I just finished a four day shoot for solar energy company Sunpower where we used the RED for three days of location shooting and one day of green screen. More about the green screen later–here’s how I did all the live action shots.
(The above movie is not an official finished product–I just cut a bunch of shots together to music I found in Garage Band.)
Last time I shot with the RED, on a political spot for “No on Prop 8” (California), I tweaked and perfected the way I work with this camera. I don’t think it’s wise to trust only in your light meter when using any HD camera because digital capture gamma curves are not as predictable as film gamma curves. They’re also infinitely adjustable, whether you want them to be or not, and can vary from camera to camera based on camera setup or internal wizardry.
So while I can rough in lighting and exposure with a meter my final exposure is always established using whatever information I can glean from the camera. On most HD cameras I use a combination of the waveform and vectorscope to see what’s going on with the image, because eyes can be very subjective and it’s helpful to have a couple of objective tools to see what’s really going on. With the RED I find that the zebras are my best friend, followed closely by the parade RGB histogram, the stoplight, and a toggle switch for raw mode.
With Build 16 RED incorporated a new color space and gamma called “RedSpace”. This appears to be a brighter version of the Rec 709 gamma and color space, which for reasons known to others always looks way too dark on the RED. RedSpace turns the camera into a “what you see is nearly what you get” camera, with the proviso that what you actually get always looks better than what you saw in the viewfinder. When shooting for NTSC or HD delivery I find that judging the image in RedSpace will give the best results when the footage is processed through RedCine, RedRushes or RedAlert using the Rec 709 gamma and color settings: it’ll be close to what I saw when I shot it, with plenty of information left to color grade any number of looks.
I set exposure using the zebras, one of which I set to a range of low=103 and high=109. This gives me the same feel as if I’m shooting with any other common HD camera. Once I set the exposure based on zebras I next look at the stoplight display and make sure I’m only clipping one channel, unless I’m letting an area of the frame blow out significantly. Clipping only one channel allows me to restore some of that detail using RedAlert or RedCine, as they will attempt to transfer detail from non-clipped channels into the clipped channel.
Watching the parade histogram tells me how far I am from clipping significant parts of the image. Due to the linear way any silicon-based sensor sees information I always want to push my exposure as far as I can toward clipping, in order to keep important shadow details out of the noise floor.
Last but not least, if I’m pushing a lot of the image into the clips then I toggle into raw mode, which supposedly shows what the chip is really seeing. There’s still some gamma being applied so it’s not a perfect raw representation, but it will give you a better idea of how the sensor is clipping than RedSpace will. Frequently I’ll set an exposure in RedSpace, panic slightly at how portions of the image seem to be clipping, toggle into raw mode and discover I’m not clipping hardly anything.
I’ve found that, when I’m setting exposure using the zebras and looking at the highlights, I consistently come up with an effective EI of 160 on my incident meter. That’s the number I use when pre-lighting or estimating exposure at times when I can’t get to the camera (if it’s on a jib, for example).
On the following pages I’m going to go through most of the shots in this piece and show you (top) the finished shot, colored in Magic Bullet Looks, and (underneath) the “raw” shot as it was processed in RedRushes using the Rec 709 color space and gamma and using the Mitchell scaling filter. (All of this footage was rendered down to 1920×1080 for editing.) Then I’ll toss in some notes about how we executed the shot.
Off we go…
(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
This shot was fairly simple: two kids walking back and forth along a road. I used a polarizer and a Schneider Tru-Cut IR filter. The RED has a far-red leak like most HD cameras, but it shows up more than most when a couple stops of ND are added. At three stops of ND I add the IR cut filter, and as it doesn’t hurt to leave it in I’ll often use it even if I just have a polarizer in the matte box.
My camera assistant, Phil Bowen, did an excellent job of following focus, as he always does. The wide shot was probably a 35mm Zeiss Super Speed, and the longer lens was 135mm. I used Zeiss Super Speeds because I didn’t know if I’d end up in a situation where I’d need a T1.3 stop; UltraPrimes only open up to a T2. Also, Super Speeds are cheaper than UltraPrimes, which made the producer happy. Super Speeds are perfectly good lenses if you don’t flare them too hard.
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(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
We grabbed this at sundown on our first day of shooting. We’re probably wide open on a 25mm lens at T1.3. The longer shot was at a T2.1 on a 135mm and once again Phil nailed the focus on very short notice.
I made a conscious decision to let parts of the image blow out, knowing that the blown out “white” of the RED had a nicer quality than most other HD cameras I’m familiar with. I colored the gammas a little warm with Magic Bullet Looks and pushed some of the blown-out gains further into clip to make the highlights pop a bit more.
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(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
We shot this garden party of solar panel owners at a community in Roseville, CA, just outside of Sacramento. Jib operator Bret Allen, SOC worked his magic on this shot, while I slowly went insane due to constantly changing cloud cover. This is when I used my meter, set at EI 160, to calculate a stop just before sending the camera off to do a series of jib moves. My camera assistant had a Preston FIZ with only one motor, and that motor ended up on the focus ring and not the F-stop ring because I knew that I could probably finesse the exposure later. You can’t do much to finesse focus in post, other than to get rid of it.
