Yesterday Jim had the Red fan club globally hanging on expectantly for a major announcement.

What came was probably slightly disappointing for many… the beta release of Redcine-X, which is awesome in it’s own right, and I’ve already begun to play with it.

Downloads are here: http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?62838-REDCINE-X-Professional…

What was expected was probably something Scarlet related, or perhaps playback to be enabled on the EPIC.

However, better late than never, I found Jim made another important announcement a couple days ago that I came across only minutes ago. That news is the first EPIC-X bodies are expected to start shipping this week.

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?62730-EPIC-X-production…

So what’s the difference between the EPIC-M and EPIC-X?

Not much, nothing to be too concerned about. Components on the M are machined, and hand assembled, while the X components are cast, and come off a production line. Still, if you want a EPIC right now, the more expensive EPIC-M is your best bet to avoid a wait.

Finally I am ready to publish my first article in a series comparing my recent battlefield experiences with three of the worlds best digital cinema cameras. My gratitude and thanks goes out to all at Media Film Service, Cape Town (www.mediafilmservice.com) for their support and for fantastic gear, and also Jacques Mulder of Mudville Production and Post, Dubai (www.mvdubai.com) for the Red EPIC.

At this stage in the game I am purposely avoiding talk of image “quality”, resolution, even latitude. All of these cameras are capable of capturing breathtaking imagery. What I want to focus on is how these cameras performed in a cut down, bare bones, guerilla warfare style of shooting with few accessories, and few hands on set.

I believe I broke some rules, stretched some boundaries and pushed some comfort zones in my recent shoots. Far from “traditional” at all on films that would normally be shot with this level of equipment, I purposely ditched focus pullers, camera assistants and DIT’s for a streamlined multi-hyphenated skeleton crew instead.

By skeleton crew, on “INSIDE” I mean my D.P. Warrick McLeod, who operated, built up, tore down and pulled focus, my director Christo Crafford, myself, and my cast (of two; Leon Laubscher and Pascale Neuschaffer).

We shot three locations, day and night, mostly exteriors with no grip and lighting gear. Our camera kit consisted of the Red One MX for two days, Alexa for one day, a set of Arri Master Primes, a Angenieux HR 25-250mm, a Zeiss 10mm, O’Connor 2575 head, short legs, Arri FF-3 follow focus, MB-14 matte box, and filters; ND’s (IRND’s on the Red), ND grads and a pola.

It was actually a lot of cases to shove into a single vehicle (a Mahindra 4×4) with all four grown men as well, but we managed.

Actually we did better than manage, we made a great movie with some outstanding pictures.

On Murder at the Manor we shot with the Red EPIC with Ultra Primes, a Zeiss 10mm, the same FF-3 follow focus but a 4×4 clip on matte box and many, many less camera related flight cases. We did have grips and lighting gear though, and a smoke machine, which filled the Mahindra and an additional long wheelbase Land Rover.

Murder at the Manor had a cast of nine and a crew of seven, but two of the crew were also cast members. Warrick Mcleod again was D.P. but was allowed this time to concentrate totally on lighting as Jacques Mulder operated and pulled focus, with someone else occasionally manning the follow focus and carefully pulling to marks when necessary.

The rest of the crew were pretty multi-hyphenated, it was really just a case of having as many hands on deck as possible. There really was no pecking order or specialists outside of Jacques and Warrick, Leon Laubscher the director and myself, producing. There were no units, there were no departments, but roles were carefully defined where necessary.

The resulting chaos worked brilliantly well for us, we all had fun and we shot 31 pages in four days. Keep in mind this was a period piece, and very drama/dialogue intensive.

I think there is little argument that these two productions, as test cases, can be considered “bare bones”.

You can check out some ungraded frame grabs from the EPIC on Murder at the Manor here – http://www.flickr.com//photos/richlackey/sets/72157627408410955/show/

So how did the cameras compare?

