Upcoming events:

• HKRUG #4 slated for mid August will be about 3D and involve visiting some film rental and production studios.
• We’ll do a end summer rooftop bbq first week of September.

Stay tuned for details.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Here are the “recipes” for how I graded “Memorium”. If you’d like the actual R3D footage, contact me and I’ll try to figure out a way to get you the footage.

One big finding: Color correcting using the eye dropper in RedCine-X on an 18% grey card on subject light only by dim street lights
a)makes skin tones look natural–which is good
b)but brings up the blue channel, which makes noise much more apparent
so in a number of cases we simply ignored what auto-white balance with the eye dropper was telling us and kept shots “yellowish” with 3200 degrees Kelvin color temp + Tint=0.

List of “Memorium” Shots with RedCine-X Grading Data, 29 Jun 2010 (Dan Carew, HKRUG03)

1. Hilda Lighting Candle: A011_C009_060988
Red Color / Red Gamma
3200° / 0 Tint
ISO 1600
Luma Curve: Shadows = .07/.00
Blue Curve: Shadows = .08/.00

2. Flowershop: A009_C007_0609P3
Red Color / Red Gamma
2765° / -14 Tint
(in shop) ISO 320; (outside in dark) ISO800
Luma Curve:    Lights = .80/.67
Darks = .29/.20

3. Night harbor: A010_C007_0609R4 & A010_C004_0609HQ
Red Color / Red Gamma
3200° / 0 Tint
ISO 1280
Luma Curve:    HiLights = 1.00/.94
Lights = .77/.67

4. Hilda w/ Rose against wall A011_C003_0609B6; standing next to harbor, Medium A010_C009_060912; standing next to harbor, Close A010_C012_06096Q
Red Color / Red Gamma
2765° / -20.63 Tint
ISO 1600
Luma Curve:    Lights = .68/.80
Darks = .28/.17

5. Hilda walking in rain with umbrella
A010_C004_0609HQ
Red Color / Red Space
3200° / 0 Tint
ISO 1280
No curves

6. Raindrops
A010_C013_0609KQ
Red Color / Red Space
3200° / 0 Tint
ISO 4000
No Luma curve
Blue curve: Shadows = .16/.00

Here’s the ‘recipe’ I gave him for outputting a good file from Apple Compressor which will look good on YouTube at 1080p:

1. In Compressor, choose “QuickTime H.264″ in the “QuickTime” preset folder, under the Settings tab (in the Settings window).
2. It will give you an “Estimated Size” of unknown. So just try to use this default setting to export it. If the resulting file is less than 2Gb (the YouTube limit), you’re cool. Just hit “Submit”. Then upload resulting file to YouTube.
3. If you need to make a smaller file, but of high quality:

-with “QuickTime H.264″ chosen, go to Inspector
-click on the “Encoder” icon/button (second from left of the 6 little icon/buttons)
-click on the Video “Settings” button
-under “Data Rate” choose the “Restrict to ______ kbits/sec” and put in 8000 as the value
-Under “Compressor” leave “Quality” at “Best; and leave “Encoding” at “Best quality (Multi-pass)”
-This will yield a file with a 8.192 Mbps data rate (60% higher/better than the default Compressor gives you for a 1260×720 AppleTV file)

Here’s the email I just sent out to Hong Kong Red User Group mailing list. All are welcome to attend. Please join us.

Dear HK Red User Group folk,

We’ve decided to hold our next meeting on Tuesday, 29 June, 7-10 pm, same place as last time. We wanted to focus this meeting on the new Mysterium-X sensor upgrade and do a “show & tell” hands-on session. Mysteriium-X allows Red to shoot natively at ASA800. And you can crank the ASA up to ASA4000, with acceptable filmic grain. Very cool and interesting! See some sample test footage and stills I’ve done here: http://indie2zero.com/2010/06/01/red-mysterium-x-hits-hong-kong-and-films-perfect-mind-live/

The location and details of the meeting:

