HD For Indies

Quick update - the presentation went GREAT yesterday - had a packed house, although only 1/3 or so of the audience understood English, so my high speed techie English produced a lot of expressions that implied "Que?" Lots of translations going on within the audience fortunately!

We went over the history of how Red came to be, the design philosophy of Red (I still love Jim's quote about the power of AND, the tyranny of OR), what the Mysterium is all about, the camera body, the ports, and the workflow. The workflow was fun, because Steve Tammi from Tennessee brought his Red #17 with him, so when we talked about shooting...we shot.

Jendra Jarnagin was up on the stage with me and we dovetailed nicely, me talking about tech and pixels and workflow and her talking about lenses, shooting, dynamic range, depth of field, etc.

So when we got to workflow, Jendra hopped up, went over to the camera and she shot a few seconds of the audience. She then walked the CF card like Vanna White with much drama over to me (audience loved that) and I demonstrated workflow - showing Red Alert and the range that RAW allows for that you can't do with a traditional digital camera; showing realtime instant playback of 1K proxies, showing conversion of Redcode RAW to 1080p ProResHQ (letterboxed and timecode windowburn, TYVM), etc. We played back from Final Cut on the big screen, cooked out a tweaked range 10 bit log DPX sequence, conformed that in Color, showed a quickie grade in there.

Oh yeah! Before that, I ran some of the footage from the Offhollywood stuff they shot (edit, I'd said "I shot," that's wrong, I was just there, writing too late) last month - Pliny (who is a new dad, congrats to him and his new family by the way!) had cut a quickie edit, I'd done a test DPX conform and grade with Color, and showed the results on the big screen.

We did about 45 minutes of Q&A.

A big Big BIG thanks to Utopic, Service Vision, and Blackmagic Designs for all their assistance with computers, monitors, lenses, lights, and all manner of technical assistance - we absolutely could not have done it without them. Biggest props to IFA for organizing this and flying Jendra and me over here, and to Steve Tammi for taking the risk to jump on a plane with less than 24 hours notice after only having met me on Red Day Zero.

Interesting things to note about audience reaction:

-getting people to understand the benefit of RAW, if they haven't shot DSLR RAW or know the difference between Adjustment Layers and just using filters in After Effects, is hard to explain. Demonstrations make a BIG difference
-bits are fuel - the more fuel your image has (be in resolution, bit depth, dynamic range, smooth tone, etc.), the better off your final results will be. Formats with less fuel (DV cameras) don't do as well as those with tons of fuel (Red).
-making a show out of moving 4K footage around in a tiny chip (holding it up like it is something special) gets good audience reaction.
-showing a Red frame in Photosop on a 30" Cinema display (thank you, thank you, thank you, to both Utopic and Service Vision for all their help this week!), then zooming in, in, in, in, to show close detail, then zooming back out to the whole frame, gets a big reaction.
-showing a series of boxes that start at NTSC, then go through PAL/DVCPROHD/720P/HDCAM/1080P/2K/4K, then popping a Red 4K Red frame behind all those to show HOW MUCH MORE you get, is VERY effective - good for gasps in any language
-total presentation and Q&A went for about 2 1/2 hours...whew!

Oops, we are loading out to do Very Cool Stuff I can talk about....soon.

: D

-mikey, having a BLAST in Spain!
The entire presentation will be online soon at the Independent Film Academy (IFA) site.

Labels: Red, Sitges