ffft,
Thanks for the info on the Nikon Mount. I'll inquire with my RED rep is there's a list, (whoa do I hate lists), but really thanks.
As far as RED user net, I kid about the fanboyism, but it does have a lot of resource, though I just don't have time to dig through it. Maybe it's my key wording, but we tried to find info on the scarlet sound playback in camera and never found anything substantial, though we gave it very little time, as for 5 weeks our crew has been sleeping about 5 hours a night tops and has done 4 countries in that period.
Graeme,
For single channel corrections, I really mean those little color squares in light-room with slider adjustments. They go red, orange, yellow, blue, cyan, magenta, etc. I know those aren't real rgb values, but it allows hue, luminance and saturation of each of those colors.
Case in point, on this gig, we had a lot of voice over from real subjects and rather than just run sound I we shot a portrait style on a white background, for an effect I want to do on the 4 videos. As these are subjects from around the world in virtually every ethnic lineage, they're are a lot of color changes in skin.
We had one scene with a very white western man next to a beautiful woman of African decent. The man had a magenta hue the woman slightly orange. This can be corrected in curves but is tricky and time consuming.
Go into light-room with a still image of faces and find that function with the color squares and you'll notice what I mean.
For vignetting, it sounds a like a trick (it is), but early on with digital video I would slightly vignette the piece. Most of us have locked in our head that film lenses and film cameras slightly degrade from the inside of the frame out and I played on this and made it work.
There are plugs for this, apple even has a vignetting setting, though most are kind of funky and don't look film like, more effect like. Light-room is good at this, but early on I did it in FCP using layered timelines and masks. I can't tell you the number of times clients, duping houses, people in our industry would say, "that's great did you shoot this super 16 or 35 and I'd say digital video and they'd say we know it's digital video now, but what format did you shoot on and I'd say "digital video". I'm convinced the vignettes plus the coloration and throwing slight focus gave them that impression.
As far as Scarlet sound playback. Sound is a monster, as you know. Even the most talented sound techs, in the most perfect room can drop the ball and when the issues is not caught quickly we have hell trying to fix it. I always (or nearly always run two computers with max digital red red rockets installed and with the Scarlet we have to pull the SSD run it through the computer and listen. With the Max digital case it runs a fan so we have to disable it to not interfere with the shooting and as you know running a 4k file without the RED rocket, even in the latest powerbooks, is somewhat slow and takes a while to spool up.
As you also know every minute of production time is costly and the sooner they fix the playback on the Scarlet the better my life will be.
As far as the mini jacks, I just find them very spotty. I would have loved real xlr inputs, or at least the R1's mini xlrs. they lock and are stable. If your team knows of any more substantial solution for this, please, please let us know. In fact I'm so aware of the mini inputs that a lot of time I'll run an R-1 for sound collection, not really as a visual B cam but just because it gives me a visual reference to pair the sound later and I know the R-1 inputs are safe.
One more note then I'll stop boring everyone, but for the first time we had a problem with one of our R-1's. I'm not blaming RED because that one body has been to hell and back and I got complacent and thought it was virtually indestructible. So stable that I left our second R-1 back in the studio, because we were carrying over 1000 pounds of equipment as it was and baggage overage in europe is a fright. Next time the second R-1 comes along. I could kick myself.
What happened was about mid way into the project we lost the ability to see changes on the monitor. WB, ISO, tint, etc. In fact to make the monitor look good we had to be a stop hot which we caught early on so we'd set the shot, set the camera and then go into cine-x for preview make corrections in cine-x and then set the camera to those settings.
Thank goodness for the raw file because until I caught this I had two sessions that were a stop hot and cine-x pulled them back and they look great.
I like the Scarlet, may grow to love it, (don't know yet), but if you can love a machine I love the RED Ones. I know them inside and out and I still think they shoot the most cinema graphic look of any digital camera I've owned, motion or still.
Sorry. One more suggestion. A hot shoe addition for all the cameras. I know that sounds silly, but we run a second camera mounted mike for sound scratch and sync and they're are times you want to mount a small led at the lens for just a slight fill. There are third party solutions, but if RED made one for the R-1 and specifically the Scarlet it would be in our kit the day it came out.
Thanks.
IMO
BC
P.S. I'm sorry, but one more thing. Why won't the Scarlet run a Phantom powered mic? I like Rodes, much better than seinhauser (sp?) and for a quick set up nothing works better or faster than one or two mics on stands out of frame pointed to the subject (as long as the subject isn't moving). Also powered mics are a pain as nobody remembers to turn them off, so every day, the batteries have to be changed. Seems like a small thing but as you know time is killer in production and anything that works, works fast is a godsend.
P.S. 2. This may sound like a list of complaints but it's not. As of "today" nobody makes a raw file camera at the price of the RED and though an added step in processing, is well worth the security. I'm convinced that RED has pushed the whole industry and without RED Sony or Canon wouldn't have dreamed of a raw file (my opinion).
People can say what they want about RED's raw file if it's really raw or not, but I know a stop over is not the plan (see my above note), but the ability to pull it back and make it look great is te=rememdous asset so thank the RED team.