RED at the BBC BBC shoots 4K for the first time with the RED camera after much persuading of camera and workflow By Paul Nicholson BBC TESTS The Farm was chosen to do the grade for Wallander and they did some of the conforms that weren’t done at The Chimney Pot in Sweden. But the Farm did become something of a hub of information exchange when the BBC were questioning the camera and it’s workflow. Dave Klafkowski is Creative Director of the Farm Group. “They (The BBC) did some tests in extreme light and extreme low light and like most tests under those conditions you will find some issues. Some of the low light that I’ve seen particularly at 4K is noisy but only in the same way that 16 and 35mm would be. There is also some low light material in mist and smog that is very noisy, but I’ve seen that with any camera. We used a bit of noise reduction with the DVNRs within the Film Master but it’s never perfect. “The truth is – the reason Wallander looks different is because of the scenery and because of the light in that part of Sweden at that time of the year. It has a small amount to do with the RED. There is something in the textural quality of it’s acquisition that makes Wallander look different. It’s the Swedish light and Anthony’s camera work. It’s a light you’ve never seen and I can’t believe that’s just the RED camera. “The agreed workflow with the BBC was to shoot 4k, we conformed the DPXs at 2160 x1080 so we kept the aspect ratio all the way through and it only hit tape when it was delivered. So we did a down res but we only did a single scale down from the 4k. There was no more scaling after that point. “We’re doing another drama for Left Bank Films with the RED shooting in Ireland and we have found that the 4k acquisition in perfect light is the best way to go, it would appear that acquiring in restricted light situations with movement, perhaps shooting off the shoulder, it is better to work in 2k because you’re pushing the camera less hard. This is just what I’m seeing coming out of Ireland we haven’t done any conclusive tests. But for TV the results are still cracking. “So high detail and no or minimal movement shoot at 4k, otherwise shoot in 2k. This isn’t a problem for us as a post facility as long as we know what we’re getting. The data wrangler or assistant editor is the absolute key here.” Producer Simon Moseley also understood that a new system needed testing: “The Swedes were very excited about using the RED as they had experience of it already but the worry was how the technical process was going to work, there was a concern that a huge amount of computer data was going to be produced that would be difficult to manage, but we realised storage had got smaller and smaller. Each of the three films that we shot ended up producing about 4TB of RED raw files. These days you can get that on one drive. There was the concern about how we were going to cut it because when we first started out, there wasn’t a recognised workflow in operation with AVID. We wanted to use AVID as we thought it was a better system. At the time you couldn’t import the RED material into an AVID and get the timecode through. “I wasn’t convinced at the start of the process that the RED was the way to go. It was a nice idea but we didn’t think it was ready. Anthony was very keen on it, and it was a combination of his keeness and us needing to find another system that swayed the decision. “The key was finding Markus (see page 3 - The Workflows). A lot of producers I had talked before we started felt traumatised by the backing up procedures that are needed but we had Markus. We bought a powerful Mac system and hired a Camper Van and it didn’t’ feel like such a big deal. What we had on set was not anymore or any heavier that we would have had on a normal film shoot. “The camper followed the shooting around and the rushes would be dumped to the Mac in the camper. It’s like re-loading a mag except quicker. The footage would then go to a studio nearby for offlining and then make its way to Markus’ Chimney Pot facility for the conform.” THE FARM’S RED WORKFLOW With most post production equipment companies coming out with their own RED workflow after the SDK’s release Dave explained what the Farm does with RED: “When we get RED rushes in here we are currently using the Film Master but depending on workflow and timing I may just use some proprietary Mac software in order to extract the file. There’s a nice little bit of software from a company called Rubber Monkey [rubbermonkeysoftware.com] the software is called Monkey Extract. It’s is an EDL conforming tool. It works in conjunction with Red Alert and Red Cine. It’s a nice little App. “We’ve got four Film Masters which will invariably be doing other things and if I need to tie them up for the processing time in order to process RED files, that’s a little bit counter productive. So I can use a couple of eight processor X Serves to do the crunching. At some point there is some processing to be done, now if you look at the way Scratch would do it, they would work with the native RED files all the way through and right at the last minute they would process them. I quite like that as a work flow. Once the code was made public I was very happy I didn’t need to introduce another piece of software in to my workflow. I like what Digital Vision has written, I can do a quick test conform either using a Film Master or Final Cut using the reference files. It’s a perfectly acceptable view, one eighth I think, you could probably even grade it, I wouldn’t dream of doing it but the colourimetry would be right.” WALLANDER It is rumoured that the BBC has banned the RED camera from all internal productions [since this article has been published the BBC has confirmed that far from banning the RED they have already bought two cameras and are planning more RED productions] – you can understand their concern on using an untested product and workflow especially when their technical advisors wouldn’t give it their blessing and they had funded a large part of the production. A drama called Fathers and Sons is soon to be shown on ITV and that was shot on RED, it will be interesting to gauge their attitude to the new technology The three 90 minute Wallander dramas started last week and quite rightly got an airing on the BBC’s high definition channel so we can all make our minds up. Page3 - The work flows RELEVANT MEDIA