Indie 2.0

After a few ad hoc test shoots, got to take my Red #1304 out and do something real and interesting: On Thursday we shot Canto Pop diva and movie star Kelly Chen doing a promotional message for a charity.

It was one of those crazy shoots–with too little space and too many people; in a tiny clothing boutique in mall in Tsimshatsui (the grand opening for which Kelly was the main attraction). There were still photo shoots both before and after us, and security and crowds visible through window of the store and we had less than 15 minutes to set up and get the shots.

We shot locked off on a Miller tripod, with two Arri primes (for a medium and a close shot). Lighting was two Redheads bounced back off an umbrella. We used a large grey felt cloth draped in background. Kelly was calm and relaxed, and a real pro. She looked stunning. We shot 4K 2:1 24 frames per second at 320 ISO and 3200° color temperature.

Initially I had planned to record sound to the camera. But the night before during tests discovered that using phantom power from the camera to power my Sennheiser MKH-416 shotgun mic caused a very loud and unacceptable hum. At first I thought it was simply a problem with the monitoring headphone path. But lo and behold, when I plugged the Red Raid via Firewire 800 into my MacBook Pro and played the Quicktime proxy with audio, I could hear the hum also. So, no dice. So I resorted to recording audio separately on my tried and true Sound Deviced 744T (which I used for a whole feature I shot in Tokyo 3+ years ago). I plan to buy a SoundDevices MixPre for around US$600, which will allow me to control levels away from the camera, and which I’ve heard (on reduser.net) will give me a clean signal (Turn off Phantom power in Red; mic uses phantom power from MixPre, instead of Red).

So this worked great. Kelly clapped her hands (for an old fashioned slate) and we did three takes. I synced it all up, quite easily, in Final Cut. The footage, played as a H.264 Quicktime, looks (and sounds) jaw-droppingly stunning on my domestic Japanese Sony CRT HDTV powered by a Mac mini, and we’re only watching it at 1280×720. Also, looks amazing at true 1920×1080 on my 23″ Apple Cinema Display.

Here was my workflow:

1. Took the three R3D files into RedCine.
2. Put them in order in the Project Library, which puts them in order on the timeline in the “Shot” and “Color” Player.
3. Set the Project Settings to: Custom 3640×2048 (effectively cropping 228 pixels from both the left and right sides off of my original 4K 4096×2048 image). I did this because, since this was just a talking head, I didn’t need those pixels. And 3640×2048 is 16:9 aspect ratio.
4. Created eight different “looks” in the RedCine “Color” module (all of which I saved, for later use). Out of these eight, I picked two that I liked to output to.
5. Then I output to ProRes422 1920×1080. It took about 3 hours on my new 2.5Ghz MacBook Pro with 4 Gb of RAM to render the five minute clip. So, every 1 second of footage took 36 seconds to render. The resulting ProRes422 file is about 4Gb.
6. For the Audio, I pulled in my 24-bit .wav files off the CF card frommy SoundDevices 422 into Adobe Audition (which I happen to know how to use well; I’m sure I could have used Apple’s Soundtrack Pro 2, which comes bundled with FinalCut Studio2). I used Audition’s “Noise Reduction” Restoration filter: first I found less than a second of room noise (with no other sounds; no voices, nothing except the air conditioning noise). In the filter, I sampled this noise then ‘subtracted’ that noise from Kelly’s dialogue recording. This makes the whole dialogue sound a little echoing, but it’s much better than the annoying air conditioner motor/fan noise.
7. Then I pulled both the ProRes422 1920×1080 video files and the cleaned up .wav audio files into FinalCut and synced them up (using the hand clap “slate”; just line the spike on the audio wave in the audio track (I’m new at FC2; you can reveal that by hitting Option + Apple + W) with the frame with the hands clapping together.
8. Then I exported this synced audio and video to H.264 1920×1080 Quicktime, using Compressers default settings. Voila! So beautiful, and so easy!
9. All in all, RedCine is an amazingly powerful and well-designed (and free!) application that does not take long to learn. But it doesn’t have real documentation. To get started on it, check out the RedCine training videos:
   Interface Overview
   Project Settings Menu
   Shot Settings
   Color Settings
   Output Settings
   Library
   Hitting the “H” key brings up keyboard shortcuts. There’s a very cool metaphor I wasn’t familiar with: swiping your mouse across the top or the bottom of the screen takes you toggles you through different settings (top=show or hide top menu choices; bottom=show full bottom menu choices or show abridged bottom menu choices or hide everything.)

   There’s two bugs in RedCine which can be very annoying and time-consuming if you don’t know the work-arounds:

   • Occasionally, in Leopard at least, files rendered out from RedCine will have a single frozen frame in place of one (or more) of the video clips. You can avoid this by deleting the folder “RedCine” in folder “Library” on your main computer name under Places (in my case “carewdan”). Do this each time you use RedCine (a slight hassle, but much better than finding out, after 3 hours of rendering, that your eagerly awaited rendered output is corrupted). Each time you open RedCine, a new clean “Library” folder will be created. Just make sure that any “looks” and files you save are not saved to that “Library” folder. It’s wise to write down in a notebook in detail all the default settings for your “Project” and “Output”, as you’ll need to re-set these manually each time (because they get wiped when you delete the Library folder). This sounds like a hassle, but it’s not. Only takes about 15 seconds (and the process of manually setting those defaults each time makes you a lot more confident and quick in RedCine.)
   • In Color, changing the “Highlight” setting does not seem to do anything. I.e., you change the value, but nothing seems to happen. To solve this, after changing the “Highlight” value, click on the word “Brightness” (or “Shadow” or “Contrast”). This makes the change you made to Highlight value take effect.

Anyway, as someone too busy with a lot of other stuff to read lots of documentation and do lots of experimentation, all I can say is: working with Red footage is easy. All the FUD I’ve been reading about is simply that: unnecessary fear, uncertainty and doubt. Man, this is fun stuff!

If and when the Kelly footage gets posted on the charity’s web site (perhaps in May?), I’ll post a link here.