I know I will be.
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HV20's Rolling Shutter
There have been some concerned comments on one of my HV20posts about the camera's "rolling shutter" and the distortion it creates. There were even some links to some seemingly disastrous footage that caused one person to return his camera.
As the owner of a shiny new HV20, I'm not all that concerned about this shortcoming. Last I checked, I had no immediate plans to shoot a film entitled "a jiggly look at a lamp." I've uploaded some footage that represents about as kinetic a shot as I'm ever likely to shoot, and while the lampposts are leaning over a bit, I hardly call it a dealbreaker. You just need to follow the DV Rebel rules and keep your shutter locked at 1/48, as well as the age-old rules of 24 fps cinema about pans being motivated by an object in the scene. It also doesn't hurt that I properly removed the 3:2 pulldown from my clip before compressing it.
Here's a narcoleptic but awesome tutorial on how to manage exposure while maintaining the cinematic shutter speed of 1/48 (or 1/50 for PAL). (thanks to Farnsworth for posting this link on the Rebel Café.)
I should note that I'm not disputing the claims by the author of the most excellent Syntheyes software that the rolling shutter is problematic for 3D tracking—but I do plan on testing just how impossible it is to get a solid track from a "normal" HV20 shot.
Is the HV20's rolling shutter a flaw that you must be cautious of? Yes. Does it ruin the camera for the DV Rebel? No way.
DV Rebel's fxguide
I love the fxguide podcast, and it seems that the feeling may be mutual. I had the pleasure of joining John Montgomery for my second interview on the podcast over the weekend, and the episode is now up. We rapped about The Guide and about the funky state of compositing software right now. The episode is a companion to the review just posted on fxguide.com.
Should you buy a Red One?
It's no secret that the Red One has caused quite a stir, and for good reason. The price point, design philosophy, and Howard Hughes-ian nature of the endeavor are thrilling and a welcome change in the staid world of camera manufacturers. I'm a big fan.
And money has now been placed where previously did mouths only tread. We saw working cameras at NAB, and some truly amazing footage shot in real-world conditions. So the Red One is real, and you could probably buy one if you wanted to. Do you want to?
I have a reservation for a Red One camera. Or rather, The Orphanage does. There's no way I'd be putting my own $17,500 into a camera body, no matter how badass it is. But for The Orphanage, it almost makes sense. With the body, a Nikon f-mount front plate, and lenses we already have, we can use it for element shoots and spec projects. Would we do enough of that in a year or three to make it cost-effective to buy rather than rent? Maybe. Who knows, when our reservation comes up, we may not even buy the thing.
Sometimes I get reminded why I don't post more on public forums. One such occasion came when I dared to gently point out on DVXuser.com (a forum about accessible filmmaking, one of my favorite subjects) that a satisfactory filmmaking kit centered around the Red One would cost a great deal more that 20-or-so grand. I actually received personal messaged from people who were incensed that I would dare try to chip at their dream, accusing me of propagating false numbers.
There are those out there who are throwing rocks at Red because they feel threatened by it, or because they like the status quo of cameras made by and for the elite. So I have to be careful in my writing lest I be mistaken for one of those people. In fact I'm the biggest fan of accessibility there is. I dare say I wrote the book on it. I'm just concerned that some Red reservation holders are getting themselves into the same situation I did when I was about eight years old, and I saved my allowance for weeks to buy an AT-AT toy. I saved and saved and I even factored in sales tax, so that when I got to the store I had exactly enough change in my jar to buy the Imperial Walker.
But not the batteries.
Luckily my Mom was there to bail me out. But she won't be there for me when I realize that my razor-sharp Nikon 50mm prime (which mounts to the $500 Red f-mount plate) breathes like crazy when I try to rack focus with it (Red 18-50 f2.8 zoom: $6,500), or that I really quite need a follow-focus regardless of which lens I use (cheapest follow focus I've found: $645, rails to mount it to: $1,250), or that a tripod that can hold a fully kitted-out Red One costs a couple grand at the very least, or that I might want some way of seeing what my camera is shooting (Red EVF: $2,950) or some way of recording it (Red Drive 320GB: $900). Mom?
Could you strip down your expectations and start making pictures with a Red One for about $20,000? Absolutely. But should you? Will you make a better movie with this minimalist Red setup (one lens, no tripod, 720p LCD monitor) than you would with an HV20, an M2 adapter, that same Nikon lens, and $17,000 left over for things like extra lenses, DV tapes, and coffee for the crew? Which of these scenarios creates a better experience for the audience? Which puts you, the filmmaker, in a better place to succeed?
Although it may sound like those questions are purely rhetorical, they are not. As you will recall, I have a reservation and I must decide what to do with it. These are real, active questions for me, and, I imagine, for many other people.
So in a world full of entirely justified optimism and excitement about the Red One, I hope you all will indulge my exploration of the elephant in the room. No matter how bitchin' the Red One may be, it may not be the best camera for you. Or me.
I'm going to finish with a lengthy quote from Carlos Acosta, a DIT from LA who posted this eloquent reply to a conversation on the CML about the relative merits of buying any camera.
