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Is It Time to Use Cinema Cameras For Your Live Production? · Broadcast2Post by Key Code Media

• 0:05
  Speaker A: Three, two, Red.
• 0:07
  Speaker B: One. In case you hadn't noticed, cinema cameras are showing up in more and more live production environments, from churches and corporate studios to sports and event venues. But what's actually driving that shift? And what should production teams understand before they make that move? Well, to help answer those questions, today I'm joined by Jeff Goodman, VP of Product Management at Red, to talk about what cinema cameras can bring to multi camera production, how the technology has evolved and what teams need to consider around workflow, infrastructure, cost, training and of course, creative possibilities. All right, so let's dive right in, Jeff. So from your perspectives, why are we now seeing the surge in cinema cameras being used for live production now? I mean, is it more because of the technology, is it more because of the creative look, or is it more the kind of the economics that are making them more practical today?
• 1:13
  Speaker A: I think, I think it is a combination of all those factors, but I think it really starts with it. It looks great. Right. It's when it resonates with the viewer, that is when people start seeking it out more and more. And when the viewer is seeking it out, that's when the broadcasters seek to try to, you know, fulfill that need. One example that comes to mind for me is when we very first started this, we were working with a certain Spanish soccer league, I'll just say that. And we had our camera on their Steadicam positions and they were going from deep, shooting the match and going shallow when there was a celebration. And the amount of social media sharing and re sharing when they were in this cinematic, you know, shallow depth of field. But it's more than that, you know, high dynamic range, slow motion replay because of the high frame rates. When they were sharing those, those were the clips that made it all around. And so they were starting to see those images resonating with the viewership and getting shared quite a bit. And that started pulling them to use the cameras more and more frequently. And I think the same thing applies, you know, across the board, even with, with talent on screen. When they see other talent and it looks fantastic, they say, how do I get that same look? That's how this sort of snowballs and how it's picked up. Yeah. And then economically things are, are becoming easier to plug into your ecosystem. We've, we've made a lot of strides on our side to knock down barriers that have kept people from being able to use cinema cameras in their ecosystem previously. And so that whole aspect has just gotten a lot, a lot easier.
• 3:02
  Speaker B: If we were to expand beyond sports and we look at things venues like let's say churches or corporate studios or, or other venue type experiences move from traditional broadcast cameras to cinema cameras. What does, what do cameras like red unlock creatively beyond just the shallow depth of field?
• 3:22
  Speaker A: Yeah, you know, as I starting to say it, it's sort of a misconception that cinema equals shallow depth of field. Right. There's so much more that goes into a cinematic image and there are are many cinematic images that are not shallow depth of field. Right. It involves a lot of different things. Dynamic range lighting is a key element of it. The color grade that you're using, you know, framing, set design, there's a lot that goes into a cinematic image. But you have the flexibility to craft the image however you like with a cinema camera. Right. If you're already starting with limitations, you're not going to be able to achieve that look that, that you're trying to get out of it. And what we're seeing too is because of the high dynamic range of the camera systems, lighting now is becoming such a critical element, people are paying more attention to it. They're starting to pay attention to all the downstream factors that really do create the cinematic image.
• 4:23
  Speaker B: And yeah, a few things I wanted to talk about about that specifically. I'm a huge baseball fan and normally what you're seeing now is someone hits a home run or a walk off and you see someone with a cinematic camera following the runner from based a home and it looks fantastic. But some of the things you mentioned a few minutes ago, I would want to push back on just a little bit because we talk about lighting, for example. Well, it's a stadium. Right. The lighting is kind of so you can see everything. Right. There isn't really a live color grade and we can pick at that all we want. Sure. Has the camera been shaded? Sure, of course. But you know, time has changed when they did the first shade earlier in the day. And so I guess I'm looking for other things, not just depth of field, but other things that you would have to do in a broadcast environment, a live environment that, that makes it so much better to use from a creative perspective.
• 5:17
  Speaker A: Yeah. So mixed shading is actually a good example. Right. So that's an example where high dynamic range comes into play. Right. You can have part of the field is in shadow, part of it is in light. You can still achieve a really solid image because when you expand that dynamic range, you're still getting detail in the highlights and you're still getting detail in the shad and you get this richness from the image because of those extra ends of information that you're collecting. And it's, it's one of these things that again, I think it's why people tend to narrow it to just shallow depth of field, because these other things are hard to put your finger on as the viewer when you're watching it and you just see that the image looks better. Color fidelity is another thing. You know, we, we have spent a lot of time on our color science to ensure that the colors are represented accurately. Right. So what you're seeing actually matches what is in reality. So adding that layer to it as well, you know, these are all really subtle things that to the viewer, at the end of the day, they just say, wow, that looks great. And we've, we've seen that time and time again as well. When you're intermixing other cameras or a producer will be like, you know, what camera is that on the, you know, looking at the image that's coming from our feed and yeah, let's transition a
• 6:43
  Speaker B: little bit into some workflow discussion. So if somebody's considering cinema cameras for an existing live production environment, what else do they need to think about beyond just the camera itself? I mean, things like the operator, the control room, cabling, lighting, which you talked about. Or are there core infrastructure things that need to change in order for cinema cameras to work in this environment?
