My friends John Handem and Galen Carter-Jeffrey invited me this morning to the set of a new film shooting in Austin, TX titled “El Coyote”, currently being directed by Jay Galvan, produced by Steven Lane, and the Assistant Director is Jolyn Janis of Digital Defacto.  The Director of Photography is Austin’s very own Michael Morlan of Austin Film Tools.  Charles Nwachukwu, was also running around the set as well.

Officially, this is my first time on set with a RED camera.  While I’ve seen several pictures of people’s rigs and heard stories about the RED camera from my friends Benny Ontiveros and Marco Naylor back in El Paso, TX, I have only now seen one up close.  It’s actually a lot cooler than you might think, because the RED isn’t a camera.  It’s a computer with a lens.  For this particular shoot, The RED camera was laid out with several Prime Lenses ranging from 24mm to 135mm depending on what the shots called for.  Add that with the RED RAIDS, Monitor, and Redrock Matte Box, and you got about a rig weighing in at about 30lbs.  So much for run and gun.

Although watching the RED camera in action was great, I’m still really curious about the post-production workflow because it seems that’s where everyone gets either stuck, or ends up spending more money than they thought because of the 4K transcoding process.  However, NLEs like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro have released plug-ins that allows you to natively edit REDCODE files.  However, this does not mean that they can export back to full 4k R3D files.  Allow me to explain a little further when using Final Cut Pro:

When picking a resolution to shoot with, you should keep in mind that although the RED
camera can shoot media at 4K, 3K, and 2K resolution, there are pluses and minuses to
each resolution if you’re planning on doing your post-production using Final Cut Studio:

• 4K media is always resized to 2K during the Log and Transfer process.
• 3K media is not supported by Final Cut Pro’s real time effects architecture.
• 2K media is imported as is, with no resizing.
• 2K resolution is supported by Final Cut Pro’s real time effects architecture and is the maximum resolution that can be output by COLOR.

Remember, RED media is read-only; you cannot export media using the REDCODE
codec. When exporting a QuickTime file from a sequence using RED QuickTime media,
it’s best to use either ProRes 422 (HQ) or Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2.  So while your film was shot at 4K resolution, you will ultimately be finishing with a 2K quality picture.  Something to think about.

While I didn’t get a chance to actually use the camera myself, I did take several photos of the production (with my little Canon PowerShot).  I’ll have to talk to Jay and see if I can actually get my hands on a few shots from El Coyote to test on my NLE and see what the post-production workflow is like.

To be continued….