Super-duper Cameras: RED
I’ll have to revisit this early December after the Scarlet announcements on Nov 30th.
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EPIC X 35 |
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Epic-617 Pro |
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oneTag Archive -
Red One, why it’s so Great
Ok just to start by throwing some numbers our there; use them don’t use them – whatever.
2k,4k,4:4:4,4:2:2,12 bit RAW 4k, etc
Ok so what is so great about that?
Well, if you consider what options you have if you wanted to film with those specifications. If you that the price of $30,000 for a standard package for the Red One; Body, Lens etc, then a comparative Panasonic might be the Panasonic AJ-HDX900 which goes for about $26,000. But hey, we are not comparing apples with apples here because the HDX900 is only 1080p, 2/3 sensors and 4:2:2 colour sampling. Maybe comparing the Red One to a 35mm Film camera would be more accurate, but they are very expensive to buy and the film stock expensive to maintain and work with. Here is an interesting comparison from the Red Site:
So the question begs: Why would I want it?
Well; besides the really cool camera that it is, I do a lot of Green Screen work and would love to have 4:4:4 colour sampling to work on. Then there is the whole future proof thing of having a 4k camera; on there is no easy distribution media for 4k HD or even 2k, maybe going out to Film from Red One acquisition would be better. Only problem is that I am still waiting for Apple to do something about Blu Ray in the Mac Pros and DVD Studio Pro, come on guys we are waiting.
The is one problem, even though I use manual settings on my camera and am very comfortable with that, the Red One is far more demanding in that regard. It is not like you can take the Red and shoot on the fly with out much planning; it requires decent lighting and accurate focus, it probably requires the same kind of handling as a 35mm film camera.
More Information
Red Site
Red One Forums
My First Red Camera Experience
The Nothing Men,
Dress for Success with RED
RED One Unboxed
Shot on RED
Shooting with RED
Seeing RED in Montreal
The First TenBefore – Keying
Hi,
First I want to give a shout out to Morgan, the presenter and organizer of this project; without him I may have been humming and hahhing about how difficult this was going to be and how I could not find someone to present. Just shows you, God’s timing is perfect and God provides.
Secondly to Dylan, who did the TenBefore transition and background, he’s going study at varsity only next year and think that he’s gonna teach them a few things 
Also, just to point to the Previous two posts regarding this series:
The First Ten Before - Introduction
The First Ten Before – Camera, Screen and Lights
Ok, now the nitty gritty stuff that Compositing Green Screen footage is made of.
Here is a typical shot I started off with. Morgan delivering some information for one of the segments. This is medium shot that I found much easier to light and most certainly to key.
I ended up choosing the Primatte Keyer over KeyLight and Chroma Key mainly because it produced the most desirable result after much trial and error. Primatte also allowed me to resample differently for foreground, background, spill sponge and matte sponge.
Because of the inherent short comings of colour decimation in PAL, or for that matter; NTSC and HDV, I had to figure out how to blur the UV channels. This was because of PAL’s 4:2:0 colour sub sampling algorithm; which may be ok for saving on space, bit rate or whatever, but ummm, it’s an utter head ache for colour keying. hmmm that is why I would love to try out the RED One . A very useful book that give an all round and easy to understand description of colour decimation along with all things compositing is Steve Wright’s book called Compositing Visual Effects: Essentials for the Aspiring Artist, check it out at Amazon here.
I did try the convert to YUV, blur the UV channels and then return to RGB, but not with much success. Instead I found two useful macros for Shake at highend3d - the FourXXEnhancer and PreprocessDV which can be used together or separately.
I used a small holdout matte and a garbage matte to help the keyer out a little.
Also, maybe as a cheat, I used another keying macro for Shake from hightend3d called Light Wrap, just to sort out the edges of Morgan and to get the effect of actually being in the room. Ok, you would have re-render if you ever had to change the backing, especially if the colour change was huge.
Here is the final result of the matte I was able to produce. The edges were not perfect, but I was quite happy with the edges around Morgan’s head.
And here is my Shake node structure:
Next I’ll chat about how I composited and edited the final sequence.
Feel free to offer and comments, suggestion and criticisms, we are planning to make another attempt that will hopefully be much better and every bit of help would be greatly appreciated.
The First Ten Before – Camera, Screen and Lights
Most of the Ten Before footage was always going to be footage of someone talking in front of a green screen. The idea was to composite this talker(talent) into a 3D environment or room so that various graphics and text elements could be introduced into the scene as if by magic, well sort of.
So we did a few tests, hmmm, from the onset it was obvious that the camera was introducing a lot of edge sharpening. The camera I used was a Panasonic DVX100BE. After some research on the net I found that this was indeed true and that I was supposed to change the detail levels to a so called sweet spot of -3 (see an brilliant forum discussion at http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/193/868436).
I did set the Panasonic’s edge enhancement to -3 in one of the Scene File settings; that is both the Detail Level and the V Detail Level. But I have to say that I still struggled with a halo effect around the talent when I performed the Keying in Shake 4.1. I’ll explain what I did in a different section, but suffice to say – I did a lot of manipulation of the UV channels to get an ok result (bearing in mind the 4:2:0 limitations in this SD PAL camera).
I must say that the Panasonic DVX 100BE is a cool camera for general shooting and that with decent lighting and proper technique on can get a good enough key, but I dream of the day when I can try Panasonic HVX200A or better the HPX170 – both 4:2:2 colour sub sampling cameras, or ummm the errrr coolest of all RED One with 4:4:4 oh yeah.
The two things I insisted on when this Ten Before was shot was that one; the camera must not move and two; the talent must be as still as possible. Purely to make the keying a simpler process. I shot the segments at either a full body shot or a medium close up; filming all the full body shots on after the other then all the mediums. This was a huge time saver because I was able to apply the same key to all the same shot types – with, of course, slight changes to the rotoscope I used as a garbage matte. This worked well, but most people commented that the lack of movement was boring – well you win some and you loose some.
Here is a still from one of the full body shots, you can see that I did not have enough width to work with – another reason that movement was restricted – next time get more material.
The green screen I used was something I picked up at a material shop; very cheap, very bad. But it was a good try none the less.
As far as lighting goes, I used three 150W dedo lights to light Morgan, and then two 2x4ft KinoFlos to light the screen. With all that lighting I achieved consistency during the shoot but I felt that I could have done with more light, maybe more ambient light. The shadows around the legs became a problem in Shake – I had to roto them quite closely; wasting a bit of time and giving the feet an unnatural look. I suppose I could have used the shadows to create a ‘reflection’ but then I would not have had control of that reflection.
Ok I also realized that the lighting of the green screen was not even, I should have used a vector scope. And yes I did use the one in Final Cut Pro 6.0.3 during testing but for some reason I forgot about it when I did the actual shoot. Too caught up in things you know 
. Next time I’ll make sure the camera is hooked up to the MBP and FCP has it’s scopes open in the capture window (Non controllable device selected).
Right, well, any comments? Next I’ll explain what I did in Shake and FCP along with a few screen shots
