Working with the RED ONE

This is a post by Aram(Spike) from a filmmaking forum we belong to. I’d asked him to talk about the settings we were shooting with.

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We were keeping all the candle lit scenes extra orange through white balance keeping the blue channel down to minimize noise. I think we shot it daylight balanced with Tungsten lights at 100 iso.

The bedroom was shot daylight balanced with daylight balanced lights at 320 iso to keep the image as clean as possible since the RED sensor is a daylight balanced one and anytime you can keep it fed with blue do so.

We shot on build 16 with 3 8 gig cards without a hitch. I think we hit the end of the card twice during a take but only because we had other shots on the same card.

We used Zeiss primes and 95% was shot on the 50mm and 95% was shot hand held.

Mike busted his ass with that camera on his back but since time was short it wasn’t worth it to switch camera ops after he got the flow of the scene down so Mike had to take it for the team and did it well. We usually switch up between us and also use Omar since he towers over the both of us and can get taller actors better.

The one thing that was a pain was that we sent our EVF back to RED for a fixing and that made the hand held work much much harder since we had to use the LCD. Mike had to bend his neck back all the time to be able to see the monitor. With the EVF you can adjust it in any direction because it sits on your eye so the eyeball focus distance isn’t a problem. I could never hand hold with the LCD since I can’t see that well close up and wouldnt be able to keep things in focus, at least not with the RED arm’s short distance.

We borrowed Kwan’s top mount and were able to mount the battery on the top of the camera giving it a shorter length for the tight spots so the batts didn’t hit any walls or furniture. Another thing was we didn’t put the follow focus on to save weight on the cam since we had to have the wireless units on there. We took the mattboxx off also in the tight areas to save weight and to keep it from bumping into things. The jump from 4K to 2K for the slo-mo was a little bit of a pain but lucky the slo-mos didn’t require wider angles since the sensor gets cropped a ton. We had just enough room to get the shots at 2K.

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Aram talks about us doing 95% hand-held. That wasa true for the scenes we were shooting those days. A lot of hand-held with some specifically chosen dolly shots.

On the next shoot date, we will be doing mostly dolly shots with a few jib shots mixed in.