CRITICAL MASS

1. First place without a doubt goes to EPIC… the camera is very compact, and with all the accessories including the addition of a 17″ HD field monitor that we didn’t bring on “INSIDE” we had the fewest and smallest flight cases with the EPIC. It made a big difference to the shoot, in terms of space in vehicles, time spent lugging equipment around, and in terms of keeping track of where everything was at all times. Absolutely fantastic… closest thing to being as compact as shooting with a DSLR and still shooting “real” digital cinema. The total camera weight built up was also a fraction of either the Alexa or Red One. I think we’d have gotten away with perching the EPIC on a Manfrotto 501 fluid head. The O’Connor 2575 was a bit overkill but silky smooth so no complaints really.

2. Second place goes to the Alexa, but only because for some reason we had one less case to carry around. If I remember correctly we had four batteries in the Alexa’s camera case, instead of in their own separate case, and of course we were shooting to SxS cards, not hard drives. This aside, it’s a heavy camera, and a lot for a tiny crew to carry around. Still, we made it work.

3. Third place goes to the Red One MX… let’s face it, it’s a big camera and those batteries and hard drives and all the cables and bits and pieces can get a bit much for a one or two man show. It’s heavy when built up, and Warrick did have it on his shoulder a lot of the time.

ENERGY

1. EPIC again takes first place. Jacques had not received his EPIC batteries yet, so we had a separate V-lock system and used standard Red Bricks. They lasted substantially longer powering the EPIC than they did powering the Red One, or the Anton Bauer batteries that powered the Alexa. On a real guerilla style shoot, battery life is very important because down-time is minimal. We did keep the batteries on a constant charging rotation, but when few people are charged with multiple responsibilities, it’s easy for charging to take a back seat.

2. Red One MX lasted slightly longer on a charged battery than the Alexa. In both cases the on board monitor was powered by the same battery.

3. Alexa didn’t last too long on a single battery, I was a bit dissapointed about that really, especially since it wasn’t spinning hard drives but writing to solid state cards.

MEDIA

1. Red One MX takes first place here, the hard drives are great, we shot for a whole day on one drive shooting Redcode36. Brilliant.

2. ALEXA is second place, the Sony 32GB SxSPro cards were filled quick, but not as quick as the 128GB SSD RedMags!

3. EPIC in HDRx fills up those SSD’s damn quick! We went through four / five cards in a day not even shooting HDR and could have shot more without too much effort. We used just over 2TB in four days of shooting! Note however, this is not necessarily a bad thing! High bitrates mean lower compression, and that means a kick ass image (sorry… not getting into image quality just yet), but be aware that you need a good system of keeping track of what cards are full and need to be transferred, which can be formatted, and which are formatted.

OVERALL INDIE GUERILLA FRIENDLINESS

1. EPIC for the win! It wins hands down when all things are taken into account.

2. Alexa is number two, this will become even more apparent in the next article when I tackle the camera’s ridiculously easy and slick menus and setup procedures. You can’t go wrong, the camera is idiot proof.

3. Red One MX comes last, but certainly not least! It’s a fantastic camera and I’m not knocking it. It is however heavy, lots of cables of all different sorts that can get confusing under pressure, and it’s just not that easy with a really small crew, or for a single camera operator/D.P. that doesn’t have support crew. Plus it takes a while to boot up

That’s it for now. I’m keeping this particular comparison at that, but none of these cameras are what I would call hard to use, or particularly complex, and they can all be used on a cut-down shoot, just be aware of what you can expect in terms of physical space in transport, setup and tear down, battery life, media cycling, and plan accordingly beforehand!

Next up I’m going to look at the physical camera bodies themselves, dive into ergonomics and menus/setup procedures.

Awesome stuff… if you’ve found any of this useful, please consider subscribing to my blog via RSS. The link should be at the top of the page.

As my regular readers know, I’m busy writing up a tech series on the Red One MX, Arri Alexa, and now I’m adding the Red EPIC into the mix.

