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Red Epic Sound Problems


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Jeff, I can tell you that the Red company is aware of the issue and I've been told that there are hardware mods that have changed out the fans in the newest Epic cameras, plus the firmware will now run the fan at "only" 25% during recording.

The real issue is, what happens if the location gets hot? Either the fan goes up, or the chips get hot and shut down. Not a great choice either way. I would say, make sure the camera crew (or rental house) can verify that the cameras are the latest-and-greatest. Be wary of some viewfinders that emit some high-frequency "whistles," which I've had happen with Red One shoots.

The only thing more annoying than the camera are the D.I.T. stations with MacPros and a boatload of hard drives. I sometimes have to (very nicely) push them to the other side of the stage or out of the room, just to avoid picking up all that unnecessary noise on set. The smart directors will hear this on their Comteks and will say, "whoa! Let's get this out of here so we can hear the dialog."

BTW, there are already almost 120 messages in the discussion on the Red group about the fan going off in the interview, and that's four days in!

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" The difference is with a film camera "

I understand, of course, but in the past, when, for example, a Mag made noise, the camera crew heard it, understood the problem anbd (they) dealt with it.

So why is it any different now??

As I noted, in the way past, the camera department used to have a room for the camera built to eliminate the noise from the set, and this was not ever expected from the sound crew.

Of course, it is a bad, and difficult situation , but the sound dept. is not bringing the noisemaker onto the set...

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I have a little twinge each time I even read this topic title. I force myself to read everything posted here but it is depressing me. I am about to start a major motion picture (I've stopped using the word "film" altogether) which will be shooting with the RED Epic camera(s). No issue with sound to the camera (we're not going to do that) no issue with sync (sync boxes provided by the camera dept.) but the SOUND of the camera I'm sure will be an issue. The Director and the Producers have never done a movie with a digital camera, always film, and I'm sure once they hear the RED they are going to ask me what I can do about it. The answer, of course, is nothing I can do about the fan noise. I hate to have to give an answer like that to a question about a sound problem.

Hi Jeff I know so much has been written on this topic and not wanting to repeat too much of it I can offer some comfort.

Having worked with the Epic for over a year now on The Hobbit I can say that things have improved. We are using the Epic X and it has an upgraded heat sinc and fan the result being the cameras are much quieter than when we started. If you were using one camera in a rig as in 2D I doubt you would hear the fans at 25% (lowest fan speed) unless the cam was inches away from the actor and they were I whispering, I find it less of problem in that setup than a fully blimped and barnied film cam. The thing is you can only run the fans at 25% if you cut after each take and the ambient temp is not too high. That said we run ours at 35% and that is fine for most applications we are also finding that post can get rid of that level of fan noise relatively easily. Another thing you can do is if the ambient temp is quite high then have the cam dept run the fans at 100% between takes to cool the cam quicker and allow you to maintain a lower fan speed while shooting. This of course is an arse as it is impossible to hear potential problems before you role as the fans are screaming. I think that is the biggest pain with these cams is the noise they make between takes not during. If the cams overheat during a take the fans kick in for a few seconds at a high rate which usually kills the mood on set and the Director waits for them to go back down and then continues. We have a developed a new method of working as a result of these cams the discipline around shooting continuously for an entire 128gig drive(15mins@48fps) leaves a lot to be desired but if the Director treats it like a "Film style" shoot then with the latest Epics I don't think it will be as bad as you think except of course the fan noise pror to rolling.

All the best

Tony Johnson

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If you read further down, someone quotes one of our members here:

It is very nice to read that other professionals on the camera side are catching on to this issue. In the end, they will be the one to force RED's hands at a fix with regards to fan noise.

Wow, I just read the RED Users forum! You really did take what I wrote and use it. Good on you.

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If you want an entertaining read concerning Customers coming to terms with the noisy RED Epic, I would encourage you to read the RED user group mentioned above. It is an emotional roller coaster journey containing the most horrific, entertaining, clueless, informed and egotistic reactions to buying a non sync camera.

I really have hope that as Producers and Directors are specifying not to use the Epic due to the fan destroying sync audio, perhaps RED might make a quieter design in the future. All RED have ever done is lower technical standards (and gotten away with it) due to developing a file based digital camera/computer. I think many are over that wow factor now, and just want to get on with recording good images and sound at the same time. I don't think there is anything more powerful than customers complaining to the very company that make the product 'it just makes too much noise in an interview'. Classic stuff!

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We have a developed a new method of working as a result of these cams the discipline around shooting continuously for an entire 128gig drive(15mins@48fps) leaves a lot to be desired but if the Director treats it like a "Film style" shoot then with the latest Epics I don't think it will be as bad as you think except of course the fan noise pror to rolling.

Very helpful, Tony. I don't doubt you guys are breaking new ground on The Hobbit -- kudos on all the hard work you guys are doing. Sounds to me like you need the new 256GB SSD's right now! I'm overwhelmed to think of the amount of data the crew must be wrangling, but I bet it'll all be worth it in the end.

