RED for wedding video production

[Chris Hurd]

Originally Posted by Warren Kawamoto

Shooting a wedding with RED is exactly like buying a Lamborghini, then driving it in rush-hour traffic.

In L.A. that's not exactly an uncommon sight.

Around here every once in awhile you'll see a
Ferrari in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Doesn't happen
very often but it's certainly not unheard of.

[Louis Maddalena]

Originally Posted by Warren Kawamoto

To add to your comments, I wonder if it has an ND filter? Or image stabilizer? What about power consumption? Lastly, I wanted to see them demo the unit with a transition from dark room to bright sunlight. Can you adjust the white balance quickly, or on the fly? Or apply ND filter? Is the image on the exterior monitor even visible in sunlight?? If not, would you have to whip out a hood to cover it while shooting? From what I've seen so far, it looks like a rough camera to wrestle with for run and gun.

Your wish is my command:

HDRx Tunnel and Sea Pool Footage – Royal Galactic Cinema

There have been a lot of other great points here that I'd love to comment on, however, I just got back from a commercial shoot for a drug company, and now I'm insanely tired so I'm going to turn on some tv and relax before bed, but I have off tomorrow so I'll be back on then.

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

Aside from shooting 4K video there are other unique features of the RED that appeal including shooting R3D RAW, enormous dynamic range (even more so with HDRx) & recording at high frame rates (up to 120fps).

Apparently Scarlet is 3K (3072x1728 pixels) & Epic is 5K (5120x2700 pixels) which means that you could be shooting 120 decent resolution still photographs per second along with your video.

[Vito DeFilippo]

Well, it's been done already. Here's probably the first wedding shot on Epic. And two of them, no less. Shot at 5K. Apparently each frame can be pulled as a 14 megapixel frame:

Red Epic Wedding Trailer for Jen & Paul on Vimeo

[Noa Put]

To be honest, if you wouldn't have told me it was shot on red, I"d never know. There's no question that what comes out of this camera is superior to any dslr or "mid range" camera's most weddingvideographers use and certainly it has more advantages, like pulling this hugh still frames out but for me the equipment cost heavily outweighs what I could get in return for making wedding "movies".
Using dslr's is still the most costeffective solution today with a resulting quality that 99% of any bride would be very happy with. To me a Red is serious overkill for a wedding.

I read in the article they shot mostly handheld and "run and gun" with 2 red epic's, That's like using a Sony cx115 for a budweiser commercial.

[Nigel Barker]

A pair of Epic-Ms at $60K each as must have been used here would never be cost effective for a wedding shoot but a pair of Scarlets at a projected $6K could be especially as you can also deliver high quality stills.

[Noa Put]

A scarlet? Isn't that this "coming soon" camera since a few years now? :D

Ofcourse you are right that a scarlet will be more costeffective since it will be a lot cheaper then these high end epics, but $6K I believe when I see it, Red has changed their minds that often you can't take them serious anymore, I also think to have a fully production ready scarlet you probably get closer to $10K but we"ll have to wait and see. In Europe that would mean a scarlet would be almost half cheaper then a canon xf300 (listed over $10K in these parts)...I don't think so.

[Steve Kalle]

If you read about that wedding video, you will see that the 2 Epic cameras were there for 'fun'. So, you shouldn't think that you can capture an entire wedding as good as most of you do with other cameras.

You should also realize that these Epics use 60 watts, thus, requiring many very large batteries. Its small size is not so small when you need such large batteries for long events. And since you need a mattebox, the small size of the Epic is completely negated.

Add in far more SSDs than what I originally quoted for such a long event because I was taking into consideration a data wrangler and video village on set to offload and backup - not possible at a wedding. Thus, add at least $10k more just for SSDs.

I will add to prior comments about the extra work in post with Red cameras. There is a lot of extra work and serious computer horsepower is needed for efficient editing on a daily basis.

Please stop referring to 5k PIXELS as resolution. The number of pixels on a sensor is different from the recorded resolution. Because it is a bayer sensor, the resolution is much lower than the number of pixels.

[Louis Maddalena]

Steve,

I do not think the batteries are that much larger than normal sized anton baur batteries so it shouldn't be too much of an issue. Additionally, it would be possible to dump footage from the onto external drives so I do not think that would be too much of an issue either but I do not know for sure. IF I do buy a RED it would be for other purposes other than weddings, but I might bring an epic to a high end wedding to give it a shot and just have my other camera on standby incase its not working out.

Louis