RedCam Central :: View topic - EPIC & TS-5

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This was posted by 3ality Digital's Lucas Wilson (formerly with Assimalte, makers of Scratch):

"3ality Digital has been fortunate enough to have been working with EPICs on working productions for a few months now.

I wanted to report a couple of things that may be of interest to the community. I am working on a more detailed technical report. These are more impressions based on a lot of time working with these cameras.

1) Stability.

As I heard Jim and Ted say a lot in the early RED ONE M days, "This is the worst we will ever be." They were right.

The EPIC, right out of the gate, has been just about bulletproof. There has been no downtime, out of hundreds of hours of shooting, I think there was one crash on one camera over what is now several months of a hard schedule across numerous 3ality Digital systems maintaining a 2D schedule on a 3D show.

2) The Images.

A few months ago, I was in a dailies session that was one of the first times that EPIC footage was ever shown in a critical situation. The people in the room were A-list professionals with A-list eyes. When the footage started screening, there was a moment of silence before we all heard a bunch of "wow" and "holy sh*t" in the room. The blacks were beautiful and there was so much detail in such low light. The highlights held. The colors were rich and the saturation was exactly correct. There was *nothing* about the images that said "I am digital." Well... except for the lack of noise and weave.

And that was a 1080 feed from a downconvert.

3) Stereoscopy.

We are using our new TS-5 rigs with a backend SIP processor. We spent a lot of time in prep with Ultra Primes loaded on EPICs. The combination of 3ality Digital technology with RED EPICs through Ultra Primes is generating some of the best S3D footage I've seen. I hope that these narratives will change some minds of people who have been on the fence or outright haters of S3D footage.

RED has also been working with 3ality Digital and Element Technica to incorporate crucial S3D metadata into the pipeline in some meaningful ways...

4) Workflow

From Day1, REDCINE-X has worked with EPIC footage, and been cranking out dailies on a high-end feature schedule. Other partners - notably ASSIMILATE, DaVinci and Mystika - have the DI story for EPIC ready to go. The confusion and sometimes byzantine pathways that existed in early RED ONE days are gone. Load the images up, hit play, see pictures.

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When these cameras really start rolling out, I'm looking forward to the explosion of content that will come with it. It's an absolutely amazing tool.

As part of 3ality Digital, I'm proud to be one of the first companies to spend significant time with what I believe is a significant leap in image acquisition.

Congrats to the RED team."