About 20 folks showed up (see picture below of most of them) – most were Red Owners, but several were working DP’s and crew that just wanted to learn more about Red. We spent about 3 hours socializing, and then held a round table discussion about all thing from prep, to rigging, to workflow, to post. Everyone loved sharing all of our unique and common experiences with each other. It was especially helpful to see the various rigs, lenses and accessories that everyone has discovered and are using in the field.

POLLING: We even tossed in a few informal polls on favorite workflow tools. To my surprise, the majority were now using Adobe Premiere. At VR, we certainly own Premier, but are enjoying our upgraded Avid Media Composer Systems running 6.0 and still working with FCP 3 everyday. For backup in the field, most everyone is using finder drag and drop, and back at their facilities, it was 80/20 finder copy over R3D Manager. Everyone was making dual copies when possible for backup and safety, Red owners, were happy with the performance or the cameras in the various shooting conditions. For most projects, Epic shooters are shooting 10:1, but for web deliverables, a few were using 12 or 13:1. We generally shoot between 8:1 (green screen) and 10:1.

Contribute your own experience by completing the poll on the right —->
We will collect the results and share them on our site.

My favorite “hands on” were with the Wooden Camera bits and the 3rd party Canon mount still lenses. Also super cool to see half a dozen OC based Epics and a Scarlet in our studio.We plan to do it on a semi-regular basis, and Justin and I talked about scheduling another around NAB time. If anyone wants to join us, drop me a note here or on reduser.net

BTW: I received our Canon mount for one of our Epics today. It is way cool. I ordered a second one already and I expect to get a lot of use from them

Read about the Canon here and here

Read about the Vincent Laforet piece shot on the C300 on his blog

Will Red introduce Pro Res as a recording option? Will they deliver  Scarlet? Will Jim buy Canon? Canon buy Red? Will Canon introduce the long awaited dedicated video camera based on the Canon 5D mark II large sensor? What is your guess? The clock is ticking.

Here is an article published in the Orange County Business Journal discussing a little Red innovations and the pending annoucements.

OCBJ Canon & Red announcements

Visit the Orange County Business Journal website to view the entire publication.

Our first hands on with Red Epic at NAB 2011 (note the huge grin on our CEO's face). Ted Schilowitz looks on.

Red was cool enough to give us Serial Numbers 15 and 16 as a homage to our original Red One cameras. Pictures and a real report from the field coming soon. We are still waiting for our hand grip and Canon mounts which will be helpful in EFP (electronic field production) and ENG (electronic news gathering).

The guys from Kazakhstan along with some of our friends, crew and the Russian translators

Not to be confused with the parody of the country featured in the movie Borat, these guys are from the very real, and very prosperous country of Kazakhstan. Temirbek Amanzhol, Duman Kozhakhmet, and Altynbek Bektassov were part of a television production team that choose Red as their high end production format. They choose Video Resources to train them on everything from camera operation, to data wrangling and creating dailies, through post workflow.

Here is summary agenda of those days:

If you are interested in a private workshop on the RED drop us a line to discuss schedule and other details.

Now enters the DLSR and AF100 and other large sensor cameras. Sure you can get great depth of field, but so far everything in this arena brings compromise. In the case of the DSLR’s you have moire, poor audio recording and zero audio monitoring, and inferior h264 codec. The AF100 fares better on the audio front – working like a conventional video camera but still lacking on the recording format with AVCHD compression. NOTE: We are expecting our Atomos Ninja recorders in a few days so we will see how that enhances the recording capability.

Here is a frame grab from a recent interview we did for a corporate client. I lit it using a Litepanel 1×1 flood as a key, a Litepanel 1×1 spot as a hair/edge light, a window (cloudy day) as a fill, and a dedo projector for the background pattern. The shoot was for a one-time use as a meeting and no potential for repurposing into future programs and the result met our needs.

To read more about it, Abe Cine has this overview.

The camera image quality is excellent in its own right and the cinema like depth of field due to the large sensor . It works moderately well in low light and produces a pleasing image – less video like then the EX3 but not quite as cinema like as the 5D.

The photo below is of one of our EF100′s rigged with a PL mount adapter, RED 300mm, Red Rock Micro matte box, rails and follow focus on a Sacthler head.

The camera ships mit out lenses, so to equip the cameras we ordered third party lens adapters for PL, Canon EF, and Canon FD lenses. The only micro 4/3″ mount we felt worthy for video was the 20mm, 1.2 pancake lens. By now, most know about the challenge focusing with the inferior LCD and the EVF, and about the 25mb (or so) AVCHD codec. To improve the monitoring we generally use our Panasonic HDSDI 7″, and for improved image recording we have ordered (now delayed) Ninja Pre-Res recorders.

The recent firmware upgrade released by Panasonic fixes a couple of minor bugs with the camera interface, and we expect more upgrades to work with more automated lenses. A couple of nagging things are all about features buried in menus. The lens check being a couple of menus deep. The lens check, which enables and disables features of specific lenses, is one and the other is the shutter speed. I expect there are shortcuts to get to these but I haven’t found them yet. Barry Green’s book is a must have for any EF100 user (just like it was for the HVX-200).

When I take the camera out I generally use the PL Mount adapter with our RED Zooms, bringing both the 18-50 and the 50-150. With a crop factor of 1.3 to the RED, the sweet spot for interviews is around 55mm, so depending on the location I will usually shoot with the 50-150, sometimes using the 18-50 for establishing shots.  I most always toss in the 20mm pancake lens, and if the our ever popular Duclos 11-17 PL is available I will add that since it makes for a great b-roll lens.If you are using Canon full frame lenses the crop factor is 2.1x.

The cameras have been extremely popular with our shooters and in rentals. It is not a replacement for an EX3 or an HVX as an ENG camera, but is much more comfortable to use for interviews and such then a DSLR. Part of the benefits are the addition of a headphone jack (what a concept!) and built-in ND filters. Both of these features are normal for most cameras, but absent from the DSLR camp at this time.

Why would I take this camera our over my Red? Well I generally wouldn’t for interviews or studio work, but that is because I own both and there is no economic reason to. However, the Panasonic is a less bulky package, the battery life and record times that are longer with less bulk (smaller batteries and cheap SDHC media), I can bring a smaller tripod, and I can hand hold with ease. One thing that I am in love with (theoretically) is once again having sharpie friendly media. Meaning I can buy cards like I used to buy tape and after they are used, write on them with a Sharpie and put them in our library. Sure I still have to copy them to our editing bay storage and archive them to our DAM library, but I can always go back to the original media if needed. WIth RED and DSLR workflow we can’t justify not reusing the original media, but with $3 per GB for removable media we can.

Here is a good read by Mickey Grant on his first adventure with the camera while traveling abroad and by Philip Bloom in his first days with the EF100 camera. And though some of Barry’s tips are (thankfully) outdated by firmware updates, his tips post is excellent.

If you have any experience with the AF100, please drop us a note.

I have included a behind the scenes little promo we did for their national meeting in this clip.

Hope you enjoy.

The DP was Marco Fargnoli and Jeff Killian was our DIT who got them going on location in Ohio. Marco has some TIFF’s pulled from the original R3D files that you may enjoy. The film was lit beautifully and they were able to shoot as if they were shooting on celluloid.

True Nature - Hospital Scene

True Nature - Bedroom Scene