24 was, of course, a Panavision show, and so they built a Panavision mount for us and we were able to mount with the Panavision follow focus and all the accessories, including the 3:1 and the 11:1 and the short zoom. I then talked to Ted Schilowitz and Jim Jannard from Red to discuss my requirements were we to take a show like 24 to the Red.
I had meetings with Fox and we had lots of high-level discussions about the post stream and workflow and how that would pan out, and for the past year I’ve been deeply involved with the camera. So when this opportunity to travel came about, I decided I was going to take the Red with me, because I finally had a mount that would take Canon’s stills lenses. The mount has to talk to the Canon lenses, so it has a series of pins that correlate. You have to get 5V out of the camera body, and this is something we’ve been waiting for. I had a Canon 5D with the three primary zooms (16-35mm, 24-70mm and 70-200mm). They were all f/2.8, but they perfectly carry the range of lensing you would want for documentary shooting.
I love the idea that you can travel with kit like this in hand baggage. My bag’s made by Think Tank it’s called the Airport Acceleration. It has room for a 17in laptop in the top, and then inside I have the complete camera, with three lenses, a hard drive for those longer running moments, microphone, cables, lens and battery, another long lens and extra hard drives and, of course, the all-important viewfinder.
We were able to get into North Korea with this kit and shoot in Pyongyang, and then Beijing, Abu Dhabi, down to Dubai to shoot the world’s tallest building under construction, and eventually to London, with a couple of side trips to the Strasbourg wine country and Florence. It’s been an amazing experience, just to test out the idea of shooting on the run with a camera that is not that light, but which is actually pretty portable.
The handle system I use is made by Sim Video out of Toronto, and I think it’s far and way the best. It provides for very robust support of the viewfinder, which is particularly important, and then Claremont Camera made me a little hand tool to enable me to put the Arri Rosetta and extension on, to make a small handheld unit.
The viewfinder’s fantastic. It has all the data that you’d want, it’s waveform along the bottom. The only drawback with the camera is that it takes a couple of minutes to get up to speed, so if you wanted to shoot something suddenly, you’re out of luck. I didn’t have a lot of battery power, so I tended to be careful about when I shut it down.
Build 17 allows you to use the full 16x9 chip size, so that’s what we would want to output at. The other new element is the 16Gb card, which gives you up to nine minutes in 16x9. But at $550, they’re not that cheap. However, most of the features now are actually buying the cards and putting them on the shelf as a first line of defence; they can always go back to the card.
The cool thing about the Canon glass is that it enables someone to get the whole system for under $25,000, which is pretty amazing. Everyone squeals that they want Zeiss Master Primes, but one lens is $30,000. However, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the Canons for solid drama. If you put the Master Primes up on a projector, you can see a huge improvement over the Ultra Primes. On the Master Primes there’s much more room, you can see right up in the top-left, right and bottom corners how much sharper it is at the edge. They’re beautiful lenses, no question, and if your able to work at 1.3, this puts the camera back as a direct competitor to us working at 500 ASA. Because this camera does not do 500 ASA; it’s closer to 250 ASA, and you need that extra stop or two to give you back a fighting chance.
Most of our footage on 24 is shot almost available light; we light it somewhere around 10 foot candles. Most people’s homes are 10 foot candles these days, so you can basically go anywhere and shoot, but not with a 2.8. With a 1.3 or 2, I can again, so suddenly having Master Primes with this combination is great. Plus, if you’re packaging this, the rental cost of the master primes is offset by the really low price of the camera body compared to a motion picture camera or an F35. If we did a deal with Panavision we could mount Panavision lenses, which would be very satisfying because we’re used to using the 3:1 on B camera. Our A camera lens is 27-68mm old Minolta glass re-tooled by Panavision from 20 years ago, but it’s still a very fine lens; it flares a bit, but it’s very sharp, and Guy Skinner my operator is very adept at using that and jamming the focus with his thumb.
