It turns out that I can’t write about filmmaking unless I’m stuck at uni. It just.. doesn’t work. When I’m on set daily, setting up the RED One daily, handling lenses daily, it really diminishes my drive to read and research and then write about anything online. It’s not that production has made me bored of filmmaking, but I’ve shifted gears in terms of how I’ve been learning. I used to read and write ravenously, now I’m learning with my hands. But from time to time, I’ll hopefully continue blogging because I think it’s good for me. Hence my current efforts in this particular post.
So… I’m currently working on my 3rd VCA film so far, Wonder Boy. I’m feeling decently comfortable with 2nd AC tasks, my equipment is worn ragged and my hands are covered in assorted abrasions. Is all this 2nd AC work helping me, in terms of working towards our big September RED shoot? I’d say yes. Practical experience with RED on set has made me far more paranoid than I’ve ever been before. When you read books about the RED, everything makes sense. In theory, everything works and every problem has an easily identified solution. Read too many books and manuals, and you can start to think that every problem you’ll encounter on set can be solved with reason and logic. When you’re physically working with the RED, you realise that the joystick is clunky, the LCD interface is laggy, and many strange, ridiculous things happen. I’ll make a list.
—When playing back footage, the image on your external SDI split goes green. (you can still see the image on the split, but only in varying shades of green. This problem occurred throughout God’s Fools and also Transmission, but not on Wonder Boy so far).
—The RED won’t respond when you hit record. We had to reboot to fix this problem on Transmission, and while this restart fixed the recording glitch, it also caused the CF card number to jump from A025 back to A017.. which makes no sense. Might be a card or formatting problem.
—The RED generates extra clips on the CF card that appear completely black when the data wranglers open them up.
—R3D File manager notes an error when you open up a new CF card. Clips on the CF card are playable via QT Proxy, but lag considerably and do not play back when transferred to external hard drive. (the image is replaced by flat green)
—RED clips play back fine in REDCINE-X, but are flagged as erroneous by R3D manager and cannot be properly exported to ProRes or DPX (the exported clip is the correct duration, but the frame is black).
That’s most of the problems I’ve witnessed so far.. all I can say is, it’s not smooth sailing. I can live with reliability problems, given RED’s image quality and affordability, but you need to be on your toes to identify problems and pinpoint the causes. Working on these VCA shoots has served as a wake up call for me prior to our own RED shoot. There’s no real way to prepare for complete disaster, but at least it won’t come as such a shock if it happens I guess. Also, the VCA shoot has helped me out with my equipment shopping list. On Transmission we used a Losmandy Spider dolly, which many people hated with a passion. But I thought it was genius. You’ve got a dolly that runs on heavy rubber tubes that are *malleable*. It’s a straight track, now it’s a 180 degree curved track, now it’s a 360 degree track, etc etc, it’s brilliant. The downside is that it’s heavy, it gets extremely dirty, it gets tangled, people trip over on it, it takes a while to snake the tracks around other pieces of equipment, it’s not as sturdy as some other dollies.. these are all pretty serious drawbacks, but for $100 per day, we’d be able to set up some really interesting dolly moves at the price of inconvenience.
Anyway. I have no more spare energy for writing now, so I will hit ‘publish’. How the mighty hath fallen.
What kind of output are looking at for Wonder Boy? DCP?
I’m really not sure, it depends on where the film goes obviously. For the VCA screenings at ACMI, they’ve changed the screening format. Last year all films were 10-bit standard def prores files, I’m pretty sure. This year I don’t know what format they’re using but it’ll all be screened at 1920×1080.. whether it’s prores or dpx or dcp, I can’t say. (you work in a cinema?)
yeah, I’m actually doing MIFF this year. But enough about me disclosing my personal information, all the best to you. And be sure to give the guys at ACMI your content as early as possible; they’d appreciate it!
[...] (Lowdown pt1, Lowdown, a day in the life of, Lowdown, in retrospect) and posts on VCA productions (Strange Things, Trial by Fire, Like a Swan) are all quite honest and involved reflections on different aspects of [...]