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MillimeterGreen Meets Red
Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Inside the Red One workflow for the Sci Fi Channel's Sanctuary.
DP David Geddes uses three Red Digital Cinema Red One cameras—close-up, long-shot, and crane-mounted—to capture footage for Sanctuary. The camera, whose 8-megapixel-equivalent images are backed up to 9TB drives daily, is ideal for the cinematographer because it allows him to use his preferred film lenses. Photo: Jeff Weddell © SCI FI Channel
As Sanctuary 1 Productions got underway in early 2008, the company considered a suggestion from Wilson that the team shoot with the Red One camera, which had garnered enthusiastic reviews from feature directors Peter Jackson and Steven Soderbergh. “But no one had shot a series like this with Red before,” Wilson says.
Geddes recalls that the insurance company backing the production was skeptical and wanted some quality-control testing to be done. “We wanted to be the first to use it for television,” he says.
The results dazzled him, and not just because of Red's ease of use, which allows Geddes to do 30 to 50 setups a day. “The biggest surprise was the image quality,” he says. A veteran DP with TV credits including 21 Jump Street, Men in Trees, Dark Angel, and Beverly Hills, 90210, Geddes is no stranger to shooting greenscreens for visual effects — including huge diorama sequences for Night At The Museum. Sanctuary represents the first time that this diehard film DP has shot digitally. “I skipped HD,” he says with a smile. Geddes quickly became a Red convert because the system allows him to use his preferred film lenses, including Cooke Optics S4/i primes and three Angenieux Optimo zooms: 24mm-290mm, 15mm-40mm, and 17mm-80mm.
“The cool thing about Red is that they've taken a 35mm gate or full sensor — to use film terms — and applied it to this medium,” Winn says. “So David can use film lenses rather than video lenses and get a very filmic look in terms of qualities like depth of field.”
Geddes says a lot of attention is paid to the capture capabilities of digital cameras, but that misses a crucial point: the power of the lenses in getting what a DP wants. “The biggest part is the glass,” he says. “Without that, it's like having the hairs missing on a brush.”
Work in progress
While Wood rehearses the actors for a shot in which they'll have to imagine the greenscreen floor caving in, Geddes pulls up a shot on his Apple MacBook Pro to illustrate what the Sanctuary team has achieved thus far. He plays a sweeping crane shot that flies from high above a cityscape down to a two-shot of actors standing on a parapet. It's a Hitchcockian move, and the only real elements are the actors.
The color and the subtleties of the images Geddes is capturing are striking, with subtle details even in the shadows. Geddes runs the color-correction program Apple Color on his laptop to get what he calls a starting point. “It's part of Final Cut Studio,” he says. “The final coloring is done with Color in 4K at Anthem.” Geddes acknowledges that the dynamic range of color he's getting with Red might not equal what he can get with 35mm film, but on balance, he says, things even out. “If you shoot film and then scan it for visual effects, you lose some of that range anyway.”
“The Red camera records from 100 ISO to 2000 [ISO] — a pretty good range terms of sensitivity,” Winn says. “Film stock only goes up to 1000 [ISO] right now. If I want, I can add light artificially.” With a few keystrokes on his Mac, Winn tweaks an image to demonstrate the amount of latitude that exists. “The possibilities are endless. But people shouldn't think they can fix something in post just because there is more latitude to play with. If the exposure values aren't there, it translates badly down the pipeline. It's not easier just because you have more options.”
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.