Red: The Camera That Changed Hollywood | Hacker News Reader

Red: The Camera That Changed Hollywood

technologyreview.com

59 pointsraphar33 comments

Why is the Hobbit being filmed in 3D ?

If Red has made 3D more common then I regret that part happening, extra especially if it changes the script or action just to appeal to the effects.

The strangest thing about the whole 3D cinema trend is that it seems to have sprung out of some anti-piracy / anti-home-cinema idea among the studios. I can't speak for everyone, but for me it is just another reason to wait and watch the film at home. Why would I want to watch a blurry, dim version of the film through a pair of glasses on top of my regular glasses? I did watch Avatar in 3D, and I regret doing so. It's a pure effect, one that adds nothing to the film and for me, detracts from the experience significantly enough to make me wait for the DVD release.

I can't figure out if Peter Jackson is genuinely excited about 3D or if he's in some kind of reality distortion field where 3D will save the art of cinema.

>I can't figure out if Peter Jackson is genuinely excited about 3D or if he's in some kind of reality distortion field where 3D will save the art of cinema.

I imagine he has no choice, that the studios stipulate he must use and promote 3D to get the funding. The studios want it, like you say, because they think it will encourage people to go to cinemas again.

If you saw Scorsese promoting his new flick recently on the Daily Show, he opined at length about the wonderful cinematographical benefits of 3D, and it didn't ring true at all. It definitely seemed like he was obliged, perhaps contractually, to say it.

> I imagine he has no choice

I think so as well. Back when Guillermo del Toro was going to direct it, he posted in The One Ring forums saying they didn't any interest in 3D at the moment, but "If after AVATAR the market may change and demands are put upon us, etc that is in the future". http://newboards.theonering.net/forum/gforum/perl/gforum.cgi...

I saw Hugo in 3D and Martin Scorcese made it look _amazing_. I have never seen it look as good as he managed. I don't know how he comes across in interviews, but he is clearly a virtuoso with it in practice.

I came here to say basically the same thing. It can be used as a subtle effect to add a great deal to the depth of the setting. I feel like it's just another added dimension of cinematography.

I can't speak for everyone, but for me it is just another reason to wait and watch the film at home.

why wait? i can't think of any 3D movies that have been released lately that didn't also come out in a regular version. there are a ton of theatres that don't have 3D projectors and a lot of people don't like it or don't want to pay the extra money to see it in 3D. i just recently saw hugo in standard projection at a theatre that had both versions playing.

It's yet another reason to stay away from cinemas, not the only reason. The non-3D versions that do play around here tend to play in the smaller salons, and for example in the case of Tintin, only the swedish dubbed version plays as non-3D. So to see the film with original sound I either see it in 3D or see it at home.

I've always really liked 3D movies when it's well done. I thought it really made Avatar more amazing and it gave Alice in Wonderland an even more other worldly effect. Most animated movies turn out really well too.

Of course, most movies aren't filmed with 3D in mind and it is crappily added in post. Those suck.

Agreed. Sometimes HN seems like a bunch of hipsters -- yes it can be done incorrectly, but by that token you shouldn't ever use color (and all movies should be silent).

3D is an enabling technology. It will not prevent bad films from being made, anymore than Ruby will prevent bad developers from creating a mess.

Current 3D technology results in a dramatic loss of picture quality. In theory they're supposed to compensate for the brightness reduction by cranking up the projector, but I've yet to see a 3D film that wasn't dramatically murkier than the 2D version. You also get terrible judder. And, for people like myself that wear glasses, the fact that no movie theatre distributes polarized glasses designed to fit around a pair of glasses means that I usually have difficulty focusing and get awful eyestrain.

I don't have a problem with the idea of 3D, per se, but its implementation has made watching films in a theatre very frustrating and uncomfortable.

Actually Alice in Wonderland's 3D was done in post.

But was shot as a 3D movie apparently, Wikipedia:

'Sony Pictures Imageworks designed the visual effects sequences.[54] Burton felt 3D was appropriate to the story's environment.[11] Burton and Zanuck chose to film with conventional cameras, and convert the footage into 3D during post-production; Zanuck explained 3D cameras were too expensive and "clumsy" to use, and they felt that there was no difference between converted footage and those shot in the format.[55] James Cameron, who released his 3D film Avatar in December 2009, criticized the choice, stating, "It doesn't make any sense to shoot in 2-D and convert to 3-D".[56]'

Yes, but it was done very well.

In the production video blogs he seems legitimately excited sometimes, and other times it's like the people on the blog are in a commercial for 3D. We do see Alan Lee and John Howe illustrating and story boarding in 3D which is cool.

As a side note, it's insane to watch those production videos: I remember Jackson saying they have 48 RED cameras (2 per rig), it shows them scouting locations in 5 helicopters, and it's amazing to see the amount of people and work going into making the movies.

First video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjMEYjCNGmg&feature=relat... (there are 4 so far, I believe)

Yeah, I saw that and I still can't make up my mind about it. I mean, I can see how it's a shiny new toy and it must be great to get to play around with all this amazing technology. At the same time, the Lee/Howe concept art in 3D stuff seemed more like a gag. But yeah, it's an incredible setup and a ridiculous amount of money being spent.