I’ve had the privilege of shooting with all three cameras over the past month and a half and I’ve certainly got my favourite now.

I also want to take the opportunity to thank Media Film Service (www.mediafilmservice.com) for the Master Primes on INSIDE, and the Ultra Primes on Murder at the Manor, as well as accessories, grips and lighting, and EPIC owner and friend Jacques Mulder of Muddville Production and Post, Dubai (www.mvdubai.com).

Alexa impressed me with it’s ridiculously easy menus and setup, and it’s latitude was a noticeable few stops greater than the Red One MX, but nothing could have prepared me for the EPIC. It certainly lives up to it’s name, and has latitude to spare even without shooting HDR.

The EPIC’s small form factor also places it in a league of it’s own compared to the other two top end digital cinema cameras. Built up, it is substantially more compact and lighter than any of it’s competitors.

I love the high data rate of the 5K Redcode, I’ve never been a fan of compression, no matter how clever it is, and although compressed, the new heavier flavours of Redcode RAW are fantastic for image detail, latitude and leave nothing else to be desired as far as I am concerned.

Post is easy, just as easy as shooting Prores 4444 straight to edit with Alexa, and a million times better as you have a 5K image and tons more image data than Prores could ever hope to provide. I can import the Redcode straight into Premiere CS5.5, drop it on the timeline, adjust the “playback resolution” dropdown to a figure acceptable to the performance of the hardware and play, what could be simpler? It’s flawless.

I’ll get into HDR a bit later, but for me, a celluloid lover, the EPIC has knocked the last nail in the coffin for 35mm acquisition.

More detailed reviews are coming, please subscribe to my blog to make sure you get them, but for now below are some frame grabs from my latest project “Murder at the Manor”, shot on the Red EPIC.

This post is being written in a whirlwind… the digital cinema revolution continues!

My short film INSIDE wraps production tomorrow night (Wed 3rd August) and has been a fantastic experience. We shot two days with the Red One MX and the final day with Arri Alexa, Master Primes on both cameras.

I’ve started the tech write-ups that I promised for the Red-MX side, but will only publish them once I can add the Alexa content alongside.

To add to the mix, my upcoming web series / short period murder mystery “Murder at the Manor” will be shot on the Red EPIC, so you’ll be hearing my thoughts on Red Digital Cinema’s new flagship camera platform as well.

I’m no Philip Bloom or Vincent LaForet, but if you want some real-life down to earth opinions and experiences from a grass roots indie production on the high-end digital cine cameras, this is a good place to keep an eye on!

Click on the subscribe icon and make sure you subscribe to future posts by email or in your RSS reader. You can also get the feedburner feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalCinemaDemystified

“I think students of cinematography should have a solid understanding of the elements of graphic design, such as composition, color, tone & scale, and their deep psychological effects. Technologies come & go, but the underpinnings of good image-making remain.” - Hiro Narita, ASC

My second short film “Inside” starts principle photography on Saturday 18th June. I am excited to share that thanks to Media Film Service in Cape Town, I’ll have hands on, up close and personal experience with both the Red One MX and the Arri Alexa on this shoot.

I’ll be writing up a technical series on each camera platform from a typical indie filmmakers perspective, from shoot all the way through post. What’s a indie filmmakers perspective you ask? Well, basically I’ll be my entire crew on this shoot, and so the information and experiences I will share will be very useful to low budget, bare bones crew working with these cameras under a number of challenging conditions.

I intend to produce images that will have anyone fooled about the number of people that were present behind the scenes, to show that it can be done, and to help out those kindred spirits who want to do it themselves.

What makes this different to some camera shoot-outs or comparison tests is that images from both will be cut into the same film.

What makes post interesting is that I’ll be using a Adobe CS5 workflow with a Assimilate SCRATCH grade and finish, to date most of the information I have encountered on Alexa specifically has been Final Cut Pro and Avid oriented.

