor...that's what I'm talkin' about!

Matt Jeppsen
FresHDV.com
 

Mike, there is no new info here. We know the Red shoots at 4.5k and that they want to try to show footage at IBC. This is just like a puff press release that you are repeating.

Please write about the Silicon Image camera soon. Your last Red article was actually pretty fair but it's not nice to slag the Silicon Image people off as being "unreleased" and stating that their camera "could well be a competitor" when the fact is that they are shooting a feature with it in South Africa right now, they just shot a short which won a best cinematography award at a festival, etc. Of course it will be a competitor.

Silicon Image even have a whole bunch of video clips on their site that the public can download! Why is this much less exciting than the Red?

The other companies pretty much deserve to get slagged for keeping prices high. But why the Silicon Image disinterest? Is it because they are more PC than Mac?

Also, what is stopping SI from cutting the price of their camera when Red finally ships next year? I'd rather shoot on a good, thoroughly-debugged 2k camera and have another $10,000 or so to spend on little things like crew, production design, lights, lenses etc. than shoot on a 4.5k camera for bragging rights.

To my mind, shooting at 4.5k only makes sense in 2007 if you have over $200,000 for your film. In 2009 it may make sense for indies to shoot at 4.5k (because the whole post infrastructure will be there)... but for now, I'd be happy to bet that a film shot for the same budget on an SI camera at 2k will very possibly be better than one shot on the Red because they will have had more money to spend on the actual important storytelling aspects of the film.

In fact, I'd go further and say that I worry that the average person who buys a Red camera will be a pretentious tech-head who can't direct, can't light a scene and definitely can't write a script worth a damn but who thinks that owning a 4.5k camera will compensate for this fact and confer on them godlike auteur gifts. Like all of the American film school students who buy a $2,000 Mac laptop to run a pirate copy of FINAL DRAFT ?!?

Okay, rant nearly over. But consider this: the next indie director to take the world by storm is not going to be some snot-nosed kid with a Red. He (or hopefully she) will be someone who spent the last few years honing their script, working with actors and planning to shoot the One Great Story That Is Burning Within Their Heart. Those people don't have a million mediocre tales to tell. They have a few stories which they feel their entire life has been leading up to. In order to tell this, they need first and foremost the best creative team they can assemble. Then they need basic resoucres, which include use of a good camera for the duration of the shooting period. This could very well be a Silicon Image camera. It could be Super16 film. Or it could of course be the Red camera that they borrow from their rich-kid friend.

So I think we need to ask ourselves... are we the indie filmmakers of tomorrow, or are we their rich-kid friends with too many Reds and too few stories to tell?

Bruce
 

It's true. SI really is an HD for Indies solution.

Do they have the mac-ready solution yet? If they do - that really ought to be mentioned. How soon is it?

And the reason I'm going to sign anonymous here is to say... Very sorry - but most of the footage I'm seeing is not that good looking but so much of it is lit so pedestrian OR lit interestingly but totally washed out from colors. Does it have trouble dealing with color?

Let's have a little more discussion and evaluation ont his camera maybe. I'm actually thinking of using it - but might just go with the hvx instead due to simplicity and the image seems almost as good - espeically with a 35mm adapter. Does the SI have anything lens-wise to increase the depth of field (other than shooting wide open?
 

Bruce,

Could you kindly post the Silicon Image camera website? I can't seem to find it after even a Google search.

Cheers

S
 

Sorry

I meant to say Silicon Imag(ing)! Well, at least you guys know I'm not on their payroll, haha.
http://www.siliconimaging.com/DigitalCinema/

It has their links to their dailies footage, blog of a guy who shot on it, etc. Footage is flat, naturally - it is not color corrected and they pride themselves on dynamic range, hence flatness of color to start with...

As far as I know, they use super16 lenses.

Cheers

Bruce
 

As far as I know, as of now there is no Mac solution. Well, the solution is... export quicktimes. Although then you lose the joy of using their very efficient, high-quality video codec.

The guy who did the short film on it seemed to be able to capture everything straight into his laptop, so maybe you could use a Macbook to boot into XP to capture your footage on set. I'm not sure though.

Talking of cool cameras that are not Mac-friendly, have you played with the ultra-high-speed Phantom cameras? (www.visiblesolutions.com) I just finished color-correcting a music video shot on the 800x600 model. It just outputs stacks of frames, which need to be converted to Quicktimes to be used in FCP. But the footage looks amazing, so who cares? Also, I guess it helped that we were only doing a 4-minute song...

Bruce
 

@ bruce allen,

I don´t get it. Mike´s running a private blog, that represents HIS point of view, he is not "digitalproducer" or anything like that.

Now about this SI-camera, it is NOT 2K, it´s HD, and nobody is telling to favor the RED over that thing. And then all this stuff about "the next spielberg", that´s not what these cameras were made for in the first place. There are little production companies, people who make documentaries, vfx-companies and so on, who need different resolutions NOT only 4K, but everything between HD AND 4K.

