FS7: Red Raven and FS7

I have seen a few films shot on the RED's now. On the whole Lone Survivor looked great but some of it does look like video which I presume was down to the motion or shutter speed of some of the action scenes/shots. I have shot on Sony and I think the motion can be horrible too but it's all down to what you want to achieve. I like a 90deg shutter on action stuff and 180 for the rest.

For some reason I really dislike RED and would never buy in to them. What sort of company charges the customer for warranty on a purchase of a new camera? RED armour. The RED cameras have skull images and other childish graphics and I feel like it's aimed at young people who have too much money. The horror stories are the biggest turn-off, it feels like every other story I read about RED indicates that you need to have two cameras because one will always go down. The one thing that I do applaud RED for is the upgrades without having to buy a new camera body. I will watch this Raven camera with interest, but I suspect it won't be for me but who knows.

It is a shame the FS5 does not have CineEI as that would be a great competitor to the Raven.
 
Red cams come with a warranty for free, u can add additional years for a charge. Dragon is a whole different animal, I don't think you've used it based on your comments. That paragraph sounds like it's from 2009
 
Red Armour is an additional optional warranty on top of the regular one... I never once had an issue with a Red that stopped me shooting in years of using them. There's a lot of people out there who don't know how to use the gear they bought.

My favourite examples of what was possible visually with Red MX sensor cameras would be Rust and Bone, Prometheus and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. All very different visually.

Agree 100% about the silly skulls etc..

EDIT: My FS7 is a hell of a lot more buggy than any Red I have used.
 
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I've started a thread about Red reliability and found a lot of info here. Ben and txdp you seems to confirm what I have heard. New Red cams could not have been different to the older ones when it comes to stability. I'm trying to decide how rentable Red Weapon Dragon is. Does it make a business sense to get it only for renting. I'm talking about European market, London, Berlin, Warsaw especially. Does anyone have experience, any info?
 
Rental houses are doing such good deals it would be hard to turn a profit if you are a single owner operator, unless you have exiting clients you can rent it to.
 
txdp said:
Red cams come with a warranty for free, u can add additional years for a charge. Dragon is a whole different animal, I don't think you've used it based on your comments. That paragraph sounds like it's from 2009
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I was looking at buying a Scarlet in 2014 and the reason I decided against it was RED armour. I don't trust a company with so many stories about cameras not working and then charging the customer excessive amounts of money for warranty. My opinions and I can only talk about what I have read from other people who have used RED cameras. If the Raven gets amazing reviews I may consider one.

Ben Scott said:
Red Armour is an additional optional warranty on top of the regular one... I never once had an issue with a Red that stopped me shooting in years of using them. There's a lot of people out there who don't know how to use the gear they bought.

My favourite examples of what was possible visually with Red MX sensor cameras would be Rust and Bone, Prometheus and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. All very different visually.

Agree 100% about the silly skulls etc..

EDIT: My FS7 is a hell of a lot more buggy than any Red I have used.
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Hey Ben I trust your judgement. Talking about films shot on RED I like....

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was an amazing film and I was too engrossed in the story and it's characters to even really look at it's visuals, I need to watch it again soon.

Prometheus I can only describe as being: Teased by a beautiful woman, then being invited back to her house and not getting any in-out! Prometheus was one of the biggest disappointments in cinema history for me, it was like watching AVP. Beautiful visuals though. Perhaps I need to watch it again.

I like the Che films or anything by Steven Soderbergh. Side Effects was great.

I like District 9 and Chappie.

Nothing wrong with RED cinema, I always felt if was for rich people or big studios who could afford 5 cameras like Peter Jackson. Will see how this RED Raven pans out but I don't like the EF mount only option. They need to do a PL version for those of us who use that glass.

I'm happy I chose the F5 over the FS7. The F5/55 was released a year too early for my liking but it's almost complete now. I'm happy with the system and it just need to be upgraded with a faster processor so we can use LUTs in S&Q and have higher frame rates in 4K, but on the whole it has been a great camera to use. The F5 reminds me of the RED One. I'm sure the FS7 firmware will work out well, it just takes time.
 
There will not be a PL version of Raven. It's not that camera.

And yes, I was talking purely about visuals.

And yes, if you didn't buy a Red because you got it wrong how Red Armour works then you missed out :)
 
Ben Scott said:
So aside from all the successful cinematic movies that have used different shutter angles in their films it doesn't work? Hobbit's HFR was, whether you liked it or not, huge and the films were a smash. Avatar 2 and 3 (shudder) will have similar HFR looks too and will no doubt be the most successful films of all time. So who is to say?
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Please show me your long list of successful cinematic movies from the past few years that were not shot at 24fps / 180. I'm not talking about special cases like stereo movies etc. I'm pretty certain they add up to less than 1% of the entire output of the industry.

The Hobbit made a lot of money but the 48fps projection was widely panned by critics and regular viewers for making the sets and costumes look cheap and the motion feel like a video game. It also was 48fps in stereo, which is a special venue format.

Avatar 2 and 3 are essentially special venue projects and also not a very good examples. The higher frame rate etc is very much tied to the fact that these are stereo movies and go back to problems that Cameron encountered as far back as the Terminator 2 /3D theme park ride, which by the way I worked on.

Movies that are not shot at 24 fps and with a narrow shutter angle are rare. Mainstream still is 24 fps with roughly a 180 degree shutter.

