Red Pro Primes

Shot a short at the end of June for director Vincent Cross. Fun little project and visually it was real nice to get out of NYC and shoot outside of the city. We shot at a motel in NJ but the inside of it looked like something out of a road motel in 1950 middle america. I forgot the name of the movie but a film with Ellien Page and Cilian Murphy was shot at this same location a year or two back.

We shot with the RED MX and used the Red Pro Primes. I had heard mixed reviews about the glass but I will have to say I am very impressed with the look esp when combined with shooting 4.5K which is what we used. They all open to a T1.9 and are extremely sharp, now some people have gripes with that but in my personal taste I like a sharp lens.

Lighting in the motel was a bit of a challenge esp with the package we had. Basically the 1.2k HMI Fresnel was my best friend and I always had 2 4x4's on standby to fill in here or there. I wish we had a 575 HMI for me to play with inside as a light for highlights. Instead I had to make the poor mans HMI a 1k with full CTB.

F3 Feature

Worked as first assistant on a feature film with the Sony F3 for five days back in late June. This was my second time working with the camera. We had the F3 pretty much in a cinema mode with 19mm rods, studio FF, MB-18, a set of Cooke Primes, and a kipro mini recorder. Production wanted to record to the highest resolution possible and out of the box the camera can only record 4:2:0 8 bit to SXS cards. With the kipro you are able to record 10bit 4:2:2 to compact flash cards. During the time I was on the new S-Log hadn't been released yet.

The F3 is a awesome camera. Super user friendly, if you've used the Ex-1 the F3 is pretty much the same except with a 35mm sensor, PL mount and a high sensitivity. After the Alexa its probably the best low light camera on the market and maybe even the best when S-Log comes out and boosts the native sensitivity to around 1000-1600. Plus a cooke lens on the F3 or any camera for that matter makes a very pretty image.

The kipro was a pain. It reminded me a lot like the RED in terms of problems that you can run into with it. First it gets really hot which leads it to overheat and drop frames. Second its takes a long time for it to boot up, prob about 45 seconds - 1 minute but when compared to the F3 which powers up in 5 seconds this is a big difference. Also when formatting it takes a while for the card to be completely formatted. Other problems were quirky idiosyncrasies with the interface. For instance if you have the option "custom take on" for naming clips it will overwrite existing files. Luckily we figured this out on our test and before shooting. Also there were times when the kipro would only record for 5 seconds of a take. When we checked the SXS card the whole take was there but not on the kipro. Another problem was if we played back through the F3 it could overwrite a file on the kipro so we always had to playback from the kipro. Needless to say I was not a fan of the system.