Since 2007, I have produced and edited 8 company reels for the RED Digital Cinema camera company. Most of the reels coincide with special event exhibitions - such as IBC, NAB, or in-house RED events and play all over the world and sometimes online (if you know where to look).
Friends that know me know that when I have to make a new RED Reel, I not only go “off the map,” but that I’m not the only one since it takes the effort of my entire team to pull these reels off. The RED Reels specifically are fairly complex - largely due to the fact that none of the footage that comes in was meant to work together with other footage and the fact that I have no idea when or what footage is going to be received. Plus, there are individual framerates, resolutions, aspect ratios, lenses, shutter angles, ISO settings, etc. It truly is a “patch-work” of images that come together to (hopefully) form a cohesive piece. The other area of complexity is the fact that these reels all go through a full DI and that the DI is completely done in uncompressed 4K.
Most people that work with the RED Camera never actually see a 4K frame playback at full raster. That’s at no fault to the RED community, rather it’s still a significant hurdle that the exhibition institutions of the world have yet to implement on a tangible scale. For the RED company, delivering a product at a lower raster size than the camera creates is not an option, so 4K mastering has been the staple of the RED Reels since the “RED 100” (a montage of footage from the first 100 cameras shipped) which debuted back in November of 2007. Unless the playback is actually managed by RED (like a RED Studios or NAB), most people view these reels in DCI 2K resolution (2048x1080). But there are 2 personal reasons why taking the time and energy to master these reels in 4K seems to pay off:
1. Practice makes perfect.
Most people who are asked “Would you ever want to try to run a marathon?” answer “Yes! I would like to try that.” But then if you asked them “Would you like to start training tomorrow for that marathon which runs in 6 months?” they answer “Nope. I think I’m good.”
Everyone loves the idea of going the distance, but everyone struggles with the need to prepare and practice. This relates a bit as to why post houses love deadlines. We know that when a film comes in with no deadline, it’s the kiss of death. I’ve literally worked on films that have been “DI’d” within an inch of their life largely due to the simple lack of a deadline. With RED Reels, the fact that we can practice working on 4K with numerous challenges 2-3 times a year is a great way for us to improve every aspect of the process. With RED Reels, workflow challenges from drive formatting to resolution mis-matching to color science and and fast auto-conforming from offline to online make RED Reels a great way to keep up our craft in an area that is full of challenges. And when we work with RED 4K files, we work with them as uncompressed files, which puts the data rate at approximately 800MB/s. With this amount of data, reliance on a good workflow, a good artist and a good tool become the difference from sleeping and working round the clock waiting for the computer to catch up to the resolution.
2. Future Proofing
I am a firm believer that preparing for a resolution-aware generation is a good way to insure our pictures will stand up to our children’s pictures. As I said, most people have never seen 4K playback, let alone have the tools in which to play it back themselves. Film has always captured high fidelity images, but RED did us all a favor that film never could: they made it easy for the first time. This ease of acquisition is the first step in preparing for a 4K future-but it’s not because RED wants a 4K future or iseven making it possible. In fact, I don’t think RED has any say in the matter at all. The reason 4K will matter is because the millions of young people today being exposed to high resolution images as their brains develop are going to innately demand higher fidelity. Why? Because the difference in temporal resolution between HD and 6K for them will be the difference between 8mm and 35mm for you and me. Think I’m wrong? Ask your kids and grandkids in 2020 and we’ll see.
Today we are finishing up the RED 600. It’s the 3rd iteration of footage compiled from the RED MX/Epic-X sensor and it further pushes the boundaries of what is possible with a good computer and a good lens. Where else are you going to have footage from some of the world’s best filmmakers right beside footage from a student short film? If that doesn’t instigate conversations about 4K, RED, and digital cinema, I don’t know what else will.
Good times.
| michael | cioni |