You brought up Saving Private Ryan, but that is a bad example. The narrow shutter angle was only used in the battle scenes to simulate a heightened sense of awareness. That is not the entire movie.


Also, I think a combination of gaming with varying refresh rates and YouTube having 1080 60fps now are making this more and more a moot point.
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Go back and read my posts. I said that CURRENTLY 24fps / 180 shutter is what audiences expect to see in cinema and will usually say that anything else looks like a soap opera. I also said that this may change in the future as the traditional divide of movies (24fps) and TV (25/30) is blurred by video games, iPads etc.


To go back to the original point though, let's you and I shoot a scene. You at 180deg with no art designer or gaffer and me at 90deg with both. I guarantee you which one will be the more 'cinematic'.
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Go back and reread my posts. This time calmly. I said that you can have a full blown studio production, which implies art direction, costume department etc., but if you shot your movie at 30fps most audiences in 2015 will say it looks like a soap opera.

As I said earlier there will always be exceptions. The cinematography of End of Watch was actually praised for being innovative and different. It probably helped that the film was shot like a reality TV documentary that audiences are accustomed to seeing at varied frame rates and the video look was part of the overall art direction. So, the mixed frame rates did not seem out of place and were accepted. Audiences are not as stupid as some people think.


Edit: As a Brit I am shooting 25fps 95% of the time... I have shot at 23.976 a few times and then had a non 180deg shutter to avoid flickering. Nobody ever noticed.
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Seriously?
 
I love filmconvert, but has there ever been a time when it made it look like something was shot on film, as opposed to being shot digitally and then some film stock emulation put on top?

Yesterday I saw my FS7 footage projected by a cinema projector in a theater, in preparation for tonight's premiere in Franklin TN. I had made two versions of the DCP, one with and one without overlaid "film grain" on the parts of the movie I particularly wanted to look like film, the 70's period parts. After seeing them, I elected to use the clean version. Just can't see how the grain improved it a bit or gave it a different feel.

I do know that the FS7 footage translated to the big screen beautifully, even though the 4K footage was downscaled to 2K and projected with a 2K projector.
 
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Ben Scott said:
Yeah, that's about as drawn into this rubbish as I care to go. I'm as calm as you like. We disagree. Enjoy.
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I'm not in the habit of dismissing the opinion of other people as rubbish, simply because they do not comply with my point of view.

I prefer 'let's agree, to disagree'.

Have a great day.
 
Ben Scott said:
I love filmconvert, but has there ever been a time when it made it look like something was shot on film, as opposed to being shot digitally and then some film stock emulation put on top?
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Have you not seen their commercials? It looks like Panavision!
 
I hav never understood the logic of adding film grain to video. Reminds of the Pictorialists adding hazy effects more than a century ago, so that photography would resemble more closely painting, thus making it more legitimate as an art.
 
Adding grain has its place for some jobs. It can add a bit of perceived sharpness. It can add a bit of texture. More importantly it can help cover/rescue noisier shots. But none of this stuff makes video look like film, and I think the time has come to accept that and embrace the wonderful looks we have on offer in the world of modern video cameras and digital cinema cameras.
 
Ben Scott said:
Adding grain has its place for some jobs. It can add a bit of perceived sharpness. It can add a bit of texture. More importantly it can help cover/rescue noisier shots. But none of this stuff makes video look like film, and I think the time has come to accept that and embrace the wonderful looks we have on offer in the world of modern video cameras and digital cinema cameras.
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Well said, I couldn't agree more.
 
mainstreetprod said:
I love filmconvert, but has there ever been a time when it made it look like something was shot on film, as opposed to being shot digitally and then some film stock emulation put on top?

Yesterday I saw my FS7 footage projected by a cinema projector in a theater, in preparation for tonight's premiere in Franklin TN. I had made two versions of the DCP, one with and one without overlaid "film grain" on the parts of the movie I particularly wanted to look like film, the 70's period parts. After seeing them, I elected to use the clean version. Just can't see how the grain improved it a bit or gave it a different feel.

I do know that the FS7 footage translated to the big screen beautifully, even though the 4K footage was downscaled to 2K and projected with a 2K projector.
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That must have been a great experience. Congrats on your film.
But don't you think (one of) the reason it looked so good is the downscaling to 2K? I'm not sure it would have looked any better projected in 4K.
Would have been great to see that side by side
 
Yoak said:
That must have been a great experience. Congrats on your film.
But don't you think (one of) the reason it looked so good is the downscaling to 2K? I'm not sure it would have looked any better projected in 4K.
Would have been great to see that side by side
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Thanks, I'll be posting some shots of the experience later. I'm pretty confident that had it been projected in 4K it would not have looked "better", just overly sharp for the people in the front and about the same to the rest of the crowd. I had already dialed down the sharpness in the camera because I find it too sharp with factory settings. For a few shots in the film I used a Panasonic LX100 (like a GH4 with a fixed lens). The 4K I shot with it was annoyingly sharp, had to dial it down in post to match the FS7. I find 4k useful for reframing, scaling, etc. in post, but otherwise I think the 6K-8K stuff is just marketing hype to keep us buying new cameras.
 
Well, I find shooting 5K makes a better looking 4K master than a 4K to 4K, but it depends on your personal preference as well I suppose.
But it will be "cleaner"
 
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