Appendix 1

When Shooting Digital Video
no backup. Keep in mind, though, fi lm is many times more vulnerable after it has been exposed, but
this has not keep it from being used successfully for more than 100 years.
Ideally, the media should be downloaded to a redundant RAID and checked before the chips are
cleared or the drive reformatted and reused on set. The chips and drives are expensive, and there is
a tendency to dump the media to drive and clear and reuse the chip as soon as possible to avoid
slowing down the production. But if you haven’t checked the transfer, and a backup, don’t be too
quick to dump the media.
Red Camera Redcode
The Red One camera uses a unique codec called Redcode that is recorded directly to drive in camera.
The removable drives can be taken to the postproduction facility and downloaded, or they can be
downloaded on the set to a laptop or other Mac. The fi le size is very small, smaller than DV, so media
management and playback is fast and simple.
Final Cut Pro 6 supports Redcode. Simply import the raw camera footage and start editing in native
Redcode. While this sounds like voodoo, it requires no shaking of rattles or sacrifi cing of chickens.
It doesn’t even require any input/output devices or video monitors. The Redcode is viewed directly
on the computer screen. The down side of this is that the image can only be viewed on the computer
screen. This is not a bad thing, per se, but at this time the closest thing to a 4 K monitor is the Sony
4 k projector. And while this looks great, the $100,000 price tag is a bit high for most users. What’s
needed here is a 4 K version of the Apple Cinema Display or a 4 K projector that anyone can afford.
In the meantime, we will all need to tough it out with the current HD Cinema Display.
Redcode is intended for projects headed for theatrical distribution. It projects as well as 35 mm or
can be used to make 35 mm prints by simply treating the Redcode as a digital intermediate (DI). For
projects headed to video, the Redcode can be down converted to HD video in any format. It down
converts well to ProRes 422, and if there is no intent to use the Redcode, the camera footage can be
converted to ProRes 422 after it is imported and before editing. This makes it possible to see the
fi nished look of the HD video on your HD monitor. The ProRes 422 can be composted in Motion
and graded in Color and output to any HD or SD video format.
Capturing and Preparing Success and Son from the Ocean of
Storms by Glynn Beard
Success was shot on Sony HD Cam using the F900 Cine Alta. The production frame rate was
23.98 FPS. The capture phase of the workfl ow proceeded like this:
• The production tapes were down-converted to DV Cam at 29.97 FPS by Digital Film Tree in Los
Angeles.
• These DV clones were logged and captured into Final Cut Pro.
• A batch list was exported from Final Cut and this batch list was imported into Cinema Tools. This
became the Cinema Tools database, which was linked to the original 29.97 DV video media bringing
all of the shots online in Cinema Tools.
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