HD For Indies

I'm guessing you've all heard of it by now - Peter Jackson shot a short film as a camera test for Red. It is a roughly 12 minute period short called Crossing the Line, set in WWI, with two storylines: one set in the trenches, and another in the air (biplanes & triplanes).

The Short Itself

The film opens with two settings - we see an Allied soldier in the trenches in WWI, getting ready to attack - he checks the picture of his girl before the whistle blows for them to attack. In the other setting, we see pilots readying their biplanes, and our guy tucks a teddy bear into his jacket. The commander blows his whistle for the trench boys to attack, charging into artillery and machine guns. Our pilot is futzing with the teddy bear when a triplane appears and starts shooting at him, our boy must evade and escape. Trench boy's picture keeps blowing out of his reach as he crosses the battlefield. A sniper starts to scope in on him, until...

...you get to wait for them to post the rest.

I was going to post some low res stills, but Red now has full 4K res JPEGs posted. Note the recommended viewing conditions - Gamma 2.2 and Adobe 1998 RGB color profile.

You can see high res stills in the RED Gallery

You can see links to a short snippet at 1K res of the film itself here, along with credits.

Keep in mind, you're looking at it on your laptop or computer screen - it was graded to be watched at 4K at DCI spec gamma/white point etc. in a darkened theater. For those who feel it doesn't look like film, feel free to mentally crush the blacks and add some grain - as you could do in post. The JPEGs are also showing some artifacting and issues I didn't see in the source - maybe an issue with the JPEG compression? Dunno, but publishing 4K 16 bit files online is a bit daunting...and so is expecting everyone to properly set up their monitors in a dark room with proper calibration, gamma, and white point. Keep in mind before commenting.

WORKFLOW

Jim and Jarred flew down to New Zealand on Jim's jet (handy thing to have around).

They took with them Boris and Natasha, two early prototype cameras.

All that was working was record/stop on the camera - no other functionality at that time (about 2 1/2 weeks before NAB). Frame rate was hard fixed at 24.0 fps, and shutter angle was 180 degrees (so 1/48th second exposure). There are some stuttery pans, this is why - couldn't adjust as you normally would.

They shot handheld, they put them on cranes, they put them on the nose of a helicopter (picture & thread) (and had some shake issues), they shot shoulder mounted, etc. - in short, they shot it just about every way you would shoot on a feature. Talking to Richard Bluck, the DP who shot it, they treated it as they would any other production camera - in the dirt, in the mud, in the air, with dust in the air from practical explosions, etc.

They shot for roughly two days. There was a little bit of shooting on the morning of the last day before getting back on the plane, and there were some tech issues with at least one camera the first half of the first day, as the right guy wasn't hands on at that moment to fix the issue - so there are a few shots with some notable issues - some clipping of whites in clouds when the dynamic range was down due to a board issue, and a mistakenly exposed shot that was 4 stops under and brought up in post, but had some fixed pattern noise (all these issues have been or are being addressed in the camera development process). But watch the rest of the sky shots - perfectly exposed clouds while still perfectly exposed foreground people, and no ND grads used..in direct sunlight. Wow and woah. Try that on any other $18K camera body, and compare that to any other digital cinema camera at any price and compare results.

They recorded onto Red Drives, same as we'll be using (I'm going to be hands on with cameras 6&7 in NYC with Mark, Aldey, and Pliny from OffHollywood Digital, and then hands on with camera 8 in southern California with Steve Gibby of Cut 4). The data rate was 24 MB/sec. The finalized datarate will probably be between 24 and 28 MB/sec, depending on ongoing tests and development work (Graeme is still twiddling knobs behind the curtain).

Red lenses weren't used, instead the New Zealand folks used Cooke S4 primes and Angenieux Primo zooms (edit - rented from Panavision somebody just told me). Hey, if ya got'em, use'em!