For those interested in the brand-new Epic camera upgrade announced today, here's a link:

http://www.red.com/n...upgrade-program

I'm very impressed that the specific items mentioned include "aluminum heatsinks and an improved fan." I know Red gets tarred and feathered sometimes, but they are clearly trying to make things right here. Anybody who's about to do a Red shoot, alert the producers and make sure the cameras they're using have been upgraded to the latest specs.

What's interesting to me, standing back from an objective view, is all of these are standard computer problems. You run a computer real hard and shove tons of data through it... it's gonna get hot and need lots of cooling. Without that, it shuts down. This is as true for an audio recorder that's really a computer, as it is for a camera that's really a computer.

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Sounds to me like you need the new 256GB SSD's right now! I'm overwhelmed to think of the amount of data the crew must be wrangling, but I bet it'll all be worth it in the end.

Thanks Marc but don't mention 256gig, we don't we are scared at the possibility of using them imagine how long you could roll and how many rolling takes you could do with that never mind the cams would over heat all the time and the fans would be on high all the time.

In defense of Red here they design or let's say improve a camera to have a relatively quiet fan speed in " normal situations" lets say cutting after each take like the old days and then people use them to their extreme let's say 250 gig cards run continuously then we all complain they are over heating and the fans come on. I guess a problem with HD in general is the myth that there are no stock costs so you can run continuously at no cost but the data wrangling costs are huge managing all the footage. A clever thing to design would be a code that can be activated when the director calls action so that all the data in between that could be automatically discarded when the data is wrangled and before it gets ingested into an Avid.

Tony

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A clever thing to design would be a code that can be activated when the director calls action so that all the data in between that could be automatically discarded when the data is wrangled and before it gets ingested into an Avid.

Tony

Then I imagine all the DITs and AEs would have to find even more ways to look busy! :)

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...don't mention 256gig, we don't we are scared at the possibility of using them imagine how long you could roll and how many rolling takes you could do with that never mind the cams would over heat all the time and the fans would be on high all the time.

True! Once directors find out they can do half-hour takes, they'll start wanting them! That's murder on the boom op, on the data crew, on the Steadicam guy, on the actors, everybody.

My joke about bigger drives is: it's an even faster, more efficient way to lose bigger amounts of data than ever before!

In hindsight... maybe 128GB is big enough. Let everybody take a break during a mag change.

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  • 1 month later...

Recently did a commercial on 2 Scarletts jammed to my borrowed 702T. First day was 23.98, next two days were 25. Surprisingly we didn't need to re-jam (although we did every couple hours anyway). The fan noise was an issue sometimes but whomever chose our location chose a house on the west side next to a house under construction and we shot in the back yard! When the jack-hammers weren't running, the birds were going crazy and when the birds weren't the planes and copters were. Production asked how bad it was. 'Whatever you hear...I hear' :)

One of my biggest problems of the day was trying to run scratch to A Cam, pull the levels down so cam could handle it but have my Comtek feed loud enough for VV to get it. Ended up oversatching the scratch in favor of a decent com feed :-/

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Can't they pad the output level of the Comtek down so that it doesn't overload the Epic analog in? This should work (though it will never sound great).

I just worked a 3-day Epic project (a Sony TV commercial), and the camera crashed only twice in that entire time, and was down for less than a minute. No issues at all, as far as I know. I'm still amused by the fact that the lens on the thing is about 10 times as big as the camera itself, plus we had on a big monitor, a video transmitter, an SR receiver, and a brick battery, making the thing like 3 feet long (for a 6" camera). But the pictures were very good, and the fan was not a problem during dialog.

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Working on a feature with TWO RED EPICS. WHAT a PITA!!

One BIG problem that has not been mentioned here - when the camera is idle (and it's hot) the fans sound like hair driers. This makes rehearsals totally useless for me.

-vin

EDIT: Tony Johnson has already mentioned this in his post here. Mea Culpa.

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Exactly what Vin says --- the whole scene setup, rehearsals, etc., are all polluted by this horrible "Hair Dryer" white noise with 2 RED cameras in idle mode. The first take is the first and only chance to get a sense of the room, the set, the actors' dialog. Of course the rest of the departments are now in full shooting mode after take one and it is very difficult to try and make the all to necessary adjustments for the sound department. It is also very apparent that the Director and the Actors HATE the incessant noise on the set. I know lots of actors and directors that would not stand for it and would demand that there be rehearsals without the camera even in the room. This would of course seriously hurt the entire process of a camera/sound/dialog rehearsal. It is a corruption of the entire movie making process introduced by a seriously flawed camera design.

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Never have i suffered so much on the set due to a camera. IMO, the Red Epic is a POS, and RED is not interested (never was) in considering sound issues. They know there are lots of people who can "manage" and yet lots more who don't give a shit about location sound.

I was amazed at how many people on the Red forum mention Izotope and WNS etc - noise reduction plug-ins - they have NO CLUE how much time it takes for an entire 2.5 hour feature to be cleaned up, clip by clip. Each time a plug-in like this is used, one has to resync the clip to match the original sample to sample. And - it is a lot more cumbersome to use the Izotope RX inside Protools than as a standalone. Imagine having to clean up each clip outside PT and then take it back in on the time line, AND time-align the clip.