• 7:05
  Speaker A: Yeah, this is actually an area where we've had a lot of challenge, you know, converting a cinema camera into the broadcast space. Because we speak a completely different language on the cinema side than broadcasters do. Getting into that ecosystem was. Was very challenging, but we spent a lot of time knocking down all of those challenges as they, as they were presented. So at this point, I would say you can start from really not having to change your workflow because we have these, as I call them, translation layers between the camera system and the cinema system and the broadcast system. First one being hardware where we have the cine broadcast module where you can connect it with SMPTE fiber. And now it's just like any other camera that you're using. Just connect your SMPTE fiber if you got power and communication, everything. And then the other is on the software side, we rewrote our entire color pipeline to give another option in camera for broadcast color. And this means downstream you can shade the camera just like any other broadcast camera. So from a starting point, you actually don't have to change anything now, but as you start to want to utilize the more creative features and start to match more of a cinema style, with what you're shooting. That's where we see people doing things like, you know, adding acs for a focus puller to, to really creatively control focus during a match, really paying more attention to the lighting like I talked about and the lens choice to really pair that in with the broadcast system. And you know, a lot of times actually as, as customers are getting familiar with this, they go fully that way into the cinema look and they actually don't come back to the broadcast style of shading. You know, that's not across the board, but that is, that has been a number of our customers that have, that have done that. So really, in summary, to answer your question, you don't have to change anything if you don't want, but you can fully embrace the cinema style only with a few settings within the camera and it's just a matter of dipping your toe or how comfortable you are moving fully over to the cinematic look.
• 9:22
  Speaker B: So kind of a side question to that is obviously the cinema cameras are being used for broadcast, but there's also the concept of, well, let's use that footage for something else later on, whether it's for socials or whatnot. So are you finding that because of the immense ecosystem that Red has had for a while in terms of recording these high resolution files, that the workflows for post production have changed in broadcast environments? Because now they have this fantastic acquisition look that they can use that would be better than maybe some of the traditional broadcast cameras.
• 9:54
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. It's because we're capturing RAW in our camera. What we've actually done is we, if you're using our broadcast color mode, it tracks every change you make in shading during the broadcast. But because it's a RAW file, when you bring it into post, if the post facility is not, which they traditionally aren't, if it's a traditional post facility, not familiar with broadcast color, all they do is just go straight into using our standard workflow that they are familiar with. And now they can grade as if it was a standard, you know, file shot for a major motion picture. Right. So it's actually made it really beneficial for them. You, you have the choice of capturing it as it was in the broadcast or doing a full upgrade. And now, you know, when you mention about social media as well, the recorded RAW file, even though you may be broadcasting at 1080 for instance, which is still very common across the world, right. The infrastructure is just not all the way there everywhere for higher resolution than that. But the RAW file you're capturing is 8K that means that you can do really nice extractions from the image. For social media posts, you know, you can stabilize and track on on a specific person that was in the frame and export that. For social media you can extract multiple people from the frame for multiple different clip. It really gives you just a lot of flexibility in post. And I will say too, we even have the ability to remotely record the RAW file to a network attached storage system. So just further gives flexibility. Sometimes we'll even see really quick edits going out on social media even while the broadcast is still happening.
• 11:43
  Speaker B: Let's talk a little bit about money because that's always something that gets brought up in any discussion. And Red, to your credit, we're one of the originators in getting cinema cameras down in cost nearly 20 years ago. But as we've seen the price of cinema cameras coming down, what does a realistic live production package actually look like and where should customers spend their money? And I'd love to know what kind of lens kits you're seeing that folks are going after as well.
• 12:10
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean there's a wide range here, right. Depending on what you're going after and what your budget is. We have a lot of different entry points in our lineup, starting at our Komodo X which is at about $7,000 and then going up to 40k plus, you know, at the top end of it with our XL series. And I'll just maybe give you the extreme examples which is you can do everything you need for a broadcast, for a cinematic broadcast with a Komodo X. And a nice pairing with that that we're seeing is Nikkor 28 to 135 power zoom because you can fully remotely control that. We have a lot of tools that are out there that are very simple to use that you can use to control that. And that's a nice package, right? So you're under 10k with a package that can do a nice cinematic broadcast there. But then you're going all the way up to what we see a lot of times is the Fuji 25 to 1000 lens, which the price of that lens will eclipse the price of the camera gear at that point. But that's where at the high end, you know, you have that full zoom length. You know, it's a 2.8 and it covers the full VistaVision sensor that we have on, on our higher end camera system. So I'd say those are kind of the book ends of what we're seeing our customers doing. And yeah, that's kind of what you're looking at in terms of getting into it.
