With the 4 AC% technical editor shares some tips and observations about shooting with the Red One distal camera. by Christopher Probst ince the birth of cinema, it has een the cinematogre- serve an attic goal, and the recent, rapid ewoltion of WUaigisl technologies fee added layers of conpliity to thir allenge. Foging into new teres, experimenting with new media and pasting the boundaries of poorer Tavs idvipe Gere eek es Sn cur taad-slee eb description, and ovr the past decd Ive had oppornuites tmexplore the pros and cons af ever digital moton-pisure camer ching Pusnons' VarCam; Sony's CineAlta vihich inches the F900, F950, F23 and F35 cameras; Panavisions Genesis Vision Rescarch’s Phan Hand Red Digital Cincias Red One. Nataly each of these platforms presented ite own earring curve in rms of both praca handling and image conto (AC recent reader survey re inthe subject of shooting withthe Red, sory goal with this etic 1 das soe copects of ht camer prtclar Tare shot some of my avoxite projets with the Red, ani Timexcremely proud of the imagery [have created i ic the Red, ke anyother care plato is nox perfect Tage ir wed! the Red eo phonograph icici 50 coecienal Th Bisa te ufc Wed music videos a for Chalo Browals “Foreves” which I shot in early 2008, When the camera was still faily aew in the marketplace. At that time, few sental houses had them, and even fewer rental bauscs of post fies knew how to hare ther. As with any new technology — and certainly with any new model of W— these were some growing pains. [dl sho« loads of dlgital imagery with other plaforms, bur T quickly found st many aspects of working with the Red were unique to American Cinematagraphrthe camer. For example, eaely on, you could quickly get bogged down just trying to define the best codec to use so you could edit your files on an Avid; the Red was iaunched with 2 post protocol geared primarily toward using Final Cut Pro, leaving post facilities initially ata loss as to how to edit and online footage in other systems. There are several things you should take into consideration. before selecting the Red for a job. It should first be noted that, in my opinion, the camera is presently not well suited for low-light, warm-colored scenes; its native color temperature is around 5,000°K, and the manufacturer recom- mends the camera be rated at 320 ‘ASA. The camera designers’ decision to balance what 1 would regard as a medium-sensitivity sensor toward caylight was a litte shortsighted. ‘The permanent color-temperature bias of the Red is “locked in” at polar oppo- sites of the real-world shooting condi- tions cinematographers typically face: we mainly need fess sensitivity in daylight and more sensitivity in artfi- al lighting situstions. Let me explain: If you're plan- ring to shoot an intimate, candlelit interior, you will likely be shooting in very low light levels in color tempera~ tures near 2,000°K. No matter how you set the Red's “viewing” setings — you can adjust the monitoring look-up table to display any color-termperatare setting you desire — you will nor be affecting how the “raw” image is recorded. This means you might be dramatically reducing the blue-channel information that the “blue-hungey” sensor receives. The result, depending also on your lighting and exposure, right be an objectionable amount of noise in the image. The “renedy” isn’t much of one: Ifyou place a color-vonection filter on the camera to compensate for using the daylight-balanced technology in a crower cobrtempene ec ee te ee eee ca cect tes ‘mide photo on ths page), who used Red One cameras (Build 20 ofthe firmware) and Arti Mater re cavironment, you will need east an 80C blue file. Aa 80C beorbs more than 4 full stop of light, wrrmthessecom ctrsor)2010 57» Working With the Red Jirmivaco update, Piercy E foo co ode erican Cinematogrepher so if you apply ie, your 320-ASA tal camera wil be rated below 160 ASA. Most cines not select « 100 ASA negative in a low-light ci stance. We would, in facts probably use a SIM-ASA tungsten stock and push it as much as one stop, yielding an ASA of 640-1 000, depen the & gon how wi ‘our meter, The difference between shooting low-fight scenes with 100-to- 160-ASA sensisvity vs. 500-t0-1,000- "ASA sensitivity speaks fr itself Over the cou ‘ences with the Red, I how to best address this haw-light force-procest e of my expeti- ‘ve grappled with ‘problem. T almost ahvays choose the fastest lenses powible, Zeiss Super- TH primes or the newer Arti Master Primes, which are abo TI, ‘The Red is often selected based on hhadgetary dif that's the case om your project, obtaining the Master Primes will be tricky o for Kary Pemy's in Vegas” however, we ‘Vegas casino interior the with a dizzying array of ng wide-open on Master Primes and balan supplemental lighting to bien allowed me to ca of my favoste Re ‘As of this writing, Red Digit Cinema has said thar when it releases the Epic, later year, Ce owners will have the of upgnding che © new Mysterium-X roporte increased sensitivity and reduced noise. The