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Red Digital Cinema Workflow Case Study

May 13, 2008 10:10 AM, STAFF REPORT

Director Brandon Dickerson had seven days to shoot and post the music video promo for the upcoming Disney release The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. The concept was to take the song, “This is Home,” performed by the band Switchfoot, and base it on the idea from the new Narnia film that a subway tunnel could somehow be a conduit to a magical, alternate world. Dickerson and cinematographer Martin Coppen planned to shoot band members in a Los Angeles subway station from across the tracks as trains zoom by the camera, and that footage was later cut together with clips from the actual film.

Time was of the essence, and even though Dickerson—formerly a cinematographer himself—and Coppen were used to mainly shooting film, they took the advice of technical guru Michael Cioni of PlasterCity Digital Post, based in Los Angeles, and used the Red Digital Cinema Red One camera for a one-night shoot of the band at a Los Angeles subway station. They did so even though they had very little time to learn the technology.

“The first thing that appealed to me was Michael saying, ‘You’re shooting overnight. You could wait a whole extra day to send film to bath, or you could be editing the next day,’ ” Dickerson says. “I had seen some commercial work that had been shot with the Red, and I liked the look, but it was the time savings that really sold me. The other thing was that the camera rental was less expensive than a film package would have been, and we didn’t have to buy film. So we put the savings into a second Red camera, which really saved us because we could only be in the station between 1a.m. and 5 a.m., which wasn’t long at all, but we were still able to get two angles of everything.”

The Red Drive (RAID) system that is seated with the cameras and holds up to 2 hours of 4K data helped the director roll on things he might not have had he been conserving film. But it was really when the shoot commenced that Dickerson became enamored of the system because of the images he was able to view on his HD monitor.

“Other high-end HD cameras all record to some flavor of MPEG 4, but Red uses Wavelet-based compression similar to JPEG 2000,” Cioni says. This intra-frame, rather than inter-frame, compression scheme, he suggests, is more efficient for the type of work Dickerson’s team was doing. Red, he says, also allows you to shoot in a proprietary RAW, 4K, 10-bit, R3D format, and to also output QuickTime files in 3K, 2K, and half-K simultaneously.

“Brandon and Martin were able to see the file in linear rec. 709 HD space on the monitor,” Cioni says. “And they didn’t need to carry a LUTher box, or worry about metadata that might get lost or misinterpreted later. The metadata is ‘stapled’ to the image.”

And the look that DIT Dino Georgopoulos was able to bring up on the HD monitors during the shoot for the DP and director impressed Dickerson, who had long been used to waiting on telecined dailies of his film work. “I’m used to apologizing to clients and saying, ‘It will look better when it’s been through final color,’ and I still apologized, but I didn’t feel I had to,” he says.

The material was sent to PlasterCity, where editor Jeff Stone read 2K QuickTime file versions of the material, and then rendered them into the ProRes format to edit in Apple Final Cut Pro 6.0.3. Then post house Ring of Fire prepared the images for final effects and compositing work.

PlasterCity then performed the online work, although Cioni notes that “conform” is now the preferred term in workflows like this one.

“With this workflow, some of the old terminology is really changing,” he says. “With Red, there really isn’t any footage that needs to be re-assembled. What we do is take the Final Cut Pro timeline and use Scratch by Assimilate, which then, instead of the ProRes version, takes the R3D 4K version and metadata and re-links the footage. We can conform a 4-minute project in 30 seconds. From there, we can translate the high-res material into any kind of format. In this case, we made 2K DPX files that were then used as a basis to master the HD and DigiBeta versions.”

Dickerson says the workflow, which was largely new to him when his team adopted it, worked great, even as he acknowledges others may have had different experiences. “I was most concerned about cutting between our Red footage and the scenes from the movie, which was shot in 35mm, but I don’t think anyone will see some big difference,” he says.

Dickerson and Cioni both add that digital imaging technician Georgopoulos was central to their success. Cioni points out that “a successful Red project,” like any other workflow, “is only as good as the people behind it.”

To see the video, visit www.boommv.com.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.