HD For Indies

After our IFA Panel on Why Red Matters ended, we IMMEDIATELY set out to go shoot Font Magica, a gorgeously lit fountain in Barcelona. The week before when Jendra had toured me around Barcelona, she was adamant that we had to end up at the fountain at night, and I was pleased we did - see pics in the above link I took of it. So once we knew we had a Red coming, she lit up and insisted we'd have to shoot Font Magica...in 4K.

I really couldn't argue with that logic.

So as soon as the presentation ended, we hung out and talked with people for a short while, then immediately packed up and zipped up to Barcelona to shoot the Font Magica.

Unfortunately....it was done for the night already. We'd had our times wrong, and it had finished an hour before we got there.

Based on that, we did a quick reassess and drove up to Mont Juic, a beautiful overlook point in Barcelona and shot from there.

One of the great things we learned about the Red during this week is how amazingly well it does at night or low light situations, especially as compared to film. If you're wondering why these look flat or color biased, please read this.

If you look at my .Mac Web Gallery - MontJuicRedShoot, the second shot is highly instructive - it is a 1/5th of a second exposure with at 18mm focal length at ISO 1600 taken with a Nikon D80 (Jendra's I'll bet), and you can see the area we were shooting - the balcony to the left if where the first shot starts, and the boat on the right is where the first shot ends. Well, why not just show you. Clicking on the image below will open the 4.4MB nearly 4K resolution JPEG:

(Above NOT shot on Red One Camera!)

Jendra Jarnagin was operating most of these shots, but we had some camera hardware focus related issues that weren't resolved for a few days. We were shooting on Zeiss Super Speed lenses, I think I recall 85mm being used for many of the shots. All footage was shot 23.976 fps, usually 1/48th exposure but some tests at 1/24th.

Our first shot was A001_C001_071012_00000

It is a panning shot that starts here...



Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 4K resolution, 16 bit 48 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

and ends here...

A001_C001_071012_01031



Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 4K resolution, 16 bit 48 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

This is a panning shot that starts on a deck dimly lit and pans across a swatch of Barcelona's seaside port, coming to rest on a cruise ship at a dock behind a parking lot. This is the kind of shot you could never light in reality without a zillion trucks worth of lights...therefore you could never light it in reality. This is the kind of shot that shows off Red well in comparison to film for low light sensitivity. We processed the head of the shot at ISO 640, Exposure=0 in Red Alert for this still, and the tail at ISO 320 with Exposure set to -0.43 to capture highlight detail.

Already this starts to present some of the choices and conundrums of shooting RAW. If one were shooting with a traditional electronic camera, you could approach it one of several ways:
1.) expose for optimal results for either head (darker) or tail (brighter) or shot, biasing towards the capabilities of the camera
2.) expose somewhere in between and do post correction, compromised on both ends
3.) expose to capture max range and watch out for the noise floor.
4.) ???

Now that we're shooting RAW, we shoot wide open then can process it differently in post, much like processing the film - should it be processed at ISO/ASA 320? 500? 800? 1000? 1600? Trial and error reveal the pros and cons of each.

So instead of having to lock in a choice while shooting, we can process it different through Red Alert, perhaps doing a blend between two different ISO renderings of the same shot as it pans, or animating the grade through the pan. Yet to be done, more on that later, but creates fresh challenges. Having Assimilate's Scratch, with native support, suddenly sounds so much more useful than rendering out long multiple DPX sequences and blending them together, potentially with feathered masks.

The next shot was A001_C003_071012_00604 which includes the famous statue of Christopher Columbus pointing...the wrong way. Processed at ISO 640, 5600 Kelvin, 0 Tint, Rec 709 gamma (all are Rec 709 gamma unless otherwise noted), and Exposure set to zero.



Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 4K resolution, 16 bit 48 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

Next up was A001_C004_071012_00010, the cruise ship again.



Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 4K resolution, 16 bit 48 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

The next shot was A001_C005_071012_00268, a wide shot of the city below, shot at 4K (as the other shots above have been), processed at ISO 250.



Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 4K resolution, 16 bit 48 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

Then we shot was A001_C006_071012_00250, quite similar, slightly reframed, but processed at ISO 320. We locked down the head for this shot, you'll see why in a moment.



Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 4K resolution, 16 bit 48 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

For the next shot, we reset the camera to 2K mode and didn't touch a thing - A002_C001_071012_00000 is shot at 2K with the same everything. The point of this? You can drop this shot onto the above shot and compare how 2K mode and compression compares to a 2K crop from the above shot - we wanted to see if there were any meaningful differences. The focus and lighting aren't perfect in this shot to compare, but it does give you an idea of how to compare.



Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 2K resolution, 16 bit 12 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

Shot was A002_C002_071012_00000 is a similar 2K shot.



Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 2K resolution, 16 bit 12 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

Shot was A002_C004_071012_00132 is a another 2K shot.



Clicking the above will open a 2K resolution JPEG at 100% quality. For the uncompressed 2K resolution, 16 bit 12 MB TIFF file, right click and Save As here.

Do take a look at that .Mac Web Gallery, you'll see where and how we were shooting and with what gear. Plus the beautiful place where we had dinner later that night, and I was able to make dailies (or would you call them instants?) on the spot with Steve Tammi's laptop and play back for the group at dinner (note the Red One behind me in that shot). The workflow really is like a digital film camera, in that you need to develop it, massage it, make dailies coloring probably, etc. But a laptop is all that is needed instead of a lab - like that!

We didn't need to worry about data management on set since we shot so little footage and had 6 8GB CF cards. But it was MUCH more of an issue the next day. More on that aspect later...

Special thanks to the group we dubbed Equipo Rojo España, who all donated their time to get to work with the Red camera for several days:

Directors of Photography:
- Jendra Jarnagin
- Pol Turrents, who was also Mr. Connection to hook us up with all of our Spain resources, a VERY special thanks to him

Technical director: Mike Curtis, HD for Indies (me)

Production Manager: Oriol Bramona of Utopic

Red Camera Equipment: Steve Tammi of Otter Creek Productions

Camera Equipment: Service Vision

Production:Independent Film Academy, Utopic, and Service Vision

1st AC: Gabi Garcia

Data management & 2nd AC: Ivan Garriga

Red Postproduction: Utopic

Again, thanks to everyone for their time, dilligence, energy, and professionalism.

OK, that's it for today, the next post will include our Sitges day shoot.

-mike

Labels: Red, Sitges, Spain