Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/5315
traditional production, but, it's not RAW, it's compressed and the ability to work with color correction after shooting has a severe limit... that's the downside. "I grabbed the 5D on a Red shoot last week and I got 300 per- cent more shots that are really cool with a 1.4 lens — I couldn't have done that with a camera that weighs 50 pounds. We are com- plete believers of the Red RAW workflow and that 4K image is un- comparable, but when you are in the real world working, sometimes it's almost wor th taking a hit for the mobility and different kinds of shots you could never get otherwise. "I imagine the Scarlet and the Epic will be the most ultimate cam- eras ever because they are convertible. I'll be putting gyros on them and building camera mounts, putting them on radio control cars, fly- ing them with helicopters, and I won't have to compromise." OUTLOOK 2010: "Everything is going to go 100 percent digital, everything is going to be solid state, and there will be a lot more on- line collaboration. "When you have a card that can record for two hours and it's the size of a postage stamp and you put it in your laptop and star t editing away… that's just not going to go away. It's too easy and too good, too wonderful. "Picture quality is going to ramp up because of the pixel pushing ability of the graphics cards.The GPUs are there.The images will get better and better and closer to a still camera's image. Why compro- mise when you don't need to, and Red is really pushing that envelop, and ever yone else will follow along. There will be different flavors and different quality levels, but essentially when we [have] pixel ac- curate mostly uncompressed images, even if they are natively 1080p, you are pretty much there. "Also, everything is going to realtime — all the apps." PETER COLLISTER, ASC Cinematographer Los Angeles Mr. Deeds, Alvin and the Chipmunks,Tracey Ull- man's State of the Union Peter Collister has been splitting his time between shooting digital and film acquired movies. As an early adopter of Red, he tends to shoot most of his digital films that way, although he has worked with the Phantom and Genesis and wants to use the Sony F35. He just completed the feature Furr y Vengeance for Summit Entertainment on Red and is currently second unit DP on Green Hor- net, which is shooting 35mm Panavision Anamorphic. STRENGTHS: "I have a histor y of doing features with either animated ani- mals or real animals. One I did recently was Furry Vengeance with Brooke Shields and Brendan Fraser, and the decision was to go digital so we didn't have to worry about the budget concerns of just letting the cameras just roll and roll when we were trying to get performances out of real animals. That was a huge plus for us. It's also the same with ac- tors. Directors' don't have to worr y about cutting performances when shooting digital, and from my experience that is the biggest plus so far — being able to shoot and shoot and shoot.There is also a negative related to this, but more on that later "The other plus is you are seeing the image the way it will really look, so the director, the producer, the agency, they can all see what it's really going to look like while on set. I can show them look-up ta- bles and make sure everybody is happy on Day 1." WEAKNESSES: "I do miss a little bit of the texture of film in some of the [digital] images that I see. I was just doing a DI on digital effects plates on a film I shot on Red over the summer and there were some shots where I thought, oh, that probably would have looked a little better on film. "Another weaknesses I see is because you can just roll the cam- eras endlessly, it puts such a burden on post production editorial in that they have such a large amount of footage coming through the pipeline that just the organizational skills and equipment necessary is more than when it's just film. We used to be shooting 800,000 feet of negative, which was a lot, and now in the digital world we are shooting twice that." OPPORTUNITIES: "From an economic standpoint, as a film stu- dent or someone just star ting out, if you wanted to make a shor t film or low-budget feature on film there were still some very hard costs — film stock processing, dealing with editorial, post production workflow, answer printing, etc. — that couldn't be avoided, so it was ver y hard to make your own film without raising a lot of money. Now I see the oppor tunity that the high def world has offered for people who want to make their own films.That is very much a posi- tive, but on the negative side, just because there are more people making movies, doesn't mean they are making good movies." THREATS: "Most of the studios are archiving by making separa- tion negatives from the original material, whether it's digital or film. They are making YCM separations and vaulting them in Kansas salt mines.That is still the only accepted archival method accepted by the major studios now. So there is no real archival method for digital. "Also, because we are in the beginning stages, every single system for high def or digital acquisition has a different workflow for post, so it would be nice if there was more standardization on the acqui- sition/post workflows on these digitally-shot films." 20 Post • December 2009 www.postmagazine.com OUTLOOK s h o o t i n g d i g i t a l Peter Collister shot the second season of Showtime's Tracey Ullman's State of the Union on Red.