RedCam Central :: View topic - New (RED) Feature, "Game" beginning Production

Site Admin

According to industry sources and RED's Jim Jannard, the new feature, "Game", a sci-fi thriller, due out in 2009, starring Gerard Butler, Alison Lohman, Michael C. Hall, John Leguizamo, Kyra Sedgwick and written / directed by collaborators, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, will begin production next week in New Mexico.

The project will be entirely shot on 6 RED cameras... (these were provided by a customer that bought 5 cameras delivered in the 1st 100... plus one more.)

Neveldine had done a camera test with RED several months back on roller blades in a parking lot. (pictures below)

More to come...

Specialist

im working on game as the onset colorist and data manager. Im going to try and post as many details as our NDA will allow throughout production.

so far the camera and the red crew has been great. they have already addressed and fixed some problems that we had inintially with some hot spots on the chip causing streaks on the image. They are also in the process of working with us to create an automated camera report generattion script.

for the grading i started working with a product from iridas which is pretty amazing if you have the pipeline to support it (its also very reasonalbly priced and it works with the quicktime reference files and 4k tifs that redalert provides). We have now decided to go with a system i have used before (Feast of Love) color correcting images in Adobe Lightroom and sending them to the colorist.

we are shooting with anywhere from three to five cameras on 8gb cards so we plan on going through 70-125 cards a day. The cards will be backed up on set on one of 10 1 terabyte drives and then shipped in card form (more stable) to the dailies facility.

ill post more once we start shooting. Feel free to ask questions ill answer what i am allowed to.

Site Admin

Hi Ryan,

Great to have you here. Thanks for the info.

I'll start out with a couple of questions, but I'm sure more people will want to throw some at you. Smile

1) Which memory cards are you using?

2) What computer are you using on-set to process this?

3) What format (and aspect) are they shooting in? (And then which version are you looking at on your system (1k, 2k proxy?)

4) Can you describe the Monitoring/DIT setup on set? (Is the DP using any LUTs in the Camera? How are they Viewing at Video Village, etc.)

Of course, you may not know some of these answers until shooting begins...

thanks very much for your time,

Specialist

1. The cards are lableld as red one cards but i believe they are ultra highspeed lexar cards.

2. We are using a dual 3hgz dualcore xeon wih 4 gb of ddr2

3. The native format of the red is 2.35 i believe. we have been looking medium and high quality quicktimes which are 2k and 4k respectively. The proxies are good for continuity stuff but are bad for camera checks.

4. Ill get back to you on this im not familiar with the specifics of the monitoring setup. The settings in the camera are pretty generic, mostly just white balance.

Specialist

We just finished Day 10 last night. Everything has been going really well. They have assigned us a perminent red tech to make us special cables/junction boxes/reprogram cameras. That has been a lifesaver. We also have a couple of cameras that we dont use all the time so we can rotate them around if one is having a problem.

The first day was a little rough one of the cameras was being affected by an explosion that they were basically running through, it was shutting off right at the peak of the explosion. They updated the cameras and disabled some of the buttons on the operators side of the camera and all was well.

Everything since then has gone really smoothly. There was a problem with the camera putting out some frequencies that were interfering with the microwave video assist but pulling the transmitter a few feet away seemed to fix the problem.

There are some weird issues that are hard to deal with on a film set. If you use the red monitor you cannot have any other video output (ie no video village). The timecode jam sync is set up wierd and they dont hold time code when they are shut down or if a new card is put in (sometimes). They had to make us a special cable that bypasses some of the functions of the normal jam sync they have built in because by default the way they have it set up the box tries to jam the camera but at the sme time the camera tries to jam the box so the box has to be re-jammed everytime you jam a camera. Sometimes the cameras skip roll numbers on thier own which is a little annoying but has been getting better in the last couple of days.

Not to sound too negative though. The image is amazing. The Red guys are amazing. They are working so hard to make the camera what it needs to be. Most of the problems we had arent anything that most people reading this will ever need to deal with.

Ill continue to add to or edit this post. any questions feel free to ask.
-ryan

Site Admin

Ryan,

Thanks for the continued reports. Sounds like they've really been putting them through their paces.

As far as some of the issues they've been having, I know some of them have already been resolved for other operators.

Like you mentioned, some people were experiencing issues with high detail/motion shots, such as your explosions. I believe this was a wavelet codec issue that was resolved with a firmware update...

The problem with only having one Monitor should just be temporary as they are enabling the Camera features almost daily. I think this one should be enabled soon and then you will be able to have simultaneous LCD, EVF, and other outputs.

What monitors are they using on set for video village?

I would love to see some photos of your setup there on set or the Cameras in action, if you can get them cleared.

thanks again for your posts!

Specialist

when we are able to view playback (because of the simultaneous monitoring issur) we are using Panasonic Bt-lhw1700p's downconverted through an aja. they are recording using the new hd raptors.

for my setup i have a zenview and a westinghouse. both terrible monitors soon to be upgraded. usally if i want to see a better image i watch it on my 17inch macbook pro with the hd screen but even that has its limitations (realtime playback).

we are now on day 40 and im up to 8 1Tb hard drives

ive included a sample of the noise striping problem (at 100%) that we have occasionally. the image has been modified to enhance the striping. the striping was even visible after partial color correction on a film out but not visible at 1/4 or 1/2 res on redcine

Specialist

here's a pic of my rig (iphone quality)

Specialist

here's a pic of the video assist rig

Specialist

our chairs

Site Admin