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(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
I had a mad scheme where I wanted to use several lights bounced into a 4×4 piece of bead board as a TV source. One light would be the base light, and two others were to be spotted into the card in different areas. By dimming the spotted lights up and down the brightness of the “screen” would change, and the shadows from the “TV” would appear to dance around. My gaffer, David Bunge, convinced me to do something much simpler: use a 4’x4 Kino Flo with two flags waved in front of it. I tried it, and it worked very nicely–and it was much simpler and faster than my rig. I did ask him to put two layers of 216 diffusion on the Kino to make it a softer source, and I also asked for a tweenie to be hung to “carry” the light from the practical in the background to the parents. I knew the parents would drop off a bit but I didn’t want them to end up as shapeless mud; by adding just a whisper of colored hard light from a dimmed tungsten source we gave them a little bit of a warm highlight to pop them from the background. Hard light, when it’s not much brighter than the fill and is a different color, pops areas of the frame nicely without looking hard or artificial.
The Kino Flo is bulbed for daylight (5600k), and the white balance on the camera is set at 4300k to let the “TV” go a little cool and the practical a little warm.
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(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
This shot was just following a whim. While shooting at Sunpower’s offices I noticed that the floor was very shiny, so we put a 1200w PAR down at the end of an aisle and had someone walk toward us. I used my favorite Magic Bullet Looks preset, “Green Pearl,” on this one, along with a vignette that blocked a bunch of the miscellaneous stuff at the edge of the frame. I also took the liberty of adding a little digital “anamorphic flare” to make the shot a little less threatening and foreboding.
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(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
The only “dolly” we used on this entire project was a 4′ slider from Todd Stoneman, a local grip who makes all sorts of wondrous things. An 18mm lens and some foreground elements made this move look longer than it really was.
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(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
We shot this entirely with existing light. The sun came in at an angle through the windows that ran down the entire length of the building and we taped up a roll of Opal Frost to diffuse it. We used a 4×4 silver reflector to bounce some of it back on the guy’s face. The dolly move is entirely due to our 4′ slider, and we shot this on 85mm and 135mm lenses at around T4.
The other half of the shoot follows on the next page…
(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
This setup was a lot of fun, mostly because the two talent are the director (Hugh Campbell) and our makeup person. The shot is supposed to be two parents discussing the high cost of their energy bill and Hugh really got into it. The audio is hysterically funny.
We lit this with a 1200 PAR through a window to the right, with a little return onto Hugh’s face via two mirrors: one caught the light from the PAR and sent it to to a mirror located just outside the upper left of frame. The window had a green tint in it, as most windows do, so we added 1/4 minus green to bring it back to normal. The RED is very sensitive to green so it’s important to correct unwanted green/magenta casts wherever they appear.
When I graded this image I brought the gamma way up to see where the noise floor is, and it’s on Hugh’s jeans. They’re a snow storm if made any brighter. Considering, though, that we held a substantial amount of detail outside when it appeared to be clipping on the histogram, I don’t think I can complain.
This was one of a couple of handheld shots I did with the RED. I don’t recommend handholding the RED as it tends to be massively heavy and the only way to really grab onto it is by the rods running along the top.
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(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
It’s almost impossible to get a good puff of exhaust out of a modern vehicle. Our editor, Craig Thomas, is also a 3D animator (or, as he’d put it, he’s a 3D animator who also edits) and he’s going to add exhaust digitally. This was lit with a bounce card underneath the truck and a mirror off to the right to backlight emissions that weren’t there.
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(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
This was a fun shot. I crammed the RED into the front seat of our editor’s pickup truck to get the right angle on the mirror. I had it rigged on a sandbag on top of an apple box and during rehearsals I tried rolling the camera left and right with the action. It worked out pretty well.
The lighting consisted of a 1200 PAR about six feet from the rear passenger side door through two frames of 216, with a 4×4 bead board bounce placed in the rear driver’s side door. The hand on the mirror was lit by sunlight through a 4×4 frame of 216 rigged just out of the shot. Our hand model had a hard time doing the shot as she couldn’t see the mirror and we didn’t have an extra monitor she could watch. She just had to hit the right spot by sheer muscle memory. After a few tries she nailed it every time.
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(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
We raced the sun to get this shot. Normally I’m very good about making sure my body is clear of the pan handle or wheels during a shot but in this case I skipped that step in order to shoot faster. Wrong! I hit my leg with the pan handle during the first go-round so we sent the car around again while I readjusted myself. I felt this shot needed something in post so I added a fairly strong vignette and warmed it up some.
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(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
Even though this shot appears after the previous one we actually shot it just before. Tasked with getting a shot of the company sign, I couldn’t bring myself to just slam one out. We backed off on the 135mm and framed a nice shot with the sign, the street lamp on the left and the company Prius. Just barely out of frame is some of the ugliest barbed-wire fencing I’ve ever seen. I warmed this shot up a bit in post as well. I love how the son catches the hubcaps as the car rounds the corner.
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(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
My camera assistant had gone to fetch his van when the director spotted this shot nearby. I wheeled our camera Magliner to what looked like an auspicious spot, slapped a lens on the camera (probably a 35mm), leveled the camera on the Magliner shelf (it was on a high-hat, so I fished some camera wedges out of my assistant’s toolbag) and started rolling just as this sailboat came into view. I was quite surprised at the time with the colors I saw in the RED’s viewfinder, and they only became more striking when I moved the ped lower and the gains higher in post.
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(top image graded in Magic Bullet Looks, bottom image processed without correction through RedRushes, Rec 709 gamma and color)
We shot this much earlier in the day than the previous shot. I matched them somewhat by adding a digital grad in Magic Bullet Looks and adding a vignette across the bottom of frame. I think I also colored the ped blue.
I love the RED. It’s so much more interesting than most of the cameras I work with on a regular basis. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we don’t have many fancy uncompressed 4k cameras to play with. I started out as a skeptic, but now I’m a big fan. I like change, and the RED is a welcome one.