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Red Weapon 8K Audio Issue


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Hi Patrick,

 

and your points are interesting, but....most all Red cameras have been 'quirky' to the point of unuseable for most sound recording applications. Think 5+ minute takes, on quiet sets, with actors whispering, and camera close to the actors. This is the real test.

 

The Helium (as tested in London by a colleague of mine in the last few days) is significantly louder, AND the menu modes ('quiet', vs 'adaptive preview quiet mode' or whatever it is called) are reversed, so the one that ought to be most quiet is not so. This is ridiculous.

 

Red cameras have loud fans, period.

 

I am aware of your  fanplate for earlier Reds - i have to say that I heard that in some situations your fanplate was louder than the regular camera. I have absolutely no axe to grind with you personally, but that is what I read and understood.

 

More important - why are we making custom built stuff to cover for inadequacies of Red cameras.... because they are unacceptably loud as sold.

 

Red camera have loud fans. End of. It may well be that they have worked so hard to make the camera small and modular that they have made a loud camera.

 

May I ask - who uses a Red camera as 'small' - they are always covered in extra bits. All the bits that were not included by making them so small.

 

I am really sorry, but so far as I am concerned Red cameras, which might or might not make pretty pictures, should be used for car adverts and beauty shots.

 

Someone had to say this.

 

Simon B

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Useless...

 

 

4 hours ago, drpro said:

I love to see these expensive cameras with a $300 Rokinon lens!!

 

First shot is with a Superspeed MKIII

Second is with a Standard speed

Third is with a Rokinon 35mm wich is optically very interesting for lowbudget.

 

Do I also have to argue about the optics I use?

 

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Fellow Sound Professionals:  The constructive solutions offered here are what we are really about.  RED bashing, though way too often true, is not what we are really about.

  We in the old school remember quite well how much noise Film Cameras made.  Lots of innovation over the decades was required to help with that.

    Was there ever a “Perfect” Film Camera??

Blimp Arri.tiff

Let me riddle you this:  Since the advent of ‘Digital Cine’, cameras have done a poor job of recording sound – some cameras are getting better – BUT with those poor audio capabilities came the need for Double System sound with time code.   A delightful step backward in film making.   And suddenly, an FP-32 just wasn’t enough.   FP 32.jpg

The bashing of bad sound in motion picture devices, in my opinion, is a little counter productive.  Productions NEED Good Sound Pros.  The Best Sound Pros are about innovating and solving issues.  Sure, it would be nice if every camera was ‘Perfect’.  That would make every job easy.  Right?  An then, if every job was easy, well then, anybody could do it…..       M*

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I work mainly in tv commercials and drama...... 90 percent of my jobs shoot on Alexa......Very rarely do we have any issues.There used to more Red shoots but , it's a rareity to see one these days.
Mostly it's owner operator shoots...... Just my day to day experiance


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

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I had a strange Red Weapon  incident today. Providing hops to two Weapons, both cameras at least three times crashed while recording  the first take, with a message that said "audio buffering". One of the DPs owned one of the cameras and was perplexed. Of course the ACs immediately wanted to rip off the receivers.. come to find out, both DPs had never completed a full reformat? I did not know there is a partial re format?  Once they did that the problem went away. I have worked with the RED Weapon several times and this was the first time I have experienced this issue. 

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On 8/23/2017 at 11:45 AM, Patrick Tresch said:

Arri had to create the mini AND the Alexa 65 to be on par with what RED achieved in a smaller package. RED pushed the use of R3D compressed RAW wich makes lowbudget at highest quality possible for a lot of folks. And R3D raw is trillion better to color correction than what Alexa used during years as their master codec : Prores... !

 

Well... speaking as a guy who color-corrects more than he does sound (I just completed my 12th feature this year for home video, plus two theatrical releases), the reality is that nobody in town finishes features or TV series in Raw. All Red or Arriraw files are converted first to DPX or EXR, and those are what the final color-corrections are done in. This was true even for massive releases like Guardians of the Galaxy 2, shot in 8K Red Raw. I wouldn't say that Red is a "trillion times" better than ProRes, and I would say that I generally see fewer visual problems with Alexa footage than I do with Red. I think given a great DP, they can get great results with both. I don't see the camera as the limiting factor these days. 

 

Most of the audio people here have a point that the Red cameras in general have been very audio unfriendly. I think it's low on their list of priorities, even with the new Helium camera. Competing cameras from Arri and Sony and Panasonic just work right out of the box with balanced audio in. Just saying.

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On 8/24/2017 at 6:45 AM, Patrick Tresch said:

RED pushed the use of R3D compressed RAW wich makes lowbudget at highest quality possible for a lot of folks. And R3D raw is trillion better to color correction than what Alexa used during years as their master codec : Prores... ! 

 


Arri has Arriraw as well.

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I never colored shots made by a RED,  wich don't contain any FX, in another format than with it's original R3D, even in 2008 (then I used Scratch)

Arriraw is not what most people shoot with and was an expensive and heavy addon for years (remember Codex?).

 

 

PS: I finish all my films for the big screen in 4k since 2012.

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I must have gone to the wrong tab - I could have sworn this was an audio forum.