The challenge right now is: how do you finish it, and most people would be quite happy if they could export their files to ProRes and make ProRes your master. Of course, it is possible to use software like Monkey Extract, which does a great job of extracting only the files that are in the Final Cut Pro or Avid EDL, but of course it takes a lot of processing power to extract these files from the card and get them back to full-sized 4K resolution, and for television I’d be perfectly happy at 1920x1080. Although, Plaster City actually has a deal now, where for $700 they give sunk dailies on D5 in 4:2:2, with the appropriate digital files as well. So you can color correct on that, and this is a pretty viable way of getting your dailies back into a format that the studios like to see: they like to see tape on the shelf.
I didn’t have enough speed to compensate for the fact that the chip was not as fast as our 500 ASA stock. When I shot with the camera on the 24 set, I didn’t change the lighting; I was just piggybacking on one of our scenes and I felt that we needed to shoot it at f/2. I needed an extra stop out of the lens in order to compete. The problem with 35mm zooms is that they stop at f/2.8; there’s nothing faster.
I don’t see any use for a DIT in this process; that’s another person who’s just going in my way about how the picture should look. I already have enough of a squabble with the director and the producers; I don’t need a fourth person in the loop to try and tell me how to light my picture. Obviously, there’s a learning curve: exposure’s much more critical with this than it is with film, but in raw, there’s enormous latitude.
I’d love it to be lighter, but you know, Jim compacted this down from something almost the size of a room, so I’m staggered that they got it to this size. The biggest complain is that if you are trying to conserve battery power, you want to switch it off all the time. And then when you see a shot you want, you have to wait almost two minutes for it to spark back up again. That’s a frustration, and I don’t know how they get round that because it does and awful lot of analysis of itself as the different computers inside it start up.
Scarlet camera
Scarlet seems to have gone away, and Red’s emphasis now is on building a stills camera that also does video On this trip, if I were a photo-journalist, that would have been fantastic for me, because I kept taking the lens off the Red, putting it on the still camera to shoot a couple of shots, and then putting it back on the Red. I’m exited by the fact that every couple of years Nikon and Canon up the ante, and are able to achieve much higher ISO speeds without increasing grain. The ability to shoot at 6400 ASA is ridiculously wonderful– that would solve the f/2.8 problem. The restraint on the Red camera right now is that noise kicks in above 250 ASA, and it’s not worth going there. So without faster lenses we have to wait for either a new chip to come out or another set of software parameters; each time software jumps from 15 to 16 to 17, the builds get better and the noise gets lower and it’s a bigger improvement.
I have pictures of Guy (Skinner) with this on his shoulder. He ran around the room and felt quite comfortable with it. When he panned fast, it arrived in time for him, but there was some lag in the display because getting a high def image in this finder takes a lot of computational power. Obviously, over time computers will get faster, and it will be easier to deal with outputting an image that doesn’t lag behind; but it can’t output enough images to make you feel like you have persistence of vision. However, we get that with the shutter anyhow. People forget that when you’re viewing through an optical motion picture camera you are seeing shutter, and even on the D-20 and D-21 you’re seeing a shutter flicker, because the mirror has break-ups in it to actually allow the image to get to the film playing.
We’d save an awful lot of money if we went completely digital on 24. A guy came to see me with a laptop the other day, showed me footage from a movie they’d shot for $135,000, complete with special effects – it was a space epic taking place primarily in the desert. They had three cameras, one for back up, two for shooting. Being able to do that for $125,000 is crazy; it becomes pretty exiting because no one could turn you away because you don’t have a set of DPX 2K files.
This camera’s not going to go away and we have to embrace it.
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Rodney Charters ASCRodney Charters has been the DP on 24 for all six seasons, directing a number of episodes. He hails from New Zealand, and his extensive credits include Roswell and recent TV movies Pixel Perfect, Sounder and Molly. |