• 13:43
  Speaker B: Are there any kind of must have accessories that, that you'd recommend, folks who are putting a red into live production that are just beneficial or helpful for the operators?
• 13:57
  Speaker A: Not really. I mean we've tried to incorporate everything into the camera system as much as possible, I would say. One thing that we have added that has been very useful actually, kind of surprisingly so in the live space is we have a paid app. It's on the iPad or the Mac OS called Red Control Pro. It's designed to be used for multicam operations. So if you're controlling more than one camera, you can change all the settings simultaneously. But one thing we added to it was all the shading controls that you can use live. And what we've seen, a little bit surprisingly to me actually, is that we'll have broadcasters who are using a full end to end ecosystem with RCP shaders and they've got everything. But then sometimes when they're on a smaller production, they'll just bring the iPad with that app and that as an accessory to the camera, you can fully remotely control everything. You can see the feed, you can shade it, you can send luts to the camera. So that's been a nice add on, I think that people have been using.
• 15:06
  Speaker B: Now let's kind of shift towards where cinema cameras are better fit and when they're not. So if a customer asks, should my next facility use cinema cameras, what questions would you ask them first? And where do you think cinema cameras are a great fit versus a more traditional broadcast approach?
• 15:26
  Speaker A: I think, you know, a lot of the things we talked about here, it, it would sound almost a bit coy to say it depends on how much you care about the image, right? That is, that is coming out at the end of the day if image quality is important to you, you know this. These camera systems in the cinema world are designed for large screen cinema, right? So we are really focused on image quality first, first and foremost. And so if image quality is important to you, then this is the route I think that you want to go. Again, it's not relegated to just shallow depth of field. You can shoot deep, you can shoot shallow. You actually have more flexibility when utilizing a system like this and we have workflow flexibility. So maybe I'm a little bit biased, but, but I would say there's really not a lot of cases where it would be detrimental to have the camera system. But if image quality, if the post production side of things is important to you as well, I think any of those reasons, high frame rate, capture, you know, all of that. If any of those things are important to you, I think it is worth taking a look at what cinema systems it you can get into.
• 16:45
  Speaker B: That's, that's, I'm, I'm impressed that there, there isn't any scenario where a broadcast camera.
• 16:52
  Speaker A: I'm sure there's one, I'm sure there's one that, that we could find. I mean honestly, the originally when we were talking with customers, a lot of the concern is about just matching other cameras. Right. You have plenty of environments where there's a lot of different camera systems and they want them all to match. Right. You can't have a very stark change when you go between two feeds. And so that's been a concern. People are like, can I really bring this system into my ecosystem and have it live nicely amongst the other camera systems? But in reality you can just tune the camera through shading. We have some pre existing luts as well if you want to be on the lut pipeline to match pretty nicely. So even that concern has kind of faded I would say. So really it's a matter of budget what you're trying to accomplish and you know, otherwise it doesn't paint you into a corner to have a cinema system. It actually expands the creative options for
• 17:54
  Speaker B: teams that are new to cinema cameras. What skills do you think they need to develop? And do you think the distinction between cinema and broadcast cameras is eventually going to start to disappear?
• 18:06
  Speaker A: Yeah, so I think when you have more dynamic range to play with exposure, you know, tuning exposure while you're using the cameras, that's one of the first things I think that people just have to adjust a little bit on how they approach exposure and what they have at their fingertips. And so then correspondingly you have more flexibility in the grade so making sure that you're, you're grading it appropriately. I think again paying more attention now to the downstream things from the camera, it really, once you have such a wide palette that you're working with, it starts to shine a light on the other things downstream that maybe are not up to par yet for a cinematic image. Again, things like the lens choice, things like the lighting choices and the set design, et cetera, those are things that people need to now start paying more attention to if they're really trying to squeeze the most out of the image.
• 19:02
  Speaker B: Jeff, thank you so much for being on Broadcast a post today.
• 19:06
  Speaker A: Thank you, I really appreciate it.
• 19:08
  Speaker B: Thanks for watching Broadcast to post. Don't forget to follow Keycode Media on social and contact us about your projects at keycodemedia.
• 19:16
  Speaker A: Com.