Guest Blog: Jeff Bartsch, Producer on “Stained,” The 1st Film Shot on RED at 4k to Win Top Film Festival Awards, EVER.

Chris has mentioned the 168 Film Project and Festival in a previous post – both he and I recently participated in the 168 over the past couple months. The 168 is so named because producing teams are assigned a random Bible verse that becomes the basis for a 10-minute short film that is shot and edited in one week – 168 hours.

This year Chris worked with Wes and Amanda Llewellyn, veteran 168 producers whose film “A Good Day” took 168 Best Picture last year – their film “Unbound” from this year picked up 7 nominations and won the Best Scriptural Integration award and took second best behind "Stained" at the 168 Film Festival this past weekend at the Alex Theater in Glendale, CA. Congrats!!

My team consisted of three producers – Josh Weigel (writer/director/producer), Aaron Moore (producer/AD/2nd Unit Director), and myself (producer- I'm on the far left in the white shirt). We produced our short film “Stained” based on Galatians 3:28, which speaks of breaking down the barriers humanity puts between itself. Our 70-member cast & crew racked up 13 nominations and won 7: Best Editing, Production Design, Sound Design, Original Score, Dramatic Screenplay, Best Actress, and Best Picture. We also won the Audience Award, plus a personal commendation from RED Digital Cinema’s Ted Schilowitz for artistic excellence using the RED One camera.

From a production standpoint, the RED camera was amazing. Things that prospective RED adopters should keep in mind:

1. The RED Camera’s audio inputs are not standard. They require some funky mini-XLR connections. I know some folks have had issues with RED audio – I don’t know all the issues out there. We were well-covered though – Martin Kittappa, our production sound mixer, hard-patched and sometimes wirelessly fed signal into the RED while simultaneously recording Broadcast WAV files (BWAVs) on a separate recorder. Believe it or not, we were actually picking up some camera noise completely off-axis from the shotgun mic – we had some very quiet, whispered dialogue at times. So let the filmmaker beware – the RED is very quiet yet not completely silent. So mic your actors and place your camera accordingly. And whenever possible, record dual system audio to cover any potential on-camera weirdness.

2. Beware reversed polarity on the viewfinder’s power cable! We fried an on-camera 7-inch HD LCD Marshall monitor – the power cable from the RED is shaped such that it’s easy to plug it in backwards. All of a sudden, BZZZT!! Picture dies, smoke wafts upward into the air. From your HD monitor. And the producer reaches simultaneously for the Rolaids and his checkbook… our DP, Brandon Lippard, tells me that the power cable design has been updated, which may or may not help you if you recently bought/rented a RED package. So let the filmmaker beware and make sure to tell your AC’s and everyone who even touches the camera!

3. This one’s pretty standard production practice – if at all possible, have a backup camera. Or a hook-up from a rental house that can step in with another unit if something happens on set. The RED is pretty much a solid block of electronics, and if something goes funky it’s usually not an easy fix. At one point, our A camera started randomly turning on and off. We shut down for a while as Brandon ran some tests, talked with a tech from RED on the phone, and went through all the steps to revive it. After a while it wouldn’t reboot at all. Hey whaddya know, a $17,000 doorstop. (THAT’s why you need production insurance!!) We would’ve been completely hosed had it not been for Mark Linthicum, our friend who earlier in the shoot had brought in his own RED for 2nd unit/B camera work. Josh, Aaron, and Brandon kept shooting while I played ambulance and hurried our ailing A camera over to HD Cinema, our rental house. When I got there, the camera proceeded to fire up as if everything was completely fine. What the heck!? Anyway, HD Cinema overnighted the camera out to RED and totally took care of us. Moral of the story: always have a backup. Or more time, which we didn’t.


For post-production, our workflow was problem-free almost to the point of boredom. (What, the only thing you have to do is concentrate on creative decision-making? Dang…) Here are some thoughts on RED post:

1. As you may or may not know, RED records raw 4 or 2k files in the R3D format. At the same time, it creates 3 Quicktime proxy files, usually at 1080, 720, and DV-quality depending on your settings. These proxies let you access the raw files without needing 4k horsepower. To do that, you have to do one of two things: skip the proxies, take the R3D files into RED’s free proprietary Red Cine software, and export your dailies at whatever resolution/codec you want. That’s what you actually HAVE to do if you’re cutting on Avid (and, I believe, with Premiere). Otherwise you do what we did – use Final Cut 6 and edit directly with the Quicktime proxies. Because the proxies are only pointer files, you must download the RED codecs from red.com, and you must use Final Cut 6 on an Intel Mac. I’ve already heard sob stories from people who were told you can cut RED Quicktimes on anything less, and they found out the hard way that it ain’t so. (And hey, if you’ve found a workaround, tell me. I’m all about the learning. And if you’ve cut a RED project on Premiere, I’d be interested to hear how it went.)

2. Because our timeframe was so tight, we ended up cutting the 1080 proxies and turning in the Festival cut of “Stained” on a standard 1080p file. Chris Witt, our editor, has a great FCP 6 Mac Pro system with dual Cinema displays – he took a color correction pass in Apple Color. The thing is, the workflow for getting your timeline to translate directly from FCP to Color isn’t as straightforward as you might think, especially under a time crunch like ours. Chris dreamed up some crazy workarounds that I myself don’t completely understand (and I’m a pretty technical guy with background in editing myself!). For more details, you should contact Chris Witt – he’s a fantastic editor and a great guy to boot.

3. Codec for final delivery – for HD submission, the 168 Festival originally requested either 1080i/p or 720p files in the H.264 codec. It worked well for some films, but when they tested our film “Stained” on the 40-foot screen at the Alex Theater, the blacks and mid-ranges got all muddy and totally messed with the picture. We ended up resubmitting in the HD100 codec, the festival projected from an XDCAM-HD playback reel, and the film looked fantastic. Moral of the story – even though H.264 works great for the Internet and HD-DVD, for festival submissions you’ll want to submit RED-shot content in the least-compressed format possible. You’ll be glad you did. (Another good alternative codec: DVCProHD 1080, which is still pretty compressed yet still can look great on the big screen – that’s actually the codec some major movie studios use for test screening direct from laptop in theaters.)

If you have any other questions, feel free to leave a comment. Heck, bug Chris Roberts enough and maybe he’ll let me take over his blog again and answer other questions.

All the best to you, and God bless.

Jeff Bartsch, Producer
www.resolveentertainment.com
www.editmentor.com