Red Digital Cinema Production (In the land of the blind)

I’ve been making commercials for longer than I care to admit. I have always been a hands on guy but 25 years ago even though I owned my own camera gear and a 3/4” offline edit system there was only so much I could do. Then I was at the mercy of the lab, the online facility the dubbing house etc.. It was like going through a dark tunnel in a low budget horror movie where at any second a hideous monster would jump out and bite me in the a__. When I first heard about the Red I saw a light at the end of that tunnel. I would no longer be paying ridiculous amounts of money to people who had nothing to do with the creative process but, blocked it at every step of the way, forcing me to compromise on quality in order to eek out a reasonable profit.

Having owned my Red now for over a year, I have started to emerge into the light at the end of that tunnel. A couple of recent projects illustrate this quite clearly. A few weeks ago a director friend of mine, who usually works in 35mm, called and asked if I was available for a low budget commercial to be shot in the Florida Keys. He wanted to shoot above water, underwater, on a jet ski, at night, in slo-mo, etc.. The clincher was in wanted to shoot this Thursday and Friday and have a rough cut ready to show his client on Sunday. He told me I could come back to my studio in Fort Lauderdale to do final color correcting and audio mixing on Monday and Tuesday but he wanted something to show them on site. I told him it was a “tall order” but, thought I could handle it. (I knew I could handle it but, I never like to overstate my case. I would rather under-promise and over deliver than the alternate).

Having recently completed a long underwater shoot in the Bahamas using a new custom underwater housing I personally designed for the Red, I knew the underwater stuff would be no problem. He had some wild POV shots he wanted, I would let the key grip deal with that but, just in case, I brought along a little HDV camera and housing for backup. I packed an assortment of prime and zoom lenses, three Red Batteries, two Red Raids, a lightweight tripod and an Arri shoulder mount. For editing I brought my 15” Mac Book Pro, a couple of compact 500 MB Iomega Firewire 800 external hard drives, and cheap 19” DVI/HDMI computer monitor for field monitoring and editing, and an adaptor cable for my Laptop Monitor out to both DVI and HDMI. I was going to bring along the new Matrox MXO Mini but didn’t have time to place the order before my shoot. Anyway, I knew I would have a day or two back at the office to do any critical color correction so, I wasn’t worried.

The shoot went flawlessly. We had about 8-10 setups, mostly exteriors with simple lighting, and one shot in front of a fire pit that turned out beautifully. The only minor challenge was he wanted to shoot everything at 30FPS in a 24P project. Just slightly slower than real time. I had never done this before on a 4K project and I didn’t think it would make much difference but, to my surprise it did. It gave the piece a slight dreamy quality that worked well with the content and made the pans look far less “strobey” then they are on hard vertical lines at 24P.

We finished our shoot around noon on Friday. We cleaned up and had a nice lunch around the pool while I left the footage copying to my hard drive up in the room. We went up to the room after lunch and the director and I picked our favorite takes in “Log and Transfer” on FCP Studio 2. As he approved a selection I would digitize it in the background in “Native” mode (which only takes a few seconds) and continued logging. After an hour or so we had gone through the footage several times and the director started hinting he was getting bored and wanted to go home. This is something I love to hear and always encourage. I told him I’d play with the footage for a while and we could get into it in the morning. He was delighted and headed for the door. So was I . I know by the following morning I would be completely done and be able to head home a day early.

There was no narration and only a few graphics so, I decided to pick some music and a few sound effects, and head down to enjoy my complementary dinner at the grill. There was an item that called to me from the menu the previous night, the sesame seared Ahi tuna on a bed of cous cous and grilled vegetables but, I didn’t want to order the most expensive item on the menu the first night... but I digress. Anyway, I put my wifi connection to good use navigating over to www.neosounds.com, a fantastic stock music site that is “cheap, fast and good”. Check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me. It has a very effective search engine and multiple lengths of every cut 15, 30, 60 and full. It even lets you download a free mono proxy file to drop on your time line to see if it works with your spot. Once on the site, I put in a few key words like “tropical”, “Island”, “vacation” and started previewing the list. I couldn’t make up my mind they were all so good so, I downloaded about ten of them and dropped them on the time line one above the other and muted all but one.

It was starting to get dark and I didn’t want to be the first one in the restaurant so, I decided to take one more step. Someone once told me if you’ve got a great opening and a great closing it doesn’t really matter what is in the middle so, I decided to pick my opening and closing shots. Nothing too literal but more evocative. The name of the resort was Hawks Cay. We didn’t have any shots of hawks and the director wasn’t interested in using any stock footage but, I did notice out of the corner of my eye a shot of a bird passing overhead as a little boy jumped into the pool. It was an underwater shot shooting up at the child through the wavy water’s surface so it would be impossible to tell that the bird flying over was a pelican and not an Osprey so, I popped it in. I then went to www.soundbible.com to see if I could find any sound of an osprey. There were dozens, all free, not that I wouldn’t have spent 10-20 bucks for it but, why pay for something that’s available for free. I also downloaded a splash sound which I would later apply a little echo to make it sound like it was being heard underwater.

So there I had my opening shot. I was half way through and it was only 7PM. I then looked for a good “Mise en scène”, a shot that more or less told the whole story in a single frame. Since Hawks Cay is a high end sport fishing resort I knew it had to be some sort of fishing shot, a shot that would put the viewer in the scene, a shot that would capture the excitement of fishing and the beauty of the surroundings. I remembered a low angle shot of the director’s son casting a spinning rod silhouetted by the sun. In slo-mo it would be perfect. I dropped it in and fitted the logo in on his right side. It was now 7:30 a respectable time to start cleaning up and getting ready for dinner.

The Sesame Seared Tuna was even better than I had imagined. So was the key lime pie. When you eat alone though it is hard to spend more than about an hour because, no matter how slow the service there is no one to talk to to eat up the rest of the time so, by 8:30 I was back up in the room. By 12:30 I had three different versions of the spot, my favorite and several other variations with minor tweaks, and a choice of music tracks so, as not to make the director feel like I was pushing an agenda on him. The key to being an editor directors want to work with is to appropriately stroke their ego, whenever possible, and never make them feel like you are wrestling control of the project from them.

When the director showed up after breakfast to start picking takes I offered to show him the rough drafts I had come up with the previous night. He watched in silence. He was speechless. “What about color correction?” Done. “What about sound mixing?” Done. “How about a DVD to ship to the client?” “How about FTPing then a Hi-Def Quicktime file right now? But his last question was the most telling. “Why is it when I take Red files to a major Post house everything takes so long, costs so much, and requires transcoding and conversion yada yada yada?” I said, “That it’s because when you start a revolution you don’t go back to the people you revolted against and ask them to help you put the last nail in their own coffins.” Sure, there is a time and place for far more complicated workflows and production processes but, for the vast majority of projects it is a whole new game.

Oh yeah, here is a copy of the finished spot. Like all good directors he made a few tweaks as did the client but, ninety percent of it came from my favorite version. www.sea-cam.com/Video/HawksCayUpdate.mov

If you are new to Red don’t allow rental houses, post houses and so-called ‘experts” baffle you with bull s@#%. It is not all that tough to shoot and edit cost effectively. Pick the brains of other users on the www.reduser.net and experiment. This is a whole new game and as my father used to say “In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.”

George Monteiro 1/6/10