They recorded onto Red Drives, and I think I heard that the total amount of footage shot was about 500 GB, so that'd be about 5 3/4 hours of footage, or about a 30:1 shooting ratio if my math is right. So for starters, to get 3 hours/day of footage for action material is pretty amazing to start with - the fact that they never had to stop to reload film (or, in theory, never would have had to stop during day to swap out a Red Drive) helped I'd imagine. So think about that - narly six hours of 4K, 24p footage, fitting onto a drive you could put in a pair of cargo pants that costs about $400 (current cheap 500GB external drive cost). But if it were me, I'd want two copies, just to be sure - it's tough to get Peter available with the helicopter and biplanes and pilots again, doncha know.

Having shot that Red footage, they could then sit down in the field (literally, the field by the runway) or in the trenches (literally, trench warfare environment), unplug the Red Drive from the camera, connect a FireWire cable from the Red Drive to a MacBook Pro, drag the clip from the drive to the timeline, and press play...to watch a 1K res (realtime scaled proxy from 4K source on Red Drive) play back in realtime. That's right - zero transcoding, zero render time, zero transfer time - play it straight off the Red Drive. If they had wanted to, they could have copied footage to the laptop and put the Red Drive back in camera so that they could edit or previz or check continuity or whatever. All this was done with a pre-release, special built version of Final Cut Pro 6. Final Cut Pro 6.0 that'll ship with Final Cut Studio 2 will NOT include this feature, but Apple demo'd (as did Red) native 4K Redcode support in Final Cut Pro at NAB. Editing on a Mac Pro with enough cores & a good GPU can provide realtime 2K extraction on the fly. More on this in a related workflow article, coming up.

The film was edited in Final Cut Pro, using native Redcod RAW 4K footage in about a day and a half - that's pretty quick. From that Final Cut timeline, an EDL was exported, and from Redcine they exported the needed selects to 4K files (one source said TIFF files, another said DPX, whichever they were, they were 4K uncompressed frames at 10 bit log or 16 bit linear I'd presume).

Those same high res files were sent to the VFX team (Peter's own in New Zealand) who added machine gun muzzle flashes, tracer rounds, smoke, artillery shake, and other digital VFX to the shots.

All shots then conformed & graded on a Quantel Pablo on site in New Zealand at Park Road Post (because Peter's team has one there). I think I heard that the plan had been to send it back to the US for coloring on Scratch to show off the native Redcode RAW support, but if you have a Pablo available, and Peter's colorist, why NOT use them? Plus more VFX kept being added so it wasn't practical to send it back and forth. International Internet connection speeds for uncompressed 4K VFX plates...ugh.

If I heard correctly, all post done in 10 days. So that's a 2 day shoot, roughly 2 day edit, 10 day post schedule for a 12 minute, 4K short film. WOW, that is FAST. The fact that no dubbing or downconverting for ingest must've helped too I'd imagine....but mostly it is a testament to how fast Richard Bluck, Weta Digital, Park Road Post, etc. can work and deliver high quality results.

4K color corrected files were output and sent to the US, I think they arrived Friday before NAB started on Monday. I was in the booth for one of the first screenings (once they had the Sony 4K projector & media server all set up) to play back as UNCOMPRESSED 4K files (NOT DCI spec JPEG2000 compressed) via an uncompressed 4K playback server. (I'm awaiting clearance from the vendor to give specifics on that media server).

Jim & team were very open and transparent about the fact that this was test footage shot with alpha cameras and it didn't all go perfectly - after all, it was a test shoot. There were a couple of shots in particular that had issues - there's a shot of the teddy bear in the cockpit with some fixed pattern noise going on, but that was accidentally underexposed 4 stops and had to be brightened up in post, exposing an issue that has since been dealt with. I noticed some clipping whites in clouds in at least one aerial shot, but the first part of day one there was a hardware issue reducing their available dynamic range - all fixed now, just an issue with the alpha dev camera at the time.

WHAT I THOUGHT OF IT

Personally, I thought the footage looked fantastic, and about 3 minutes into my first viewing (saw it 3 times), I was thinking "They got ALL THIS in just TWO days?" Man those folks were productive! Aerial shots chasing biplanes from a helicopter with the camera mounted on the chopper's nose, operated remotely. In broad daylight, well exposed planes, skies, and ground detail all in the same shot, same exposure. Wow. Amazingly crisp detail that even the 4K JPEG stills don't do justice to. I overhead an industry veteran that I know/respect say it didn't look like film, it didn't look like video, it was a third thing. It is visually grainless in playback - at the viewing distances we had in the theater, could not see any grain, is just super clean. If you want to add grain, feel free, or you'll get it on filmout, but it isn't in the projected footage.

