Around late August I shot a short film for Sebastien Tobler, titled ‘Fractured Legacy‘. The film shot over 5 days in Delaware, Virginia and DC. For camera format we ended up going with the new RED EPIC. Sometime down the road I’ll talk about that film, as we used the EPIC in a different manor than how we used it for this. We ended up having an extra day on the EPIC rental before we had to return it. So I figured after the shoot we’ll shoot a little short film. Instead of making the typical test short of beautiful images of girls touching wheat fields with their hands, I’d do something a little more, fun. With the help of several others, we made this little jewell:

The ‘trailer’ was shot in four hours and mostly with available light. We shot in afternoon, evening and night We were battling to get enough exposure because of the high frame rates and shooting in the deep forest of Rock Creek park. Although we did use one fluorescent Cool-lite for some of the exterior night shots. The day that we filmed also happened to be the same day that the earthquake struck the east coast. We needed to get a variety of locations in order to make it look like a trailer. So made for an interesting day of getting around D.C. Big thanks to Alex Cortright for lending us his amazing pipes, make sure to check out his portfolio.

We made sure to make the shoot a very run and gun type operation. We had the RED Clutch handheld rig. It’s an interesting rig that uses a front chest plate to hold pressure. If set up right you can even take your hands away from the grips and it’ll hold itself on your shoulder.  I was also lucky enough to enlist my camera crew from ‘Fractured Legacy’ to help me out with this. My 1st AC, Katie Neff and 2nd AC, Justin Oliver. Both of them operated for quite a few of the shots. I’d like to point out that they both drove/bussed in from their homes (South, VA & Massachusetts) to work on ‘Fractured Legacy’ AND slept on our couches. True filmmakers.

Clutch handheld rig

In the trailer I wanted to test the high frame rate footage of the EPIC. Since corny action trailers have a ridiclous amount of slow motion, I thought  this would be a hilarious way to test it. We ran whole range, starting from 5k@96fps all the way to 2k@300fps. Also wanted to test low-light capability with different ISOs. The camera is natively balanced at 800iso. But it’s important to see how it handles itself a few ISOs above.

Compression Settings:

Unfortunately we only had a 128, and 2x 64ssd mags and we wouldn’t be able to offload because of time restraints. So I changed compression ratio to 14:1 to save some mag space. It’s typically best to stay within the range of 10:1 to 5:1. After 5:1 it becomes a little challenging to see the difference and you being to sacrifice mag space. For those of you who are used to RED ONE compression settings, REDCODE42 is the equivalent of 7.5:1 with the EPIC. To give another reference ‘The Social Network’ was shot at REDCODE42 and that was a pretty stunning film.  But once you start to get into 96fps high frame rates and above the EPIC makes you raise the compression ratio (It does make you confirm this operation before it moves into that frame rate). This will get better once they come out with faster SSD mags. Check Evan Luzi’s site, The Black and Blue, for the EPIC pocket guide about compression settings vs. FPS.

EPIC on set of 'Fractured Legacy'. Bit of a rats nest to handle splitting out to additional monitors. Photo by: Katie Neff

About 80% of the trailer was lensed with a 28mm Ultra Prime, mostly shot wide open. You get an idea of what that lens is made of during the shots of the guy smoking with the traffic lights in the background. Notice how those traffic lights in the background are complete circles and not octagon. The lens is SUPER sharp wide open (even thought it’s only T1.9). Longer lens footage was shot with Fujinon/Arri Alura 18-80 T2.6. Finally a  PL zoom that looks beautiful and has practical focal lengths. Also I didn’t see any vignetting with Alura at 18mm at 5k from my testing. If I were to buy a PL mount lens, this would be the first on my list.

Native image out of camera, 5k at 24fps

Ok, now for the subjective part.

Frame Rates:

EPIC footage shot 5k@96fps and 120fps is just absolutely STUNNING! You get some sort of an idea of how it looks on the trailer. But to watch the native .r3ds is just jaw dropping. 4k at those same fps is just gorgeous too. When shooting with the RED ONE you had to switch to 2k to even get a 60 fps. The problem is that when you have to crop the MX sensor the image degrades extensively. I don’t know enough about the sensor to say exactly what the cause is but it definitely breaks down. So to have frames rates as high as 120 in 5k is SUCH a huge improvement.

Native image out of camera, 5k 2.4:1 at 96fps.

When you first watch your footage of 2k@300fps, it’s pretty damn cool. Just about everything looks like an over dramatic music video. Even a girl throwing a stick in the water. But after editing the trailer and watching the footage a thousand times over, eventually tired of the shots because of how much the image degrades at 2k. On the other hand the 5k@96 and 120fps STILL keeps impressing me. Don’t get me wrong, the 300fps is definitely cool to try, but staying in 5k or 4k is where you’ll get the most out of your image.

Color Science:

It’s important to note that even though the EPIC shares the Mysterium-X sensor as the RED one it does a significantly better job of handling that data. The most significant difference I noticed was the color science. RED techs have said that they haven’t improved anything but there is no doubt the camera now does a better job of handling skin tones.  Also the way the highlights roll off is much better than RED one. It’s not quite Alexa level but a vast improvement for sure. It’s very important to see that their continuing to improve these two elements because in my opinion they are the two biggest weaknesses for RED footage.

Native still frame out of camera. 5k 2.4:1at 96 fps.

ISO:

As for ISOs we went as high as 1600 for outside street shooting. The EPIC doesn’t handle ISO over 1000 too well. BUT, if you shoot at a low compression ratio, let’s say 3:1 or 5:1 at 800 or 1000iso, it’s easy to push the footage in post. You can get a proper exposure because of all that wonderful data in .r3d files. You may have to work a little noise reduction. Not an ideal situation, but an option if you have no other choices

Post Workflow:

I went with Storm, which is unfortunately a product that’s now been discontinued. But within the program I did a base grade with the .r3d files. Gave a green/tealish look for the background and warmed up the skin tones to get those action movie color tones. Then exported them as Apple ProRes4444 1920×1080. On a hand full of shots enabled some noise reduction with ISOs over 1000. On my MacBook Pro I’ve found that REDCINE-X does a better job of playback with the .r3ds than Storm. But I’m not a fan of REDCINE-Xs grading tools. Their color wheels are far too sensitive for my liking. I went with this route because I knew that this footage was only going to be used for online.

I had a lot of fun shooting this trailer and much thanks to everyone who helped:

Matt O’Grady, Griffin Wholey, Alex Bryant, Katie Neff, Justin Oliver, Alex Cortright and Jon Salvia. You guys kick ass!