Would be fun to have a pair of RED cameras to play around with... I just don't know if I want to pay to see the result in a cinema.

That part about them hand-illustrating in 3D was a joke. They show one guy working on the red version and one on the blue, side by side. There's no way they could do that precisely enough to actually produce a 3D image by hand.

I hear a lot of complaints about 3D being blurrey and dim, but in my experience (Sydney Australia, cinemas near the CBD) 3D movies are always done on the newer digital projectors and are bright, vibrant and extremely sharp. 2D on those same projectors is also sharp, and while the glasses may block half the light getting through it only takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust and it looks just as bright again, but with a nicer colour depth.

Are other locations in the world using old/poorly maintained/incorrectly configured projectors from 3D?

Here in Sweden, that has been my experience (blurriness, dimness). Sadly, we have a cinema monopoly around here and I am guessing that they are saving money by undercranking the projector bulbs.

Your bad experiences aren't universal. If the movie is specifically shot for 3D then it shouldn't be blurry, the limitations of the technology (and our eyes) is well known and accounted for. As for it being too dim, you might have problems with your theater not operating the light at the required brightness level (the bulbs are expensive will last much longer if they are dimmed a bit).

> Why is the Hobbit being filmed in 3D?

Because Peter Jackson wanted to film it in 3D.

From the point of view of filmmakers, stereoscopic 3D is something new to be explored, like color, or before that, sound, or before that, editing.

Avatar and Hugo are two solid examples of 3D done right. I hear that The Great Gatsby will be another great example, as well as The Hobbit, which will be the first major 3D studio release filmed at 48 fps (which makes the stereoscopic effect much easier to watch).

My own company, Fohr, among other things deals with some major issues affecting live-action 3D. (To date, the best 3D is being done by computer-generated animation films. This is because each element in the scene can have it's stereoscopic parameters adjusted independently. When live footage is captured, though, this is far more difficult to accomplish.)

Bottom line: filmmakers are embracing 3D because they like it, and because they want to help pioneer the storytelling devices that make for good 3D.

Unfortunately, Avatar only had budget for a total of four dimensions. So they gave three to the visuals, and just one to the characters.

Holy hell was that an awful, awful film.

nuh uh

> If Red has made 3D more common then I regret that part happening

I don't think Red is to blame for this. At the end of the day, it's all about the money, so if we as consumers keep going to watch things in 3D (and pay even more money to do so), it's a no-brainer for the studios to keep making crap in 3D.

Given how many films are converted to 3D in post-production, it's hard for anyone to argue that it's about the aesthetic.

Will that fabulous sensor in the Red camera make it to the consumer market some day?

Large sensors don't get cheaper (they don't benefit from Moore's Law), so maybe not. However, APS-format still cameras that shoot video aren't that expensive (<$2,000) and are constantly improving.

well there was the Scarlet at one time, a prosumer camera from Red. Look it up, I've been out of that area for a while.

Scarlet was originally supposed to be a 3K sensor for $3k. After a while, there were comments that $3k was no longer going to happen because of costs and feature set, and it got upped to about $5k.

A few weeks ago, the entry-level Scarlet with a 7x fixed lens was canned altogether. Red is instead focusing on providing a solid "professional" camera. Their Scarlets now use sensors that didn't make the performance cut for their top-of-the-line model, the Epic.

Scarlets now start at $9,750: http://www.red.com/store/scarlet

Yeah - that was a pretty sorry tale of vapourware. I know a couple of indie guys who were super jazzed about the Scarlet, and delayed buying equipment because they were convinced it would come out.

It was hard to tell whether it was vapourware. They had defied expectations in actually producing a real camera in the Red One, but they also had marketing material advertising a sensor that was something like 17cm wide - which seems to me utterly unmanufacturable today.

An odd company.

[EDIT: atrocious grammar]

Here's what I don't get. According to online videos about the making of the Hobbit, the Epic cameras they're using have quite poor saturation, particularly for (ironically) red, resulting in a muted, dull look. But instead of grading the video in postproduction, Jackson's team is instead adding bright makeup and oversaturated props to compensate.

If I were buying 30 cameras from Red, I'd demand better.

I'm not really impressed with RED cameras either. They're cheaper than any other higher resolution digital cameras because they traded spatial resolution for bit-depth. Red returned to a bayer-filtered CMOS array, abandoning the higher quality 3CCD sensors. RED has marketed to the higher ups that feel they don't need to listen to digital video engineers about signal quality, and its worked. About the limitations of bayer filtering: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3370690

At the rental house that I use, I hear that the Arri Alexa gets more traffic than their stock of REDs. It makes sense that a powerhouse in the industry like Arri would be able to cater to moviemakers better than a newcomer that showed up making a lot of promises that they couldn't always honor.

Well, also important to note that an Alexa is rented more then a RED because of the price jump associated with owning an Alexa...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com