Mac FilmMakers’: Red One Camera
Another great Mac Filmmakers’ meeting at Apple in Cupertino. The group has a blog now.
Red One Digital Video Camera
Torrey Loomis of Silverado Systems in Folsom (an Apple Reseller for pro filmmakers) brought a RED ONE camera system (serial number 00021) and gave a good presentation with actual footage.
Red One - 12 MP outsourced “Mysterium” sensor, 4k horizontal, rebored consumer still lenses (I’d guess Canon L lenses), goal is 4k projection, or shoot for DVD.
Camera body is about $25k including essential accessories, lens set is about 20k. $65k to 70k for complete package. Rental from Silverado is $2k/day, $4k/week, negotiable for longer.
redcode RAW is 4k wavelet compression.
60 to 72 fps for slow-mo, special effects like “300″ movie battle scene.
Supports shutter speeds 124-2000, 100-640 ISO, 320-500 is good, 1000 ISO for monitoring in dark.
4 fan settings: hot, silent, idle, other fan setting.
Has some overheating problems in Spain, but no shutdowns in field.
8 GB - 5 minutes of video (enough for most scenes), waiting for 32 GB CF for 19 minutes, can use hard drives.
redalert software - included.
redcine software - 5k - 7k.
Shorts shot with the Red One Camera:
Paranoid - posted in 40 hours, black spot blowouts, hard on actress makeup.
Crossing the Line - shot 2 days in NZ by Peter Jackson, 15 minute featurette, posted in 10 days.
On the other hand, Blair Witch project was shot on DV: good story, poor camera quality bugs you second time on 40′ screen.
reduser.net
creativecow
Fabulous Pizza Break
One guy had a YouTube decal’ed red Casio Exilim EX-S880 camera. He said video was better quality than his G2. Resolution was still 640×480 though. YouTube tie-in is good for Google to distribute upload software utility in box.
Demo Reels
Taylor did another one of his useful updates on blogging, podcasting, RSS and free bandwidth hosting for videos:
- blip.tv, free good-quality encoding and hosting of video
- pameran.com
- grab flv formatted file from youtube
- Sony hc-7 hdv cam has remote, canon doesn’t. Likely because Sony can integrate their own chips better than licensees.
- itunes, ipods prefer MPEG4
- RSS publishing
- Obama Camp blog
Multi-lingual industrial DVD of blood glucose product manual was presented by Polish Ph.D.
He had some great tips on DVDs and mastering:
DVD+R in black envelope for masters. Don’t read the disc or bits change since self-made disks are basically burned into photo emulsion.
Taiyo Yuden is best medium, mostly a QA issue these days.
Mitsui, verbatim other mfgs.
- DVD10 double-sided single density NTSC and PAL disk
- print notes on aquaproof hub
- Final Cut Studio 2 pro-res from hdv, no AIC - don’t use imovie
- Mac Disk Utility to burn, 3x slower but bit-for-bit accurate
- your golden master dvd: don’t read it, don’t write on label
- HP 5280 all in one printer
- write with water-soluble ink, not sharpie which is acid-based
- Sony ZU1 video camera
- videotransform.com provides good service and are open-minded to special DVD runs
- certified Taiyo Yuden disk $1.50 each directly from Japan
Thanks to Apple for again hosting the meeting in their lovely Town Hall 4 theater.