company's literature wt provide an ASA rating for the new imager but suggests thar the sensor performs-corparably at around 800 ASA. "This will be a step toward solving the lowrlight prob: Jem, and I look forward to te upgrade when it becomes available ‘The Red Ones CMOS Mysterium sensor utilizes what is 1 “rolling” shurver to achieve ies faye to daimage capture. Unlike Arris D-21 camera, the Red has no physical rotat: ing reflex micro: like many digital cameras on the market, it uses an elec tonic-shutter scheme to create an effective scan-rate at which a frame is looked st on the sensor. Problems arise with all electronic rolling shutters when the camera is moved very quickly, like with a whip-pan; or when, the camera travels ata fast rate perpen- dicular to astationary object; or if there is a very rapid momentary change in the exposire condition. In these instances, strobing, partial exposure or sin the skewing of the geometric lin frame can occur Strobing caused by camera panning film camens for decades, but «rolling shutter can also create split frames of eure with very fast changes in the frame. For example, recently shot the video for Chris Brown's “Cravl” in downtown Los Angeles using 1 Red and anamorphic lenses. In one scene, we had several paparizzi flashbulbs gping off in-thot. Because stll-photo ashes are very brief in duration, many of the subsequent exposed “frames” on the Red recorded half of one frame, and the other “ subsequent feame, I found this bbe very distracting but was unable to deal with it on set. Red has also exhibited sensitivity to heat, which can affect the image and camera in peculiar ways The camera does have settings that allow you to control its fan functions, but even with the camera set to run the z fan continuously — which you if you're ako recording on- “Vd shot loads of digital imagery with other platforms, but | quickly found that many aspects of working with the Red were unique to the camera.” set sound — the Red has exhibited several problems in hot environments This is due in part to the cameras coo design: the heat-sinke ventilation is wovwtheasecom Caen rapes Aa ean ed cee ran peel ee ey Probst with ce roe Sener Pron rons eater Cee located on the bottom of the body. As swe all know, heat rises. The main chas- sis of the Red is basically an alaminum-alloy cylinder, and. when re gets hot, the heat rises inside this tubular body and literally cooks the electronics inside from the op down, As the sensor overheats, several hairline vertical “scratches” begin to appear in the image; these defects appear on the viewing output to the monitor and are also recorded to the “raw” 3d files, I have witnessed this on many occasions with many different Red bodies. The only way to solve this problem isto take the camera into 2 colder environment and allow it to cool down, Once it cool, the streaks in the image will go avay. So if youre planning t shoot « big Westen in Death Valley in the middle of you should careflly consider whether to use the Red — orat leat bring lots of ce packs to place around the body, T have also found the Red's onboard-battery hamess to be very temperamental. Ive had dezens of Red cameras power themselves off after the slightest jostling of the onboard battery: The contact pins that engage the batteries are prone to intermittent failure, and when that happens, the camera shuts down. This i, of course, ako a service issue for the camera- rental house, but T have experienced Febrimy 201059) Working With the Red eed pees his ameras all pars off problem with Res provided! by rental hoes the world, Potential Re ware of this, becau guarantee the partic: jon/upgrade being used om in ual Red cameras in the fel This spontaneous powering denen prnblem is compounded by the be ag ardware cy v0 ngest 90 seconds of ye in situations where we were y connection fails, and we to release everything because it american Cinematographer would then take approximately two nto col ready ere ase several workarounds foc this problem. One run the camera off 3 1 battery that ie not on the cam will not indicate when these block aenseeie ses interruptions can covurin this There Aatw been improvements to the onbourd-battery mounts, and more than one configuration is available manufactures. Stil this isan ongoing problem, and ws Red cameras aye in the rental marker, onnection ports will need to be prop cetly serviced in. order to help prevent this decades Addlionally to avoid reboot delays when changing batteries, most rental y hot-swap" options so that the camera fromm third-party oe porwer-supply sources are chi ea vibra ans with the recording ssed with the Red One. When choosing which record ed thiee most pr ‘options currently being used with Red 1) recording to Co icctly ing true but is fasy st and proven reronding medium, Gcasionslly you might encounter a bad card Thave lost rakes to a can whole take was is the most dependable way to. wave ata on the camer’. F most CF cards offing fllresolution 4K recording 1,000" maguzine of reported