RANDOM ART WORKSHOP
M: +852 9244 8786    O: +852 2811 1845
www.randomartworkshop.com
Unit 1203, 12/F, Island Beverley
1 Great George Street, Causeway Bay
Cost will be HK$50/person (to cover rental fee) and  drinks and will be available for purchase at cost

Here’s what we’re thinking of as an agenda:

Agenda Point 1. Mysterium-X “Show & Tell”
-I’ll bring in my Red One with new Mysterium X sensor, plus some Mysterium-X footage to show. We can do some test shooting, including how to properly set exposure and hit white balance in post. I’ll tell my experiences, shooting and grading. And we can watch the footage.
-We’d like to invite anybody else with Mysterium-X footage to show their footage and tell about their experiences shooting and grading with the footage. Please send me an email if you’d like to show your footage and talk. (We can figure out a way to best show your footage; either Blu-Ray, AppleTV or ProRes via a Matrox box.)

Agenda Point 2: Brainstorm on additional topics you’d like covered at upcoming meetings:
-Warwick Teale has suggested we invite some vendors, for which he has some candidates. Good idea. Let’s discuss and prioritize.
-Billy Lau would love a session on “mixing Red footage with Canon 5D/7D”. Does it work? How to do it? Samples of work, etc.
-any other ideas from anybody else; open discussion

Look forward to seeing and catching up with those of you that can attend! Please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might be interested. And let me know if your not on this mailing list and would like to be added (or if you’d like to be removed, of course).

thanks and best regards,

Dan

Will post some more tests of shooting at night in Hong Kong with Mysterium-X soon. And next Hong Kong Red User Group meeting I’ll bring my Red with Mysterium-X for some test shooting (details on the meeting coming soon!).

And here are some TIFF still grabs from the Red footage. Very cool way to capture the moment and get great stills. Gives new meaning to “spray and pray” high frame rate photography–cuz I was spraying 24 frames per second for 8 minutes at a  time (onto 16Gb compact flash cards).

Shot last month, “The Sellout”, directed by Shern Sharma. Poubelle International is a Hong Kong based power pop band with a lot of good energy. We shot 3K (3027×1728 pixels) at Varispeed 50 frames per second (and the band sung the song at double-speed).  The whole music video is a single shot. Cool. We shot on a dolly with my Red 18-50mm PL-mount zoom and the operator, Hugo Chow, pulled focus and racked zoom simultaneously. A few production stills, by photographer Fred Lam:

Sweet.

I’m the coordinator for the Hong Kong Red Users Group (HKRUG), which we kicked off with our first meeting in March, with about 20 attendees.

Our next meeting is on Tuesday, 27 April, 7-10pm. We’ll have two speakers:

• Warwick Teale, reporting back on “cool things at NAB 2010″
• Dan Carew, reporting back and giving a summary of Reducation (the 5-day Red-sponsored training event in Las Vegas, 8-12 April) and the “RED DAY/REDuser Vegas 2010 event” on 14 April

Cost for the HKRUG meeting will be HK$50/person (to cover rental fee) and location will be at a studio/open space in Causeway, where drinks and snacks will be available for purchase at cost:
RANDOM ART WORKSHOP
M: +852 9244 8786    O: +852 2811 1845
www.randomartworkshop.com
Unit 1203, 12/F, Island Beverley
1 Great George Street, Causeway Bay

Here’s what we’ve informally decided HKRUG is:

HKRUG is an informal group of Red camera owners, users and fans here in Hong Kong. The group is open to all and a way that we can share tips, techniques, projects, “best practices”, workflows and ideas on Red Digital Cinema–cinematography, cameras and post-production. As you know and believe, our industry is changing very fast with all sorts of exciting innovations. Exchange of information is key to keeping “up to speed” and making Hong Kong into a “top spot”in Asia for Red and digital cinema. We want to keep HKRUG simple, cheap, informal and independent. We aim to meet about once a month for drinks and snacks in a place we can talk and exchange ideas. We’ll invite one (or several people) to talk and present each month.

Please come and join us next Tuesday! Future meetings will be announced here on my blog and tweeted on my Twitter feed. If you’d like to be added to the HKRUG mailing list, to be notified of future meetings, please send me an email letting me know.