Oh, I guess I should also mention that the final scene wraps on June 25th, and a preview copy of the film needs to be received in Berne, Switzerland at the Shnit International Short Film Festival by July 1st.

Join me on this roller coaster ride! Now would be a good time to subscribe to my blog!

You can also like the INSIDE facebook page for access to behind the scenes photos and more info as it happens, and follow my other blog Indiewood for more production specific posts.

I have had very little original material or even commentary of late for Digital Cinema Demystified.

I am not sure if I’ve lost interest, or if my relative isolation from any new gear lately has just taken its toll.

In any case, there are more boxes with lens mounts on the market than ever before. I suppose it has all become a bit boring.

I’m interested in a few cameras and hope to dive into them in the not too distant future.

These are Arri Alexa, Red Epic, Phantom 65, Aaton Delta Penelope and Sony’s F65.

On the border of interest is the Sony F3 but for a few thousand more you can have a Red One MX, so it’s borderline.

You can keep your AF100, FS100′s, and any and all forms of HDSLR… not interested.

Anyway… this article by David Leitner on Filmmaker Magazine’s blog is a fantastic snapshot of where we are at and what’s on the market.

DOES SIZE MATTER? | The Filmmaker Magazine Blog.

Vincent has outdone himself with this fantastic write up… he’s been getting up close and personal with the Red Epic M. Head on over to his blog right now!

What camera did I use to make this still picture? « Vincent Laforets Blog.

A great article by Mike Jones demystifying color grading.

How to overcome your fear of DIY Color Grading.

I have a profound interest in disruptive technologies… in predicting… watching the industrial, social and economic effects of revolutionary technological “advancements”. I equate it to a scientist in a lab coat watching a H-bomb explosion in slow motion with the task of analysing and categorizing the destructive capacity, and the short, medium and long term fallout.

The digital revolution in cinema/television/video has brought about some real madness, mad sheep disease I think because it affects sheep… which constitute the vast majority of the new-blood digital cinema “workforce”, on the image acquisition side and the post production side. I’m tired of it, and while I cannot change anything with a blog, I can notice it, call it what it is and disassociate myself from it as a professional and a artist.

This madness is a trend that is not limited to digital cinema, the madness is spreading to all kinds of industries but requires a special set of circumstances to breed and become an epidemic.

In fact I would go as far as saying the entertainment industry itself at it’s highest levels has become contaminated, and I for one have had enough.

Some may call it democracy… access for all, but I call it dishonest opportunism… and it costs real professionals their jobs and livelihoods. You don’t give a 18 year old kid with a fresh driving license a Porsche as his training wheels and yet that’s what has happened in this industry. I’m seeing a whole lot of carnage as a result… real people who have worked harder than anyone that are losing their living, stuck with a skill set that has become obsolete or worthless.

There’s a few examples I want to use. The first is the D.I.T., the Digital Imaging Technician. When Red Digital Cinema started shipping the Red One, suddenly there became a huge market demand for digital imaging technicians… and there weren’t any. A new technology had created a new job description overnight at the level of a traditional experienced camera assistant and it was open to anyone with I.T. skills willing to take on the acronym regardless of experience.

So, a vacuum was opened up, and suddenly there were D.I.T.’s… where did they all come from? Like a land run, where free titles were being awarded to the first suckers to stake their claim in the ground, a stampede of young and inexperienced opportunists armed with a Macbook downloaded the freely available tools, some sample media and read up the lingo… and so became D.I.T.’s.

If a “D.I.T.” could talk the talk… with enough confidence, they could talk their way into almost any shoot… because producers, line producers, D.P.’s… nobody had a cooking clue what any of the jargon meant, how these cameras worked or what to do with the data.

These fly by night opportunists… who would otherwise be cutting their home movies on pirated software, had access… access to free tools, to free information (the Reduser forum was a pretty good school) and because the technology and workflow was intuitive enough to this type of mind, these young nobodies were suddenly on film sets, right by the camera, earning daily rates that many on set could only dream of after many years of ladder climbing.

