First RED Wedding Booked!

[Louis Maddalena]

Hey guys,

Had to share that I booked my first wedding to be shot on RED next year! Not charging them any more than DSLR rates because they will be the first but I will be shooting on RED next season!

Louis

[Warren Kawamoto]

Epic? Or Scarlet?

[Nicholas de Kock]

Congrats, wonderful to hear you are working for free way to go on the business plan :P Looking forward to hearing your report on the camera and seeing results.

[Jeff Brewer]

Won't the complex menus/workflow with these cameras put a huge strain on you in the production and post-production? Just curious.

[Buba Kastorski]

as soon as I'll get my, all weddings that I do will be shot with Scarlet, and some in 2012 season on Epic and Scarlet

[Warren Kawamoto]

I personally would not use red for weddings on a regular basis because setting up shots require speed, which reds aren't too good at.

[Justin Molush]

Congrats - but just an FYI (and you probably know this if you booked it) you should probably hire a camera tech exclusively for that camera and a BRoll/second shooter as there will be down time with that camera unless you have a LOT of SSDs and a LOT of batteries constantly charging.

Do you have someone running DIT? You will be producing footage faster than you can ingest at one point so just be wary and pace yourself that you dont run out of SSDs/Batteries when the vows are happening.

Where are you renting from and what rig/tripod are you using?

[Ken Diewert]

Louis,

I'm assuming that you have a Red already and are familiar with it. I just spent a week with an Epic, and I would be very reluctant to shoot a wedding with one. As mentioned media cost is through the roof, and batteries do not last long at all. We also had lots of emergency power downs/reboots required. At least 3 per day. If this happened at a critical point during a wedding, you'd better have back ups... And I'm not trying to be a downer here, but I think 4k is major overkill for a wedding, unless its royalty or something.

This is an excerpt from a Phil Bloom blog post 2 days ago

"First off, and this is the biggie. Buying a Scarlet is NOT going to make you a better filmmaker. It is NOT going to make your camerawork any better. It WILL cost you more than many of you think financially. So I just want to put down the facts on paper so you can make a better informed choice and also my opinions…less important than facts but may be worth listening to! These facts are gathered from my own experience as a RED Epic owner for the past 5 months…

First off I love my Epic. The images out of it are so beautiful. I also swear at my Epic more than I have ever cursed another camera…why? Because it goes wrong. The reliability is not the same as any other camera I have owned. Nothing close. But, this is expected (and effin annoying!). The Epic is effectively a BETA camera. When you buy this you need to know this.".

[Steve Slattery]

"The reliability is not the same as any other camera I have owned. Nothing close. But, this is expected (and effin annoying!).The Epic is effectively a BETA camera. When you buy this you need to know this"

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I just cant understand the logic of paying good money on this basis. Would you buy a car that was likely to break down?

Steve

[Buba Kastorski]

we'll see how it goes, I always have all my DSLRs and EX1 in case of unexpected camera failure, and I never shoot one camera. We did a few weddings with RED1 as A cam, and I didn't really like that experience, R1 is not a run and gun camera, but you know the rule of the game - whatever client wants;
but Scarlet/Epic is a completely different camera, it's smaller, lighter, it boots just a couple seconds longer than EX1; unless you shoot wedding 3:1 @ 4K media is not terribly expensive, just about SxS media price when EX1 was first out; having redvolt in the side handle at all times lets you hot swap IDX any time you need without camera restart; my only concern is reliability, but that I will have to learn on my own, and I definitely will report how RED Scarlet X behaves in ultimate R&G situation, because what could be more run and gun than shooting a wedding?

[Jeff Brewer]

@Steve Think demolition derby. Sure stuff is going to break and you might be in serious pain later on, but damn it was a fun ride.

[Louis Maddalena]

Wow Missed a lot of comments, I'll try to address as much as I can.

Right now I'm planning on shooting a little with Scarlets, a Little with an Epic, and having 5D's and 7D's on site as a back up.

I'm not working for free. I'm getting a little over $2200 for a highlight only package.

I definitely understand the worries about batteries not lasting long which is why I am going to have REDvolts on hand but not going to shoot with them but shoot with some Dionic 90's.

Media is definitely an issue I agree. At 5K its a huge investment but I'm thinking for this wedding we'll stick to 4k and 3k shooting and since Scarlets will be part of the equation we'll limit the compression to 8:1 so we can match.

I will be bringing a camera tech / DIT to be part of the process. However, this is a wedding so the point is to not be seen so I'll keep them away from the action until the reception where they can be in a back room.

Philip Bloom did have some pretty harsh things to say about the Epic, and tried to convince many people to not buy a Scarlet because of them. It is important to keep in mind though that if you bought an Epic-M, RED made sure you knew that you were buying a beta camera. It still says that the Epic-M is a beta camera on their website. However, Philip did buy a scarlet himself so it couldn't be that bad.

Post production process: My plan right now is to ingest and edit with a rocket and then export down to HD video when I'm done editing, grading, and finishing to be displayed on their television set, while still making a 4k master of the project incase I ever find a need for it. I hear you can rent the move theatre for presentations which might be a cool way to show the bride and her family if they are interested.

[Julie Hill]

Doesn't it cost more than $2200 to rent the cams, pay people, and edit the highlights? Just curious. If I were you I'd charge at least 5x that amount.

[Sean Seah]

Cool can't wait to see the results, especially slow mos! Personally I would be going for the C300 at the moment =)

[Louis Maddalena]

Originally Posted by Julie Hill

Doesn't it cost more than $2200 to rent the cams, pay people, and edit the highlights? Just curious. If I were you I'd charge at least 5x that amount.

It would indeed but I'm hiring a DIT who is going to give me a deal, my second shooter works on me on every wedding and he has his set rate, and I own the cameras so I don't need to worry about rent... prices will go up for red camera but this time I'm shooting on RED leaving the DSLR's in the kit and charging DSLR prices in the even that what they end up getting is a DSLR video.