Please just keep to your SI-camera and stop whining. Most people like to look at exciting things, not the ordinary ones - we have to look if red will deliver what they promised, but until that day, we´d like to see how or if that little company reaches milestone after milestone.
 

Maybe Bruce should start his own site. hdfornobodys.com. He's got opinions on other peoples opinions in a blog. But it seems rather contrived to talk technology, spit on its newest innovators, and then try to mix in your rhetoric about directors, actors, film students, and "budgeting". Only a person with no concept what-so-ever about working on film and HD would make such arrogant statements about a product they barely understand, let alone have any concept how to use. Like a Producer.

SI and RED are not even in the same ballpark. An imaging device is still not a camera. Apples and Oranges. Thompson Grass Valley and Red, have much more in common. Which makes the pricepoint of the Red camera, all the more evident.
 

Hey Bruce I actually enjoyed your rant and I agree about the rich kid tech heads with no stories worried about horizontal resolution when they lack basic storytelling or cinematography skills... I'm an indie animator who just finished an animated feature by myself and I don't worry too much about the technicalities... Why would I want 4k anyway? I'm doing this feature at 2k and it looks awesome... I don't get it? Will working at 5k make me a real man? :) Will it make my films better? Or will it just fill up my drives faster and choke my network?
 

I need to work at 5k to make more money as a dp. I charge $1 per pixel to rich kids.
 

JIM JANNARD,

Just fucking hire Curtis as a workflow consultant so we can get over this issue and get back to details.
 

Bruce - as I mentioned the other day on the blog (not sure if that got edited out or not) - Silicon Imaging isn't based in LA, so they haven't been on my mind lately since I was on the trip. I threw them in there to be fair and not leave them out.

Everybody else - let's not get into personal attacks here please - Bruce is a frequent contributor and entitled to his opinion. PLEASE DO comment and critique the validity of the gear etc., but please don't attack people personally.

As for the "rich kid" stuff - what about the rich kids shooting F900 or Varicam? Or film? Come on.

-mike the blogger
 

The SI camera is pretty exciting you guys. They want it to work with Mac by launch this fall. It's already been used to shoot a feature: Spoon in South Africa and it was documented on a great blog with sample footage on the SI website. The developers are really great about interacting with the community just like Jim and his crew. They say it will be 1080p for sure but have commented that it might ship at full 2K so it could very well launch at that resolution. I think if/when it ships we should be hearing more about it.
 

@ mike

that´s a very balanced reaction. But bruce´s position is a bit displaced for this
blog. Right now, your blog is ( my opinion ) the best information-source for people interested about RED ( and lots of other interesting stuff ).
Don´t get me wrong, Jarred Land has a nice website, too, but it´s a forum based
site that´s centered on cameras, while your site is a much wider info-source
( I frequent it every day ).

regards,

p.
 

http://www.cineform.com/48hour/
 

Hmmm... I already put my $1,000 down on a Red camera... but I would still like to find out more about the SI camera and I think it absolutely is of interest to indies doing HD. Yes, I think Mike can write about whatever he wants, but he in the past has made it seem as though people commenting are welcome to put in their two cents as well.

Observation: All these blogs and forums - This blog, cinematography.com, cinematography.net, etc. etc. etc. - The mode of communication seems to be getting increasingly rude and antagonistic.

Filmmaking is a tough business for sure. There is a lot of resentment. Yes, some people get lucky and meet the right person at age 22 and suddenly get great jobs on huge movies. Other people work on their talent for years only to be undiscovered. I wonder if this bitterness is sneaking into these posts more and more and the whole tool becomes the catalyst which sets off the opportunity to rant.

Now, I thought Bruce's comment was perfectly fair as a comment. But then to be told to basically "shut up" and to start attacking him is not a mode of communication.

I've noticed, however, that even beyond cameras, this is becoming an acceptible mode of communication - you see it in politics all the time.

Well... it doesn't work. This is art and science and not politics - so perhaps everyone can chill out a little bit and spend more time exploring ideas and information and less time trying to prove how much the center of the universe we each are. If we really were... we'd not be posting on forums and blogs - we'd be out doing what we profess to do...

...speaking of which... sounds like a good plan. Cya.
 

man cant we all just get along
 

the last poster said that the sound in forums like this one is getting more and more rude, but I think in this case bruce allen started with demanding something from mike, he, like all of us visitors can only make a request to the blogger. People nowadays seem to think that they can demand anything anywhere on anybody´s website, and they don´t pay anything for that. Sorry, but maybe a solution could be the introduction of some type of rating-system, so the blogger ( i.e. mike ) can judge the importance or usefulness of an article from the visitors side( if he likes to know it ).
 

"bruce allen started with demanding something from mike"

Well, I'm not sure it's demanding when you use the word "please."

"Please write about the Silicon Image camera soon. "

He did call the RED article a puff piece and he was being a tad agressive, but being an objective reader (friends of neither people) I think Bruce was well within the bounds of fair posting without entering the realm of "nasty" or even "rude." Assertive, yes.
 

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