Fulltime Casual – An Australian Film and TV Podcast

Well, it’s on life support. 35mm at DV prices is cool concept but unfortunately it’s still a concept. I love the whole ethos of RED but the they gotta start releasing cameras. They have only made one of the 10 or so cameras they have announced. And they have only now just caught up with their back orders on the Red One.

But having said that… I agree. When it finally comes out, the scarlet is probably going to be as revolutionary to the movie making world as the iPod was to the music world.

Yawn.

The number of times i’ve heard film is dead.

The Sony rep circa 1993 told me their new video format was going to kill 16mm film for commercials. Well now in 2008 Digi beta is going the way of the dodo’s.

In 2000 the digital pin up boy george lucas said film was dead and preceded to make all his star wars films on the next generation of digital cameras, using the HDCAM format, using panavised F900.s

Well F900 HDCAM has also pretty much gone away in the not too distant future…

So forgive me for being cynical.

To be honest it’s really really dull to keep hearing people obsess about the pixel count and the stats and figures.

Meanwhile, the RED camera has revolutionised some aspects of the business. Im shooting a very low budget film right now using RED that would not have been otherwise doable with much lesser cameras.

The main problem is that it creates the impression that all of a sudden, production value is cheap. The camera body is cheap, but if you want those 35mm lenses that are what is driving the whole move to RED, then you have to pay. And they are now in demand because of limited supply.

Post is also expensive to do well.

At the end of the day filmaking is about telling stories and it’s another colour to add to the palette that the storyteller can use to paint a picture.

It’s actually juvenile to think that there is one single camera or format that *bats* all others or is somehow the GGOLD standard.

jb

There was a point when film was dead for still photographers and there will be the same point for video. Red is revolutionising a lot of the industry, especially low budget and the introduction of their new camera line will probably be the another nail in the coffin if not the introduction of the funeral service itself.

We have been showing a lot of production companies and people interested in low budget feature film production the Red workflow and how they save so much money in the process and the response is people are blown away. I’d suggest like the poster above is to have a look at the camera. Some hire places don’t mind showing you the setup and i’m not sure about others but we will actually do no cost test shoots so you can choose for yourself wether it suits your production or not.

One thing is for sure, at the cost versus quality ratio, nothing beats Red.

I don’t know that I’d agree that film is dead for stills photography.

Sure the mass consumption consumer market is, but there are still plenty of visual artists and keen film loving troglodytes that still seem to think there IS a difference.

Im sure they said the same thing about black and white photography when colour was introduced.

Still seems you can still get black and white film too. That doesn’t make it dead does it ?