I want to ask these "cinematographers" to add a RED-coloured light to their lighting for each shot, and then clean up the bad effect of this light on each and every clip on their timeline.

-vin

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I love that the solution for a lot of the EPIC owner-operators on the red forum is to use a Y-cable off of the mic straight into their zoom.

Just hire a mixer for F--sake and problem solved! Are some of these guys just that greedy or just ignorant?

I guess both?

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So-called "Cinematographers"... they don't have any idea about sound. In any case, i'd venture out to bet a 100$ if in the last five years, JW members who do feature films worked with camera crew that was really in line with what is needed, in a time when even basics are ignored by the image makers.

My boom op can teach them how to light their scenes better. And it's not just about preserving space for

booming.

I am sorry, but my impression of camera people nowadays is at it's lowest ebb. I know there are some good people out there, but...

-vin

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So-called "Cinematographers"... they don't have any idea about sound. In any case, i'd venture out to bet a 100$ if in the last five years, JW members who do feature films worked with camera crew that was really in line with what is needed, in a time when even basics are ignored by the image makers.

My boom op can teach them how to light their scenes better. And it's not just about preserving space for

booming.

I am sorry, but my impression of camera people nowadays is at it's lowest ebb. I know there are some good people out there, but...

-vin

A very sad +1 from having this same experience too many times. The product suffers and nobody seems to notice or care if brought to attention

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I like to make fun of my local Epic and Scarlet owners every time the audio meters freeze or fail to work on their 30k+ cameras. "Just unplug the 3.5mm and plug it back in... walla!!!" As the Senator would say, "you get what you pay for" :blink:???:wacko:

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Can't they pad the output level of the Comtek down so that it doesn't overload the Epic analog in? This should work (though it will never sound great).

I had the feed out of the 702T way down and the Comtek Tx and Rx way up but it was still just a little too quiet for the producer :(

Remember when the first 100 RED ones came out and didn't have their sound capabilities implemented? And when they finally got it going it made very little sense? Same problem with fan after cut on those too. Gotta face it...from the beginning RED said a big F U to sound.

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We tried and failed to dissuade a client from buying two Epics. This client likes juicy visuals, which the Epics give him, but he also has to shoot a lot of long-form interviews with people important to his clients whose time is very valuable and who are not at all professional talent. So he hoses himself at least once on each interview job with the Epic fans taking off after we've been rolling for 20 min or so, even in a relatively cool room. He is total denial about the effect this has on the interviews. I've tried to explain the issue if having a blanket of camera fan noise (esp from multiple cams) over the sound of the set during rehearsals and setup as it being just like a really loud air-conditioner was on--we can't hear or localize the smaller sounds that will suddenly become an issue when the fans go off. At that point I feel like I'm the guy with a flat-tire on the freeway--everyone just passes me by and doesn't want to stop to help, and there are serious political issues involved in engaging camera and production on this subject. Often the first time a look of recognition comes over their face is when I insist that the camera roll during roomtone, even though the cam audio isn't being used. But by then its too late--many Epics are personal cameras owned by directors and DPs. I'm sound-cutting and premixing a movie like what Vin described--quiet interior, fairly warm sets, whispery dialog, so the camera fan is on all the time, but is ramping up and down in pitch during shots, with very obvious pitch changes across cuts. My major contribution to this film will not be great dialog cutting, ADR emplacement or SFX work, it will be taming the damn fan in the RED as much as I can. So stupid. I am grateful that the current hip personal cam (Canon C300) has a fan that is audible but quiet when idling but seems pretty silent when rolling.

phil p

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So he hoses himself at least once on each interview job with the Epic fans taking off after we've been rolling for 20 min or so, even in a relatively cool room. He is total denial about the effect this has on the interviews.

Hard to argue with that. The camera definitely cannot handle long takes at high data rates (like 4K or 5K at 5:1 or less). This is a boatload of data, the visual equivalent of 96kHz or 192kHz sampling frequency for audio, and the files are massive and the chips get very, very hot trying to handle massive data like this. There's no other solution except for the fan to cool the whole mess down after a certain time, or else the thing will start to melt and the camera will shut off to protect itself.

I say this only as an explanation, not as an excuse for Red. What's funny to me is, the Red Company and Red users in general often poke fun at the Sony F65 and the Arri Alexa because of their relatively-large size (at least twice as big as the Red Epic)... but those cameras have more air space, better fans, better fan position, better vent design, and so on, and make much less mechanical noise.

I agree that their priorities put about 99 things ahead of audio and timecode, which is a shame. The Epic is better now than it was a year ago, but still, the full-blast fan (aka "leaf-blower mode") is very tough to deal with.

I was amazed at how many people on the Red forum mention Izotope and WNS etc - noise reduction plug-ins - they have NO CLUE how much time it takes for an entire 2.5 hour feature to be cleaned up, clip by clip.

I agree, Vin. I pointed out on the Red User group that none of these noise-reduction plug-ins give you something for nothing, and the end result is always a big compromise. To me, using them is a last-ditch effort to try to salvage bad tracks to get something useful -- not to take bad sound and make it good, especially for an entire film.

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