Considering all the constraints during this project: the time limits during shooting and post, the limited camera functionality at the time, this all looks phenomenal. In terms of "real world" shooting, I don't know how you could ask for a more realistic, rigorous, highly qualified test shoot. Rarely has "in the field" and "in the trenches" been as literally applicable to a test shoot.

Other than the above mentioned issues (camera shake from helicopter, teddy bear FPN, clipped clouds in a shot or two), I only heard one complaint, ever, about the footage while in the booth - a DP that clearly had a strong attachment to film mentioned some trees in one of the aerial chase shots that he'd have liked to seen more shadow detail in...OK, slap a tracked power window on it and fix it...DONE.

To my eye, having worked with digital imagery since the earliest days of Photoshop (v1.0.4), working with scanned 4x5 transparencies, 35mm for still, video, and feature work, digital acquisition for every possible deliverable from cell phones to movie screens....this is going to work. This is going to work VERY well, for a LOT of people that have very high expectations in terms of depth of field, detail in scene, dynamic range, etc. Oh - and one point I heard repeatedly - some folks feel HD poops out when doing big, wide, vista shots when it comes to fine detail - not so here - the helicopter shots chasing the biplane and triplane held detail as far as you'd want to see it.

If I sound glowingly, effusively positive about the shoot, the short, the workflow, it is because it is hard not to be VERY impressed with what has been accomplished here. Kudos to Peter and his team in NZ, and kudos to the Red team for all the amazing and hard work they've done over the last year and a half, and especially to Jim himself - without his dream, vision, drive, and backing, this never would have happened. *

Presuming Red can ship & support reliable cameras in bulk, I don't know what there would be to complain about for what they are delivering, and ESPECIALLY at this price point.

Other info on the shoot:

David Mullen, writing from his own personal perspective on the Cinematography.com forums: "For me, the RED camera was the highlight of NAB. The Peter Jackson short film shot on the two RED prototypes was an amazing achievement. I would describe the look as something like 5245 50D 35mm scanned at 4K -- sharp & clean. Fine detail even in extreme long shots (of course, the demo also points out the beauty of 4K digital projection to show-off that detail.)"

EDIT - I had the above totally wrong earlier, thinking David Stump not David Mullen, and mis-attributing Stump's credentials anyway. Anyone who read the wrong attributions, my apologies for my speed blogging error, and to both Davids for mixing them up.

Follow the link for the rest of his commentary. He's a strongly qualified viewpoint, and goes into detail.

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Avid NAB 2007 Student Blog: UT VIDEO - Peter Jackson in RED - UT Austin (where I went, Hook'em Horns!) student video blogs on Red, including talking to the DoP (the good part starts about 2 minutes in). Richard (DoP) talks about how they used it as they would any camera in production - on cranes, handheld, on sticks, on helicopters, etc.

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FresHDV's coverage - NAB Video Podcast - Peter Jackson DP Richard Bluck Interview at FreshDV (also includes stills)

"It's built from the ground up to be a camera for a cinematographer" - Richard Bluck

In post on Pablo, "could do what we wanted to with it...treated it like a film grade" - "responded really well" - "Most amazing thing about it is the price range" - lets folks get access to stuff couldn't have access to otherwise

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Visible noise pattern in PJ footage - Reduser.net

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Bonus round - I got quoted on Ain't It Cool News.

And, as always, if you need some help or recommendations on what Red gear or post gear to buy, or how all this stuff will work once you buy it, or how to make it all work together, that is exactly what I do for a living - I'm trying to position myself as the Go-To guy on all things Red related. Contact me at the link at top of page.

* and extra Teh Luv to Frederic - if HE hadn't come along, NONE of this would have happened! He also got me involved in all of this most excellent madness, so I owe a huge debt of gratitude to him as well. Thanks man!

Labels: Red