THE COMBINATION in cinemas February 2009

Australian Film Syndicate, distributor of powerful new Australian film 'The Combination', has released a corker new website and 1 min trailer online. I shot the film for director David Field on the RED camera system earlier this year in western Sydney. It is due for Australian cinema release 26 February 2009. See my earlier posts for plenty of info on the shoot.

Go to www.thecombination.com.au

GOLD Award at the ACS

Last saturday evening at the NSW Branch ACS Awards night i was the recipient of a Gold award for 'Minutes of a Separation' in the Corporate Educational category. The piece was shot on the Panasonic HDX 900 HD camera as the filmed component of a live gala production by the Sydney Theatre Company for watchmakers IWC staged in Geneva, and starring Cate Blanchett. See my site for a clip at www.tobyoliver.com.au

'The Combination' trailer #1

To see a early trailer clip for new Australian feature film 'The Combination' go to www.thecombination.com.au. I shot the film on location in western Sydney entirely on the RED digital cinema camera system earlier this year and it is looking to a cinema release early in 2009.

On the Road with the Toads

Currently i am two weeks into the documentary shoot 'Cane Toads 2' for director Mark Lewis, maker of the original Cane Toads film in 1988. We are shooting with a small crew in the Top End, from Darwin across to Kununarra until early December.

The Final Grade

Just finished the grading process for 'The Combination' with a final check today of all the reels in the DI suite before sending to film out. The DI was done by the talented colorists at Efilm here in Sydney, on the Lustre system with monitoring on the Barco 2K projector.

Very happy with the final results, the RED has come through with pleasing results, not withstanding some scenes that were quite difficult to grade. Even though i rated the camera at 500 ASA, effectively underexposing, we had no noise issues in the image at all - at least not when viewing the fully calibrated DI room projector, or on the 35mm print. Going through a full DI process for filmout does put the image under the greatest real world scrutiny and the camera held up pretty well - except for some particular situations.

The most difficult scenes to grade properly were without doubt those shot under tungsten light, especially if low level or a bit underexposed. As the sensor is native daylight balance, the warm tones of a tungsten lit interior seem to push the colour imaging capabilities of the camera close to the limit in the red part of the spectrum. Of course it is possible to correct the balance in the DI suite but an apparent colour depth limitation rears it's ugly head making many shots look 'funny' and not quite right. Again, it is fixable, but does often require a lot more work on the part of the colorist to make images acceptable.

On the other hand, many of the scenes shot in daylight or with HMI lighting almost grade themselves and look terrific with just a simple contrast curve applied. In retrospect i would do a some have suggested and use a quarter blue filter on the lens when shooting tungsten, just to take a bit of red out of the image. Apparently the new Red Build 16  does have 'improved tungsten tolerance' which would be very welcomed. I look forward to testing it when next i have the opportunity to shoot with RED.

'Recommended ASA'

Interesting now with the imminent release of RED'S Build 16 update that Jannard is now suggesting a 'recommended' ASA rating in the 320-500 ASA range for the RED ONE camera; i guess we were a beat ahead of time rating it at 500 for 'The Combination' shoot. Image (right) of Russian church from our test shoot, shot on RED build 14.

RED - the setup - ISO, resolution, compression

Unlike a regular high-end HD cameras such as the Sony F900 or Varicam, the RED has little in the way of menu adjustments to manipulate the image. As i have mentioned before, the adjustments available change settings of the HD monitoring output only and leave the actual RAW recorded image data at a 'factory' setting.

Given this, the biggest impact you can have on the image with the menus (as opposed to lens settings like iris and focus) is your choice of ISO or ASA setting. After our tests and some advice from John Bowring at Lemac, for 'The Combination' i set the ISO at 500, up from the nominal setting of 320 ISO. If you are using the waveform and monitor output to set exposure, then this essentially underexposes the sensor by two thirds of a stop, helping to protect the highlights in the scene from clipping and in effect increasing the useful dynamic range. Of course in a controlled studio environment the contrast of a scene can usually be manipulated with lighting so there is less need to underexpose. But shooting a low budget feature on location presents many situations where the contrast in a scene cannot be easily controlled so i know that if my highlights are starting to clip on the waveform, at 500 ISO there is a little more headroom on the RAW image. In fact the more contrast in a scene, such as full sun onto white shirts with a shaded wall in the BG, the higher the ISO can be set to hold details in the highlights on the shirts.