 

As a DP and camera owner (no Reds now or ever), I concur that digital cinema cameras are not simply designed for recording audio - which is often integrated almost as an afterthought. In fact early digital cameras weren't great on time code either. I'm impressed with the knowledge most audio guys bring to shoots as I guess understanding the various models is a fact of life now. Note that Mr. Jannard came with a background in sunglasses, not film, which is probably why his designs excelled at sensor design but were (and maybe are) among the least user friendly and reliable cameras around. For contrast look at the stories around this week about Arri, a brand now 100 years old. Not to pile on Reds anymore, but my old Auricon conversion recorded better sound. And if you got the mic far enough away, you could even avoid hearing the camera occasionally... and it never needed rebooting.

 

 

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  • 1 month later...
On 8/18/2017 at 8:20 AM, Michael Stahr said:

The Red Weapon, another audio step backward.  At least with the Epic you had a pair of Balanced, mic level inputs.

The Weapon, without the 'pro' back, has only a single Stereo Mini Jack.  Remember firstly, this is now an UN-Balanced 2 channel input.

Treat it like a DSLR.  Just being unbalanced has issues.

A simple "adaptor cable" may not do the job.  

When feeding from a mixer (2 balanced line XLRs at Mic Level) I have had only occasional success with an adaptor.

However, my only reliable solution is to use a Beachtek box.  Just like feeding a DSLR.

Nextly,  monitoring.  The headphone jack doesn't tell you much, or give you much in the way of "confidence".

The only real 'tell' is to have an SDI stream direct from camera to an SDI monitor with Audio.

This is the only thing that will provide what is actually being recorded.

On that note, I have had troubles with having a monitor (I use Convergence Design 7Q) hooked up to a RED that some how induces noise.

Turns out to be some kind of ground loop - that magically disappeared when an isolation transformer was put on the SDI feed.

In the old days this was called a "Hum Bucker" ONLY useful for analog video.  You must now use one designed for SDI.  This one is little and works great:

http://www.allenavionics.com/AVI_Trans/hd-VIT-75.htm

 

Sound is all our fault.  

Get camera to go to Battery power, and disconnect from everything else external, record some sound, play it back to a battery powered SDI monitor connected direct to camera.  No power supplies.  No other connections.  If the sound is good.  It is good.  If it gets bad when other things are hooked up, it's somebody else's department.

Everybody expects sound to be perfect, everywhere:  ISO tracks, feed to multiple cameras, feed to Comtek, feed to Video village.

Remember, it's a RED.

And in the end it's still all our fault..... 

 

M*

Thanks, Mike.  You are right about ground loops.  Sound guys understand them but others think we are just making excuses until we get rid of AC connected devices.  Remember our early Red1 experiences!

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On 8/21/2017 at 6:30 AM, John Blankenship said:

You lose points, however, for calling sound mixers who deal with all those variables, "stupid and unprofessional."

 

Ditto, people are brutally rude here. I don't like to post anymore at this site, but I can't find a better one for the subject matter.

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There are only a couple rude people here. And you can hid their responses. Doing that made this a nicer place for me. Go to your settings and add those people to your list of ignored users. I think this link will work:

 

http://jwsoundgroup.net/index.php?/ignore/

 

Overall, I find this one of the most supportive, generous, and knowledgable forums on the net. For any subject. Sure, sometimes people are grumpy and brusque. But many times those brusque responses also include useful information and move the discussion forward.

 

So hide a few key people, put on your slightly thick skin, and things will go well. At least, they do for me.

 

 

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On 9/13/2017 at 9:05 AM, rodpaul said:

I must have gone to the wrong tab - I could have sworn this was an audio forum.

 

As a DP and camera owner (no Reds now or ever), I concur that digital cinema cameras are not simply designed for recording audio - which is often integrated almost as an afterthought. In fact early digital cameras weren't great on time code either. I'm impressed with the knowledge most audio guys bring to shoots as I guess understanding the various models is a fact of life now. Note that Mr. Jannard came with a background in sunglasses, not film, which is probably why his designs excelled at sensor design but were (and maybe are) among the least user friendly and reliable cameras around. For contrast look at the stories around this week about Arri, a brand now 100 years old. Not to pile on Reds anymore, but my old Auricon conversion recorded better sound. And if you got the mic far enough away, you could even avoid hearing the camera occasionally... and it never needed rebooting.

 

 

You are telling your age.  Was the Auricon magnetic or optical?  My old memory is failing me.

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  • 8 months later...
1 hour ago, osborne456 said:

Correct. Boston U. grad school had some and several Cinema Products CP 16- workhorse "conversions"

-standard news cameras... all mag stripe.

Not at first.  The Auricon Cinevoice I shot at the start of my career recorded OPTICAL sound on film.  Many of these cameras were converted to mag stripe recording later on.  The CP-16 came along much later, there were several companies that used Auricon film transports in either modified or rebuilt bodies (General Camera, Frezzolini, etc).   Cinema Products won the war because they came along with an entirely new camera that fixed many of the problems of the Auricon conversion units.  Even so, the Auricons and the conversion cams kept being used almost until the advent of video news shooting in many small markets.

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