If you’ve made it through most of this book without skipping ahead to this final chapter, congratulations, and thanks for sharing your time! As you can now see, the RED camera has a complex workflow both in production and in post. But if you take the time to learn and practice, it’s really not that tricky.
To wrap up, I’ll give you a few more tips regarding the potential for building a business around your RED camera. At the end of this chapter, you’ll find some recommended Web sites to visit for more information, a map of the RED ONE’s onboard menus, a gallery of stills, and a glossary.
If you read through Chapters 4 and 5 on putting together a RED equipment package, you probably noticed that all this stuff can get quite expensive before you even start shooting. So, how can you make your RED camera pay off? Let’s look at some potential business scenarios and how to handle them.
This is a relatively new field, and it brings plenty of opportunity. You’re likely to find available positions as a data wrangler and/or digital imaging technician (DIT) in any major movie-production town (and not just for the RED but for other data-centric HD and better digital cameras). This is a job for which owning a RED camera is not a necessity, as long as you know the camera and its menus well. Chapters 4, 9, and 14 contain helpful information for potential DITs.
The single most important quality for this position is an utmost respect for data. Treat every CF card or RED-DRIVE as if it were a camera original negative, because that’s essentially what it is. Be mindful of footage, and make sure you always know what’s been backed up and which media can be recycled back onto the camera. Never lose a shot. Review the POV interviews with Evin Grant, Brook Willard, and Dean Georgopoulos for additional tips.
If you own a RED ONE, chances are you’re not going to be shooting with it every day. So, you might consider renting out your camera to other productions. If you explore this route, you should keep a few things in mind. First, take into account the production market where you’re located. What’s the competition like for RED rentals?
If you’re in a big production town such as Los Angeles, New York, or London, watch out. You’ll be up against major camera rental houses with multiple RED cameras and high-quality accessories and optics. More importantly, they will have an established infrastructure and staff ready to deal with all rental requests. That can make it difficult to compete as a lone-gun rental operation.
You also need to have your package insured against loss and damage. You would be surprised how roughly rental equipment gets treated sometimes. Before you lend out your gear, make sure the people renting it have properly insured your package with production equipment and liability insurance. For this and the reasons already mentioned, if you’re in a major rental market area, I think it’s wiser to align yourself with an existing rental facility and put your package into their consignment pool. You won’t keep as much income from each rental, but you’ll be protected against damages and loss, and you won’t have to worry about having the absolute best of every piece of equipment to remain competitive in your market.
Successful directors of photography (Figure 15.1) care more about composition and lighting than they do about specific cameras and technologies. A good DP adapts his or her techniques to whatever given medium a project is shooting on and makes the most of it. That said, owning a RED ONE package can make your services as a cinematographer that much more attractive, because it’s one-stop shopping for a would-be producer. They get a camera package and someone who knows how to use it to its best potential from one source.
If you go this route, make sure you know the camera backward and forward and that you also are skilled at cinematography and lighting. I recommend practicing with a still camera to master the basics of composition and exposure. With a motion-picture camera this complex, it’s not always practical to be a one-person band. You need to have an excellent gaffer and camera assistants you can rely on to make the most of your reputation. Review Chapter 6 and the POV interviews with cinematographers such as Arthur Albert; Nancy Schreiber, ASC; and Rodney Charters, ASC, for more hints on being a DP.
In addition to moving pictures, you can also use the RED for still photography since its 4K resolution offers sufficient quality for most print applications. This opens up a whole new opportunity as the worlds of photography and motion picture cinematography converge. It’s possible to shoot movies on the RED and extract single frames for use as still photography. Short films, features, commercials, and print campaigns all can be conceivably captured within a single session. Check out the POV interview with photographer Greg Williams for details on this evolving trend.
Half of this book is devoted to postproduction, so it’s obviously very important to the RED workflow. It used to be the case that you would shoot a project and then turn it over to a film lab and postproduction facility to do all the heavy lifting. But nowadays you can do nearly all of the work yourself with a modest computer and editing and finishing software. Whether you’re a camera owner/operator or a freelance editor for hire, a thorough understanding of the post process is essential to completing a RED project.
As evidenced by this book’s chapters on Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Apple Final Cut Pro, there are many different approaches to completing a RED project. My advice is to pick one application to specialize in rather than trying to be a jack-of-all-trades. At the end of the day, audiences don’t care which program you edited with, if they enjoy your story. If you can master the technical side of the workflow, all that’s left is the art of the edit and the creativity of color correction. (For more specifics on artful editing, I recommend The Lean Forward Moment by Norman Hollyn [New Riders].)
If there’s one question that comes up a lot, it’s this one: “Is this the last camera I’ll ever need to buy?” I wish I could say the answer is yes, but in fact it’s an almost definite no. The moviemaking industry is constantly evolving and developing new technology. Ten years ago, the possibility of using a high-definition camera was completely out of reach for most productions. Ten years before that, a video camera was something you shot birthdays with. In 2006, when RED first announced a 4K camera, the concept sounded like science fiction. Yet, just recently Regal Cinemas announced it would be outfitting 5,000 of its theater screens with Sony 4K digital projectors.
This year, several major motion pictures are being released digitally and in 3D. The trend for higher resolution and image quality is going to continue for the foreseeable future. You can see the roots of this happening already at RED with its upcoming 5K resolution (and beyond) cameras such as the RED EPIC. Will we ever reach a plateau with digital cameras, when we have sufficient resolution and standards set in stone? Personally, I think that might happen eventually. But not anytime soon.
So if you have to keep getting new cameras and learning new workflows every couple of years, what can you do to stay ahead of the curve? For my taste, the things you can always keep consistent are your own talents and skills as a storyteller. If you make a derivative movie with stock characters speaking clichéd dialogue, it’s not going to play any better in 4K, 3D, or whatever the newest camera technology has become. Create a unique idea with interesting characters who change in major ways over the course of the story, and you’ll have a potentially great project. Then, if it just happens to be shot on a RED ONE, so much the better.