...Let me throw some great reasons to NOT own production hardware. They will be especially true if you are a post/consultant. I am amazed how many producers, editors, animators, etc have committed to buying a camera.
This list could go on and on....my only hope is that those who buy production cameras and related gear understand the TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP. It's not as simple as adding up the hardware. If you buy equipment for the purpose of making money, it's a business. If your current business is not directly related to renting cameras you will have to start a new business which will likely compromise your old business. Now, your new camera business has to have insurance, clients [the bigger ones like free lunches], an office, subrentals, repairs, new gadgets, LOTS of time on the phone explaining the new technologies to a clueless producer hoping for a cheap camera.
- Production gear gets beat up and blamed for every problem that comes afterwards.
- No matter how cheap you think it is, it's expensive.
- You will never have the right lenses
- You will never have the right tripod.
- You will never be cheap enough.
- It will break in the middle of a shoot and you become public enemy #1.
- You will find yourself changing your career so that you can keep your fancy camera busy even when it is the wrong camera for the job.
All of a sudden....$17,500 seems scary to me. When it's all said and done, it's more like $90,000 plus continuing operating expenses and I still have an experimental system that has been branded as the CHEAP alternative. It's still a camera, the business has not changed at all. For the fifteen years I've been in this business, I have seen countless products that promise the world and actually deliver. Did the world change? No, it just got more pixels, more color, more speed, or more sex appeal.
I purchased a DVW-700 in 1997. It was 1035i and the hottest and most exciting development for digital acquisition at the time. It was quickly changed to the HDW-700a which did 1080i. It was a BetaSP/DigiBeta world at the time and no one knew what to do with this camera that required huge changes to take full advantage of. I had the newest toy on the block and was the poorest guy around for it.
The thread about compression is a great example of being realistic in a business that is full of crazy expectations. Compression is a reality for a multitude of reasons, but it comes down to making money. Buying a camera and what camera to buy requires a glimpse of reality as well.
If, on the other hand, you want an awesome toy and have lots of excess cash.....
Carlos Acosta,
DIT/Engineer/Reality Checker
LA
Thanks for permission to re-use that here Carlos. The conversation is still active there on CML, here, and everywhere else. Is the Red One the most exciting thing to happen in Cinema in years? Heck yeah. Does that mean you should buy one? Maybe, or maybe not.
More to come on this, of that you can be sure.
Red One camera body: $17,500. Red One as pictured above, $33,870 (my best guess based on prices at the Red Store)
Mythbusting 1 2 3
Mark Christiansen, author of Adobe After Effects 7 Studio Techniques, has complete the third installment of a series of articles about the state of compositing software for visual effects, and how Adobe After Effects fits into the picture.
I agree with Mark central thesis that AE's weak spots are responsiveness under heavy loads and "pre-composing," although on the latter it's not so much that pre-comping (nesting one layered comp into another) is the problem, but rather that once you do, you've lost any ability to visually navigate your project. As I've mentioned before (wow, way back in 2004!), it's the project itself, not the layered comp, that is the workspace of After Effects, and its long past unconscionable that there's no decent way to navigate it.
The Orphanage has been running shots with Fusion and NUKE for a while new, having the possibly unique history of never once running a shot through Shake. Simultaneously, we currently have a large show using After Effects. It's fascinating to watch compositors seated in the same room work in two such different applications as NUKE and After Effects. While each has its strengths and weaknesses, as Mark adroitly summarized in part two, one colossal advantage of NUKE's nodal system over AE is navigability. Sitting over an AE comper's shoulder, I watch them search and hunt desperately for "where" they did a certain bit of compositing. A comper is a visual person, and yet they are forced to scour endless alphabetically-sorted lists or arbitrary expanses of tabbed panes to find a comp they pray they've named distinctively. If they ever dared open the Flowchart View, they'd likely find that AE had trashed whatever organization they'd attempted to create there.
Meanwhile, the NUKE comper navigates to the "place" in their node tree where they did a particular bit of work with two flicks of the mouse. In the same way that you can reach for a familiar book off your shelf without needing to read the title—the general location, the color of the spine, or even the fact that you've left it sticking out slightly are more than enough visual cues to identify it—the nodal comper creates a distinct visual landscape that they know like the back of their hand. Doing a bunch of procsessing on just the background? Lump those nodes over yonder. Got a cool light-wrap trick you like? The nodes that make up that technique take on a certain shape that you'll recognize at a distance and remember months later.
Looking back at my 2004 article I seemed almost apologetic about wishing for more of a nodal interface to After Effects. That hesitancy is now completely gone. AE's only leg up on Motion is that it can handle much more complex compositing. In order to maintain this important differentiation, AE needs to stop punishing its users for creating the very type of project that makes AE worth using—one that contains many nested precomps.
That's right, pre-composing is anything but evil—it's the key to AE's power. But AE will remain in this weird limbo between the high- and low-end until it gives us an interface that lets us visualize and navigate these nested comps.
Mythbusting (Part One)
Mythbusting (Part Two)
Mythbusting (Part Three)
fxguide podcast featuring Mark in a roundtable discussion of comping apps at NAB