HD For Indies

My Red presentation the other week in Sitges, Spain at the IFA Conference with Jendra Jarnagin, Steve Tammi, and Pol Turrents went very well, I was very happy with it. We ran for about 2 1/2 hours and covered a lot of ground and answered a lot of questions.

This was the first public viewing of a production Red camera in Spain (after Soderbergh shot his movie over the summer there), so interest was high.

For those who couldn't make it, a DiVX version will be posted soon (I'll update when I have the link), and here is the PDF of my Keynote slides (4.27MB), and annotated stills taken during the presentation. The stills have a text walkthrough that actually goes into more detail, worth looking at - many things not in the Keynote slides.

MONDAY UPDATE:
Here's part 1 - good news is that it is all of it, bad news is you have to have DiVX installed to watch it:



Here's part 2:



(if you're having trouble watching the streaming embedded version above, you can download the DiVX clips to your local drive from the IFA page on Stage 6. Go to the page with the video you want, and there's two buttons over the video itself - one to play, one to download.)

Big, BIG thanks to Utopic and Service Vision for their aid, equipment, and support, and to the local Blackmagic Design folks for jumping in at the last minute as well. We couldn't have done this presentation 1/10th as well without them, and huge thanks to Steve Tammi for having the faith to get on a plane with his Red One #17 in Tennessee to join us and help us in Spain. Pol Turrents was critical to all this pulling together as well, it was his contacts and resources that got us what we needed.

And of course special thanks again to Juan and Inga, the organizers of the IFA Conference, for inviting us over, putting us up, and treating us so well, without whom NONE of this would have happened.

Here's how it went down:

After the crowd filed in, we introduced ourselves, gave a little history of Red and the philosophy behind it, and jumped in with with "Why Red Matters." I broke it down into six categories:

Image Quality/Resolution
Modularity/flexibility
RAW & Redcode
Filmless/Tapeless
Cost - both buying and integrating

After going through those categories in detail, we went into the workflow from both a DoP's perspective (Jendra) as well as the techie/post side (mine), talked about the camera a bit, then showed the differences in resolution between the primarily available formats. After that I showed a draft of an edit of the stunt car shoot OffHollywood shot when I was in NYC with them last month, and then showed a split screen before/after grading version - very effective.

Then the fun part - a live walkthrough of how the camera works - shooting, ingest, editing, grading, the whole deal. Since Steve Tammi had brought a Red over, he and Jendra fired it up, rolled a few seconds of the audience, then Jendra walked the CF card over like Vanna White - no tricks up our sleeves.

I put the CF card into a CF reader ("THIS is your HDCAM SR deck for Red."), pulled it into the Mac Pro (kindly provided by Utopic, a post facility in Barcelona, many thanks to Oriol).

I showed how Red set up their naming structure to try to prevent duplicate file names, showed the file/folder structure created on the card, and then opened up the clip in Red Alert. There I showed how RAW images could be manipulated beyond what a regular electronic camera can do.

From there I made QuickTime proxies, showing how 2K, 1K, and 1/2K proxies could be made on the fly from the 4K source instantly, then converted the 2K proxy to a 1080p ProResHQ file for ease of use in Final Cut Pro (including window burn for assurance during conform later). I dropped that into Final Cut and showed that playing, then went back to Red Alert and exported it as a DPX sequence, then conformed that simple shot from Final Cut into Color, and showed how much far you could push Red images around with a 10 bit log version of the audience shot.

After that, we did a Q&A, with Pol Turrents translating the techie for us between English and Spanish (with a bit of Catalan thrown in their too.).

Then we packed up and headed out to shoot 4K in Barcelona...but that's another story (forthcoming).

Labels: Red, Red Alert, Redcine, Sitges, Spain