Red Camera

Having recently wrapped production on Raspberry Magic, I'm anticipating the first cut in a big way. Editing Red footage has become considerably easier than it was even six months ago, according to our editor, so I'm very happy about that. We basically shot 3.5 terrabytes of footage, then our editor spent two weeks transcoding the footage into a DVC Pro format, which he could then edit. We used Zeiss Standard Prime Lenses, and a Cooke 250mm one day. The footage had a nice look to it, and I was able to watch the takes on a 17" monitor. Many folks tried to persuade us not to shoot on Red in the beginning, but I'm glad (so far) we did, as the footage looks really nice, and we are going to be able to do something interesting things with the color grading. There are so many formats out there right now, sometimes it's hard to know what to choose. For a long time, I really wanted to shoot on Super 16mm, but then I realized all of the film processing would be too expensive, time consuming and I wasn't sure if I could manage with so many child actors on the project. But actually, our children were quite mature and I never really had to deal with multiple takes for this reason. But time was a major issue, especially with the kids. Some days, I did 15-20 setups!! I had to be really fast and know exactly what I wanted out of each setup, which was super stressful. But moving the Red, re-syncing, etc had its moments, but overall, it was fairly quick. It'll be interesting to see how things change/develop with the Red over the next six months, as there are so many features which have recently shot on this camera. It's nice, though, there are so many post houses here in LA that do an incredible job with the color grading and output back to 2K, it'll be interesting.