Even though low light and nighttime shooting typically has less contrast - except for any light sources in frame - i find 500 ISO a more intuitive speed to use thanks to years using 500 ISO film for night shoots, knowing what lamps are needed to cover given areas to a particular T-stop and so on. So i left the ISO setting constant throughout the shoot. However, this does present a problem when shooting in bright sunny exterior day conditions with a camera rated at 500 ISO . The amount of ND filtration required to get down to a T stop of around 2.8 or 4 is about 5 stops  - which unfortunately creates an magenta tint to the image caused by excess infra red hitting the sensor compared to the visible light. While it can be graded out in post there are IR cut ND filters becoming available to deal with this issue.

Jim Jannard (RED's founder) touches on this relationship between ISO setting and dynamic range in a recent post on the RedUser forum. It sounds like the forthcoming Build 16 will have much improved ways to judge exposure at the sensor rather than just the HD monitor output which will be very helpful if it works. The most difficult part i find of working with HD video and the RED as compared to film is setting exposure and containing highlights.

Other settings we had were frame size and frame rate - we shot at 4K 2:1, using the full width of the super 35mm sized sensor, then setting the monitor frame line markers to 1: 2.40 aspect ratio. Base frame rate was true 24fps (not 23.98). For slow motion footage up to 50 and 60 fps, we changed resolution to 3K 2:1 then set variable speed mode allowing recording on the same media, in our case usually the Red drive. We shot at Redcode 28 compression rather than the higher quality Redcode 36 to save on disk space with the 2.2 terabytes of original footage duplicated twice for safety backups. Redcode 28 gave us a higher top frame rate also, up to 60 fps at 3K.

RED feedback 1

Finally i get to provide some feedback on our experiences shooting with the RED camera on the local film 'The Combination' which wrapped at the end of April.

We shot for just over 4 weeks with one RED ONE camera shooting 4K 2:1 24fps with a set of Arri Ultra Primes and an Angenieux 25-250mm HR zoom. The camera was using Build 15 (firstly the beta version, then upgraded to the release version  on set) and in terms of reliability it hardly skipped a beat. I was expecting a few more issues to crop up considering some of the operational history with earlier builds but i was pleasantly surprised. There were some minor issues with the Red LCD and we lost one clip when the camera went into timelapse mode by itself, but all in all it worked as advertised.

More notes to follow soon including - my setup; the camera's best points; it's bad points, and things to improve.

The RED Combination

We shot the second test day with the RED camera in preparation for the feature film  'The Combination' to be shot here in Sydney in April. The camera, supplied by Lemac Films, behaved itself very well, apart from a niggling problem with setting the correct white balance setting. To get a natural looking daylight balance on the monitor we had to set manual WB to 10,000 degrees K which is clearly incorrect. Switching to the regular 'daylight' setting produced a rather blue image. So a bug i guess. I probably need to check the Reduser forum about it. Looking forward to seeing the pictures filmed out for us on 35mm.

RED rides again

Last week we got hold of a RED camera kit and lenses for testing for an upcoming indie feature film shoot i will DP. The gear was courtesy of Lemac Films in Sydney, who currently have two RED kits and are expecting a few more soon.

I was interested in having a look at the latest update, known as 'Build 14', and Lemac boys updated their camera to 14 when we arrived, which only took a couple of minutes. A few things have changed since i shot with the camera last year and have really helped the camera along as a viable option for a feature film shoot.

We tested the new 3K mode at 50 fps; recording to the CF card and switching to the REDDRIVE - when you change the shooting mode from 4K to 3K you must reformat the record media, ie 4K and 3K material cannot exist on the same media. So a good method may be to record the bulk of the film at 4K on the drives and put slo-mo 3K footage on the CF cards. Audio can be recorded and played back in the headphones; and the startup time seems to be halved, about 45 secs. All in all some good improvements. Simultaneous video outputs are still not enabled but apparently this will be fixed in Build 15, due in March.

We will be staging a location test shoot soon.

Varicam Hula Hoops

I recently completed a shoot with Panasonic's venerable but still impressive Varicam HD camera, a Summer Promo for cable channel TV1. We utilised the variable frame rates of 60 and 40 fps for much of the spot shot on Sydney's Cronulla Beach with two Varicams blazing away

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Stupid Stupid Man - series 2 on air

This 8-part comedy series was shot in August-September 2007 and is now on air in Australia on cable channel TV1 on  Tuesday nights - click here for official site and download of various Episodes.

We shot the show on the Canon XL-H1 HDV cameras and down-converted to SD with excellent results, for the full article see the Jan 2008 issue of Digital Media World Magazine . I'm on the cover, caught in a rather serious moment on what was really a very funny show.