time savings of shooting digi and nor having to constantly eload eves, Wi» Working With the Red bored rere ne on a pair peony Cire ead cra film is moot. Also, CF cards do place limits onthe recording speed/resolution that can be used; 2 16GB CF card will not alow shooting 2K 120 fps using Redcode 36, whereas Red Drives and RedRAM drives ipport that, Red Drives offer substantially longer recording times; you can defi nitely outrun even the longest film io, with more than 120 pture time available at AK. But there isa catch: Ifyou are ina very jarring environment, or even if you're just around loud sound might experience a number of dropped load. scen: minutes of 62 February 2010 a james while recording your data to a Red Drive. On one of my Red projects, 4 commercial, the sound of the talent cling in a room created hundreds of dropped frames. The incident could have gone unnoticed if the assistant hadn't been keeping an eye on the onboard monitor while the monitor was not “zoomed in.” (When “zoomed in,” you lose the data-displey informa tion on the onboard monitor that shows dropped frames have occurred during a take.) It’s ironic that the Red ‘ss often used to shoot masic videos, where loud playback is the norm. Iti somewhat frustrating that if we don't American Cinematographar wwant to risk dropped frames with the Red Drive, we must either switch to the shorter-record-length CF cards ot acquire RedRAM drives, the most expensive recording option, ‘The RedRAM érive utilizes the logy as CF cards, internally arraying, a number of laptop fh to 40 minutes of 4K Redende Raw information. The catch is that the RedRAM deive is approximately five times more expensive than ¢ standard Red Drive and roughly nine times tore expensive than a 16GB Red CF card, However, many Glramakers find that the long recording time and comparative stability around vibrations rake this the best recording option of the three same solid-state tec! ives together to allaw up ‘A discussion of the Red Ones qualities would be incomplets if it didrit touch upon the resolution! compression options the system offer. Ik is remarkable that Jim Jannard was able to bring 2 4K cumerato the market at a price point accessible to almost everyone, but the adage, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is?” comes to mind. In order to discuss 1 Red One’ resohtion, it is first neces- sary to discuss the systen’s Mysterium Bayer-pattern CMOS sensorBayor-pattem imagers incospo rate a unique system to derive RGB color information in order to form an image. In this chip architecture, the sensor is lid out with groups of four adjacent color receptors: two green photosites are arranged diagonally and are flanked by individual red and blue photonites. This sort of checkerboard pattern is repeated across the entire sensor. (See illustration above.) Color information for a specific region of the image must therefore be interpreted by de-Bayer-processing the green “pixel” photosites group with their adjacent red and blue photestes to caleulatea cumu- lative RGB value. Put more plainly, with a Bayer pattem, eich photosite on the sensor does net represent an indi- vidual RGB value of color information. Just how this color-receptor scheme translates into gffctive resolution can lead to confusion when comparing it to other sensor technologies with different resolution designations For this reason, it is difficuke to compare resolution properties of a 4K Bayer-pattern camera to a camera that derives data from oversampled pixels or fom a sensor that utilizes co-sited photosites, individual phetosites thar RGB ‘co-sites” to yield a true one-to-one pixel-to-RGB value. Ir true that the Bayer-pattern ‘In the real world, the only way the Mysterium could deliver true 4K resolution would be if the sensor were used as a monochrome chip.” para < fom the Red ally 4K data, but the only way the c tue 4K. reso- aa carl peered pattern, which the rae Mysteriam sensor os coer ee eg within this scheme, there are two ec) ee ie Perron og poner aed Pare oe eres as & monochrome chip, delivering a and-white pictore. In io, each photosite sample would be discrete and would not be averaged with any adjacent photosite data; every photosite would contribute discretely to the overall resolution, Unfortunately, with a Bayer-pattern imager, each phorosite on the sensor does not gener- ate an RGB value And because a Bayer-pattem sensor must use color information from at least four adjacent photosites to derive a single RGB value, iis necessarily true that the effi tive resolution derived from the 4K Bayer data is ews than 4K. The cinematographers goal with any format is to use it to the best of its capabilities and capture as much infor mation and latitude as possible. With that in mind, I state that the Red One should only be used in the highest- resohition setting possible for a given shooting scenario. The system does allow you to record in a number of lower resolutions, and with different degrees of compression, but to do £0 is to step onto