Budgeting a small feature to shoot on RED?

Tom Lowe

Tom Lowe

Well-known member
I'm trying to put together a ballpark budget for some investors. The plan is to shoot a small feature this summer 2007 on a RED camera in compressed 4K. The budget will be about $120k. Either me or my buddy are going to buy the RED camera and some prime lenses, so what I am wondering about, budget-wise, is how much should I include for...

1) Storage. How much to budget for storage? Will I need a RAID array in the field? What will the camera record to? Will I rent a magazine? Download to simple 1TB external harddrives?

2) An HD tech? Can I train one of my young filmschool guys to do this in the field? Will I need a dedicated person to store and "digitize" footage?

3) Editing computer/software. I want to edit online, like I did with my HVX footage last summer. What kind of a system upgrade am I going to need to edit RED 4K compressed in real time? Software: Is Cineform offering something at 4K? Red? Adobe? I use Premiere Pro now with Aspect HD. How much is this additional software and hardware going to cost me?

4) What can I use as an HD field monitor? What about an onboard for the AC?

I just want some ballpark numbers, so I don't write a budget, then figure out later I left out something really important and expensive.

Thanks!
 
1) hard to tell. REDCODE RAW 4k is about 27MB/s. How many seconds will you be recording - and probably double that for safety. You'll record to the RED DRIVE - less that $1000 per RED Drive.

2) TO back up the RED Drives? Sure, or just buy enough for the day's shoot and do it yourself in the evening.

3) 4k Online is going to be tricky. It's not just playing it back, but rendering time for full 4k effects etc. WIth RED CINE you can do an online / offline, or transcode to something else (Cineform if you want to ) or you can edit with the REDCODE codec. Lots of options that we'll be talking about as they get finalized.

4) There will be a RED LCD monitor. You could use that.

Hope that helps.

Graeme
 
Graeme, thanks,

Graeme_Nattress said:
1) hard to tell. REDCODE RAW 4k is about 27MB/s. How many seconds will you be recording - and probably double that for safety. You'll record to the RED DRIVE - less that $1000 per RED Drive.
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What are the Red drives? Just basically harddrives? How many GBs?

2) TO back up the RED Drives? Sure, or just buy enough for the day's shoot and do it yourself in the evening.
Click to expand...

So no HD techs needed to deal with these RED drives? Is there a lenghty "digitizing" process before we can view "dailies" at night?

3) 4k Online is going to be tricky. It's not just playing it back, but rendering time for full 4k effects etc. WIth RED CINE you can do an online / offline, or transcode to something else (Cineform if you want to ) or you can edit with the REDCODE codec. Lots of options that we'll be talking about as they get finalized.
Click to expand...

So i can use the REDCODE inside Premiere Pro at 4K? Is that free software for camera owners? How much horsepower is my DELL going to need? I understand this is a tough question, since processors seem to be upgraded every few months.

4) There will be a RED LCD monitor. You could use that.
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How much is that? What is the resolution? Will there be a 2K/1080p out so i can use a plasma or LCD in the field maybe?

Thanks.
 
RED DRIVEs are TBD - we're still working on them, but they're designed to be mounted behind the camera on a bracket and will record the REDCODE compressed 4k, 2k, HD footage.

You should be able to use REDCINE to view footage direct off the drives, and copying them to your main system should take not too much longer than the record time as we're maxing out the drive speed for data rate.

REDCODE is a software codec for playback of RED files. We've not announced much details about it yet as it's still in development, but should work in a wide variety of cross platform places. Again, processor speed is TBD.

I don't know the resolution on the LCD panel. It should make for a nice picture though. And yes, there's a monitor port for your LCD or Plasma.

Graeme
 
So no REDCode Direct to Computer output options for a stationairy production?

It would be nice if there was something in between RAW and REDCODE in the gigabit range if we had a desktop with a RAID. I'm thinking about a Chroma Key scenario where you want as clean of data as humanely possible, but might not have a quarter million dollar SAN ready for the Highspeed Serial Port.
 
The camera is designed to talk to the drive direct, rather than a computer. There's nothing really inbetween REDCODE and full on RAW, although in teh green screen footage I have, I don't think you'd have a bother keying it after it's gone through redcode. It's really nice and clean.

Graeme
 
Graeme_Nattress said:
1) hard to tell. REDCODE RAW 4k is about 27MB/s. How many seconds will you be recording - and probably double that for safety. You'll record to the RED DRIVE - less that $1000 per RED Drive.
Click to expand...
Graeme,

We've been hearing a lot of "you'll record to the RED DRIVE," lately, but RED FLASH hasn't been discussed as much. I would FAR prefer to record to solid state memory with no moving parts out in the field than I would to any hard drive solution. I thought the original announcements said that both the drive and the flash would cost under $1,000, but the capacity of the flash hasn't been verified. Can you elaborate on the direction that RED FLASH has headed?
 
I hope david from Cineform will weigh in with some cost estimates for the 4k Premiere Pro software.

