Shooting R3D

Recently we have decided to shoot on the RED ONE camera - to spice up our TVC life :)

Client: KIDS WORLD - Byron Bay

Director: Michael Mier

DOP: Lav Bodnaruk

(director Michael Mier in the yellow shirt)

There has been much talk about this camera, its production and post-production flow (I am sure I do not need to tell you about this - it would be impossible to not have seen and/or participated in those forums that seem to be popping up everywhere) and perhaps due to some uncertainties about the shooting format, production and post production workflow, etc. we at Lav Productions had dismissed it in the past for a different shooting gauge (either HD or 35mm film).

(Martin Moynihan - playing chopper)

The projects we had at the time were not right for it and we were somewhat skeptical in taking it on - especially when long form was in question (on an indie feature film) as we were not sure who to call for help, should we run into problems.

However, as more and more of our peers and colleagues were using it around Australia (and the world) we were starting to feel that perhaps it was time for us to take it for the test drive too.

(Lav Bodnaruk & Paul Seipel with the RED camera)

Thanks to the RED PIX (who I believe may have been the first owners of the camera in QLD - correct me if I am wrong) we were able to get our hands onto one of these puppies and shoot a small ad on it.

(Boris Zoulek, our talent and Paul Seipel on a rig Boris made)

RED PIX sent out a data wrangler with their camera, and all the right gear, which made the previously hard decision of using this 'unknown' camera an easy one - for we had the RED expert and an owner of the unit on the set with us at all the time. 

(Jason Hargreaves from RED PIX)

Paired with the kit of Zeiss Super Speeds we were ready for the shoot - with only one small set-back, and that is that we did not have the view finder on the camera - but would have to use the on-board monitor to do all of our focusing and framing (I believe that the view finder is now available from RED PIX as it was on its way from the manufacturer when we shot with it).

(Paul Seipel, Lav Bodnaruk and Boris Zoulek - with the onboard monitor)

We shot onto the RED Hard Disk Drive, which took out any complications we would have had with the small CF cards. Our data wrangling was minimized to backing up twice a day - we shot onto the drive through till lunch time, during which all the data was backed up on two different external HDDs via the Mac notebook and after which we continued to shoot onto the RED drive, again backing everything up on the end of the day's work. By the time we finished our shoot, we had so many versions of the same data that pretty much every crew member could take a HDD home (slight over-exaggeration).

(Michael Mier and Paul Seipel)

All of the data was checked for errors and drop-outs on the set, by viewing the QuickTime proxies but also by opening some of the R3D files and playing with them on the spot in RED ALERT.

Our data wrangler even had a chance to sit down with the director and pull out some stills from the R3D file, grade them slightly on the spot and show them to the client as such (which is rather impressive to see after watching the 'flat' and ungraded footage for most of the day via the video split).

Overall the shoot was a success.

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The post-production was always going to be complicated as we wanted to do our edit in the AVID Media Composer suite. We tried to use the RED CINE to open the R3D files and export our final shots as an uncompressed 16bit TIFF sequence, but that proved hard to do.

More precisely, the RED CINE kept on crashing non-stop, working only when it wants to and it soon enough became a game of persistence and patience, for we had to try the same action over and over again, until finally the software would not crash and allow us one export of the shot. This would follow with 10 more crashes, after which we would successfully get one more shot out.

Fearing that the RED CINE was having a personal problem with our 8 quad PCs we moved to the RED ALERT on a 8 quad Mac and tried our luck there. We managed to move quicker on RED ALERT, but not without problems either. A day later then scheduled, we had our TIFF sequences in our AVID.

From here on the edit was easy, for AVID treated the TIFFs like any other - not knowing their origin. We exported everything at the 1920 x 1080 resolution, so there was no issues with the fact that we shot some of the shots on 4K, some on 3K and some on 2K, as they were all compressed to the same size image for the AVID to understand.

I was surprised that the shots we took at variable speeds, for which we changed from 4K to either 3K (or in couple of cases) down to 2K, were not really the speed they were meant to be. We took some shots at 100fps, but in the playback, most I would think they are is 50fps. This might have something to do with the RED CINE and the RED ALERT, for the settings in those software's, were just not responding.

Overall, shooting RED was a great experience. I think that the results speak for themselves and that there is definitely room for this format amongst the others.

Personally, I look forward to the new releases of both RED CINE and RED ALERT, as they keep fixing and working away on these BETA versions and meantime, should we need to shoot on this format again, before the new software releases, I can only suggest scheduling an extra day of post-production ;)

Thank you to all the crew that worked on this job!

Lav Bodnaruk (pictured below)

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