a very slippery slope. Let’ suppose for a moment that yout hired to shoot a job whose end rd high-definition 6» Working With the Red Another of Prot’ Red ee fiaerter rs coor’ Cert cree ee pete’ perc) rey er Peres oer peer american Cinematographer ‘think it pat the proje ereby avoiding all of a scene that resolution using Red fiom and. pe changing the way it “looks gather its in fion 08 p. 6!3Sme-sized senso to looking at an trea half that size, comparable to Super 16mm, This characteristic comes to the fore when captoring eaterial at higher frame rates, Suppose you wast to capture a shot at 24 fps and then, with the same composition, doa take. in slaw-motion at 72 tps Cures, with Build 20 of Red One firmware, you must switch the camera to 2K resoki- tion in ender to shoot 72 tps, And because the camers is now scanning Full the sesuor sine it was seanning in the 4K take, you must change lenses on the camera tw compensate, ‘This becomes increasingly problematic ithe shot in question is a wide shot, If you originally rolled with a L4eum Ulva Prime on the camera, you need a 7mm prime fens to achieve the same fild-of- view when you switch w 2K 72 fs, Certainly, exteme-wide-angie 35mm- format lenses exist, but they often e@phibie certain distortion characteristics and are usually slower than their stan= dand-focal-tength countermrts, The eed to switch the lenses at all is rmuisance enough, but iF you want t This brings me te one of aecomplish wide slow-motion shots, the siost important considerations for you must therefore cary a separate set those considering the Red platform: of wide Lémmn-format lenses to cover compression. One of the riracles the 2K Super Itmntn san sizes of the Red One is also one of its Red Digital Cinema has Achilles heels, Taking what should bes somested much of this problem in it: massive fle of RAW 4K iovage data and next camera sytem, the Epic $35, secording it ta a small CF cant would ‘which will offer up to 100 fps in 5K seer to require come form of intemal resolution and 125 fps im 4K resolution, computational alchemy thar Red isit ‘Additionally the Epic Tine will fuse keen to publisine, it is based on the several different “brain” modules with JPEG 2000 compression algorithm), different rensor options, including However, in general terns, if you breake Super 35-siged Mystesiurn-X chips, a 12-bit 4K Bayer-parrem_moving- fullrame 35mm still photo, 645 image file down to ite mathernatical format, and even 617 format-sized components, it would add up oo some> Monscio sensors These camerss will thing tike the theoretical data boxed flso feature improvements in the below Redcdle compression-sering apsions. Currently, Red highest ‘Theoretical uncompressed 4K image data: 4K 16,9 image (4056 x 2304 pixels} = 9,368,064 pivels per frarme 12 bits per pix! = 12 x 9,368,064 = 112,416,758 bits per Beyer patter frarme | 112,416,768 bts 8 = 14,052,096 Bytes 14,052,096 Bytes 1028 = 13,722 KB 13,772.75 KB /1024 = 13.401 MB per frame 13.801 MB x 24fps = 321.627 MB per second or 2573 Miy’s wernshessccom Fetruny 2010 6>» Working With the Red compression standard — Redeode 36 color/resalution considerations, T have at B88 fps — sexords approxi a hard time calling the Rects 3d files 18 GB per minuic, or .03 GB per true RAW data second, which cakuhtes to rougl 240 Mb per second. When you A od dat “The Red has a slow bootup time, which | affectionately one call ‘the longest : 90 seconds of by witha Red O camera your life.” Je that the Phantom HD gener: yy in the neighborhood of LOL, What this meat image-making is that the One final aspect to touch upon is post. Just as with film cameras, how you handle the post process for the amount af compression, C01 the Bayer-pattern Red is as important to the cameras performance as how you light and capture ugery. With the Red, y begins the moment the data is removed from the camera on set, Carefil handling, of unprotected data — footage that has not been eed up to multiple dupficate drives sunt. The importance of para aving propery tined individuals performing this task cannot be over- rated. Once the Red’ dita exists on drives as master .3d files, a whole range of various image-handling — and qualty-effecting — options open up, Without detailing every pipeline 3 for processing and manipula al, I would point out are several different methods 10 de-Bayer, down-rez and online the ra data to enable color correction and of an edited project. color-correction platforms — DaVinci, Laster, Pablo and. your Ee Oe eo) CO i é eC a Cre Pt it’s time to bring it up to date. Films from every nation are eligible, provided they were theatrically released between 1998 and 2008. ST SU CMEC ALCO Sc a CSL PCE UCU Oa Ce ty PC us eC CORN A = ‘ ayaaplatforms that can nthe raw 3d w footy cod poets rr? daily, and as th fics « | es E used the Red ceri rer) projects. altered the film- duction paradigm, but th need not be a siry or quality. Just as il d matured ¢ www.K5600.com “SOFTUBES AVAILABLE IN Pe ONE LIGHT. ONE MORE FUNCTION, By + N Ce cad we ro