I guess then i have to worry about what kind of monitor I am editing on? Could I get away with editing on something like the Dell 30" (2560x1600)?

So I guess I would edit and archive in 4K compressed, and just output 1080p for the festivals or whatever.
 
I thought RED Drive was going to fit in a slot in the camera. Is RED Flash going to fit in the camera? I would like to keep the camera as small as possible, but I obviously need to record to something....
 
this doesnt have anything to do with the discussion...sorry...

...i just happened to be watching the exact part of the New World from your icon Tom..... as i was checking out this thread. I dunno...it was pretty cool.
 
We're in the same boat (producing a low budget red feature next summer) although we have our money in place.

We have a bit more money ($200K to max the SAG ultra low budget) and so far I figure about $40K per camera package (we're getting two--backup/second unit/two camera more like $50K/$30K) and about $20K to beef up our post gear (already have two G5s, 23", 30", FC studio, etc)

We're planning shooting 4K compressed, editing 1080p and only conforming the 4K if we get into major festivals that can handle it.

Does anyone think I'm dreaming or do those numbers sound semi-realistic?
 
We should compare bugets.

How many days are you shooting?

So you will effectively downconvert the 4K to 1080p, then edit the 1080 and output 1080 for festivals, screenings, etc? That might leave you with a lot of 4K footage sitting around on harddrives. Will you go back and get rid of the 4K archived stuff that does not conform to the 1080 edit?

If you are spending 20k just to beef up your post, maybe I should try to raise something closer to 150k?
 
I plan on upgrading to an 8 core mac pro by then with raid, ram and backup drives is a bunch of it.

If you are woried about the 4K sitting around, I wouldn't be. Drives are cheap and hopefully cheaper by next june-july. At 100 Gig per hour of compressed 4K (if I remember correctly) at you shoot a 2 hour feature at 10 to 1 you need 2 * 10 * 100 or around 2 terabytes of drives to store the 4K on--should be around a $1k for that (you don't need raid on your shelf so just a bunch of drives).

2 Red drives per camera ($1K each per drive) 1 drive should shoot all day but I got an extra for backup.

I have a phobia about deleting much at all so if the software is workable and do-able on my setup I will give conforming the 4K a shot (though I doubt I will be able to play it on anything) to focus the entire feature on one set of drives but I'll likely just plunk the redcode drives on my shelf in case I realize a month later that I screwed something up!

Big fears are how long it's going to take to generate the 1080p (some speculate 1/2 second per frame) and is red code really going to be able to compete with true RAW. I can't begin to even imagine a workflow for an indie feature with true RAW--let alone what you need on the set?

And the biggest fear is what happens if the 1st gen camera melts through the dolly and needs to be sent out for repair--what do you use as a backup of you don't have redundancy? We will have one level but what happens if the second camera goes the way of the first? What do you do--rent a Viper?

We are hoping the first wave of us jumping in the pool will have the RED lifeguards watching us pretty closely!
 
Yeah, I share your concerns. We will be shooting on only one camera, and way out on location in the mountains and stuff, so I guess we are going to pre-arrange some kind of deal with a rental house to have a RED on standby/FEDEX for us. It's definitely risky.

Is the RED team itself going to support indie owners out in the field if the camera goes south under warranty? As many of us know, when you're out on location and a camera goes bad, it's panic time, because the money is flying away and nothing is getting shot.

Regarding editing, after shooting on the HVX this summer and being able to CONTROL the footage with real-time native editing on a moderately high-powered 500GB DELL Raid system, I cannot see myself doing a downconvert/proxy/offline edit. It's just too nice to have it all at your fingertips.
 
Weston said:
this doesnt have anything to do with the discussion...sorry...

...i just happened to be watching the exact part of the New World from your icon Tom..... as i was checking out this thread. I dunno...it was pretty cool.
Click to expand...

Haha, cool. Yeah, that's one of my favorite shots, like, ever, in cinema history. Malick is like a god to me. :)
 
Tom Lowe said:
...so I guess we are going to pre-arrange some kind of deal with a rental house to have a RED on standby/FEDEX for us. It's definitely risky.
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I am afraid RED will be very hard to come by from a rental house for less than full rental rates booked in advance as they should be extremily hot next summer and I would be surprised to find any one willing to hold them on standbye.

There should be quite a few discounted vipers and others being discounted by then, though :) and worst case you can just settle for 1080p!
 
Yeah, that's a pretty scary scenario. :(

Well, who knows, there may be some rental houses that have a lot of REDs by next Sept.
 
ThomSteinhoff said:
We are hoping the first wave of us jumping in the pool will have the RED lifeguards watching us pretty closely!
Click to expand...

I'm so with you on this one after faxed in my reservation form(still waiting for the cue number).
 
Tom Lowe said:
Yeah, that's a pretty scary scenario. :(

Well, who knows, there may be some rental houses that have a lot of REDs by next Sept.
Click to expand...

If everything goes south you could always put out an emergency call on this board, an owner may be able to help you out.

Martin
 
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