By now, many of them are legitimately qualified… their training has been on the job, but the traditional hierarchy to a profession in a highly regarded industry was turned on it’s head.

Camera assistants, loaders, and D.P.s stunned in horror and disbelief that such a thing was possible now had to catch up with the technology or risk being made redundant… which was a very real threat when Canon launched the 5D MkII.

Now we have sheep with large format cameras that cost a fraction of the $25,000 for a basic Red One setup.

The low to mid level videographer is no longer a viable profession in my opinion, and neither is a low to mid level editor… because everyone with a DSLR and a iMac is both. The barriers to entry have been demolished and the noise floor has risen. If you want to be paid… it had better be because you can deliver far beyond the norm… and that is harder than ever.

In my opinion this awful trend has become an expected norm… the new modus operandi for an entire industry and it’s soul has been lost… at least for a period of time, without a mention or acknowledgement of it’s passing.

Take the recent explosion of stereoscopy for instance. I have largely ignored it because I saw it coming and knew what it was… dishonest opportunism masked as art. The technology was the catalyst but the insatiable appetite for greed in a panic stricken industry amidst the worst economic decline in it’s history has really been something to behold.

The number of self proclaimed D.I.T.’s who suddenly became overnight steroscopy experts has been an astounding thing to watch… I think the only real qualification was to know what the word stereoscopy meant, or be able to pronounce it properly but if you could set up a impressive website or blog as well, man… that was proof. It was another perfect opportunity for a generation of desperate techno con men to make a lot of money from a stupid slow moving animal that is slowly bleeding itself to death to these parasites.

The only winners are the blood sucking technology manufacturers. They are the real culprits because they sell to the producers and the consumers. The companies making and selling the latest cameras and 3D flat screen TV’s in higher quantities and cheaper than ever are the only winners.

The rest of us… all of us are losers.

That’s my glass is half empty view of where things are at but that’s not where it ends.

There is a ray of sunshine, a opportunity for a select few to turn the tables and rise to great heights. This dream that many of us “filmmakers” pursue is still a game, it always has been and the game is not over. For those who have what it takes to stand out, the playing field could not look better.

I’m looking out over a vast and endless sea of losers, losers who are all capable of producing good work but won’t be able to earn a cent from it. The expectation has risen… the 35mm cinema look is now expected, a fantastic cut… expected, good lighting and creative cinematography… expected.

Many… the majority won’t be able to rise above it because that’s all they have. The tools were given to them overnight, and access to the “high end” look that is becoming the norm has been brought down to everyone’s modest abilities. This is now the lowest common denominator… it’s the floor.

For those that can push higher… above the floor, in creative imagery… in storytelling, there is great and fantastic opportunity with none of the traditional barriers to entry.

The real top level professionals have nothing to worry about, and will always be in demand because it is their art that is in demand… their voice, not their cheap tools.

For those creatives that can put it all together and go beyond there are real rewards, because they are the same rare and valuable assets to the industry that they have always been… to producers and also to an expansive audience that is rapidly becoming de-sensitized to the glossy 35mm “film look” and clever post production.

The audience will soon demand more, and if you take steps to position yourself as a creative that can deliver much more, not just lean on the crutch of your 5D MkII you will be a long term winner and build a life long career.

If you’re leaning on your tools right now… you may have a small window to make a quick buck… but playtime will soon be over. You must know that every new DSLR sold is reducing your market value, every new copy of Final Cut installed is reducing your market value… and it’s already almost zero.

It’s not a career, you are not becoming a cinematographer, or a editor, you saw a vacuum and you ran to fill it like all the other sheep.

Just because you have a camera does not make you a photographer. You are not your camera, your camera is not you… you need to be more… you need to see subject matter, create, craft and tell story… and I’m afraid those skills cannot be bought or pirated.

That is the only barrier to entry any of us need to worry about because it’s no longer about the technology… the technology is nothing… less than nothing.