PJ

Peter Jackson sent greetings to “Red Day” in Las Vegas last week. Click on the photo above to watch. As I summarized in my blog post last week:

Yesterday was Red day, which was a lot of fun. A 5+ minute greeting from Peter Jackson projected in 4K, where he

• said he was a big fan of Red, a company making cameras “for the right reasons” by a “hobbyist” with a real passion for cameras
• stressed the importance of shooting in actual 4K (rather than HD)
• said that film’s 100-year run was ending and that Red was a good digital image to replace it
• talked about how much he loved his early Red camera Clarice, and how he had used Clarice to do early dawn pickup shots for “Lovely Bones” in Valley Forge National Park–all by himself, one-man crew.
• chided Jim and Red to “get us our Epics” because he’s really looking forward to using it

Cool stuff, most of which I didn’t mention in my NAB roundup. He has a quick visual (with no narration) of the amazing small high-def monitor from SmallHD–showing it side-by-side with a Red LCD, where the SmallHD monitor is clearly superior.

• Video: wonderful for watching movies on long plane rides (like the 15 hour one I just had 2 days ago). But more importantly, it was really useful to be able to pass around my reel and sample video clips to colleagues in the film/TV biz at REDucation and NAB–before class, in a bar, during a test shoot.
• Photos and pdfs: In training and NAB I was constantly pulling up photos of new gear and production stills–to quickly visually illustrate a point I was making in conversation. It’s also super useful to have pdfs of manuals (and to print to pdf those long NY Times articles you don’t have time to read when you find them; drop them in a “to read” folder in GoodReader).
• Books and magazines: forget Kindle. I love the free iBooks app, which allows you to buy books and read them on the lovely backlit iPad. Reading George Carlin’s autobiography, a book on film lighting, and a few more. I also have an amazing “Cat in the Hat” interactive book app for iPad, which my 3-year old nephew loved.
  
  And Time magazine on iPad rocks. Why not just read a (paper) book you ask? Well, here’s an example: I was stuck waiting 60+ minutes in a line for security check at Las Vegas airport. You know the drill, shuffling forward 3 feet every 30 seconds, in a noisy poorly lit snaking line. Too dark and difficult to read a book holding it with one hand. Reading my iBook was no problem in those conditions, however. I found myself edified and measurably less cranky as I did the “shoes off, laptop in plastic box” drill.

• Writing: granted this is the activity I’ve been doing the least on my iPad. But the small keyboard doc I picked up in Vegas before I left is small and quite useful. Using it hear with Apple Pages iPad app, as per my photo below. Quite useful for surfing the web. The iPad touch keypad is fine for typing with your thumbs. But QWERTY touch typing just doesn’t work for me–you can’t have your fingers lightly touching the keys, as on a real tactile keyboard, which means they have to hover over the keys. Which is a “fail”.
  

What about iPad apps for filmmakers? A quick roundup:

1. Color correcting surface called “Gradiest” coming from Act Focused, currently for CineForm First Light only. But coming for other programs soon (presumably, e.g., Apple Color).
   
2. CodeRed: iPhone/iPad app to browse RedUser.net.
3. MovieSlate HD for iPad (US$29.95) , apparently due to be approved soon, from PureBlend software (the makers of MovieSlate for iPhone). This is apparently the most full-featured slate app, with timecode, etc.
4. FinalCut Pro Field Guide, from Movieola (US$3.99).
5. A tool to help actors memorize and rehearse lines: Rehearsal by Sotto Voce (free).
6. OmniGraffle for iPad (US$49.99): great for shot blocking and other diagrams.
7. Reel Director (US$3.99): video editing app.
8. ProPrompter for iPad (with remote iPhone control). Very cool. The iPhone software only version is US$9.99. The iPad version with hardware is apparently under US$1,000.
   
9. PenUltimate (US$2.99): handwriting notebook app for iPad. Currently the best-selling app for iPad.
   
10. FinalDraft for iPad is coming (for writing scripts).
    

Kevin Smith apparently doesn’t think iPads will help filmmakers–but touts its potential as a prop (graphic courtesy of gizmodo):