The REAL Reason we spent $140,000 on 8K Cameras - ft Corridor Digital
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,983 words · ~9 min read
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okay sorry about that just with all the stress this camera has put me through
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over the last six months i needed a quick snack before i get started one
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moment please
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the ripjaws km 570 mechanical keyboard from g-skill features full RGB a simple
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design cherry mx switches and more check it out now at the link below
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now red cameras are inherently difficult to review because their modularity
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allows nearly unlimited different configurations so i'll focus on the
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build that we chose for flexibility today and easy adaptability for more
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specialized rigs in the future we ended up with more first party
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accessories than many users because my personal experience and anecdotal
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evidence suggests that third-party accessories can lead to compatibility
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issues down the road and at least if we experience a device failure there's only
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one contact we need for support something we did end up needing more on
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that later as for audio when Linus did his original
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unboxing for the weapon we had planned to use the off hollywood omod but after
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a few weeks it would be generous to say that for 2500 it wasn't giving us the
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audio quality we expected so when beachtek offered to send us their new
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dxa cine and dxa alexa we were really excited to find a solution that didn't
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compromise on quality or workflow synchronizing audio in post is fine for
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feature films but it's a nightmare for our rigorous daily release schedule the
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dxa alexa is our daily driver now thanks to its two full-size xlr inputs and
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phantom power but the dxa cine is smaller gives you the same fine control
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with hardware buttons and is much less expensive if you're running and gunning
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with powered mics like sennheiser's avx system or something that doesn't need
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power like a rode video might go okay enough about audio let's talk about
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the most obvious reason you want to buy this camera the sensor in the weapon
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body or brain as red likes to call it their helium sensor shoots at a whopping
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81.92 by 4320 at up to 60 frames per
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second but the benefit of this is not immediately obvious to the average
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person it's not about publishing at 8k for the dozen or so people out there
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with ak displays it's about flexibility in post being able to stabilize and
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punch in with a very minimal loss in image quality is great and for vfx work
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it can be an absolute godsend but don't take my word for it hello you're
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probably wondering what the heck i'm doing here my name is nico and i'm part of a channel called corridor and we
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shoot a lot of stuff on the red cameras and Linus and brandon asked me to actually talk about resolution because
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these cameras shoot up to 8k but tvs only go up to 4k so why shoot in the
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higher resolution if no one has a display to watch it there's actually a couple useful things that it does or
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that enables a filmmaker to do for example when you shoot ak footage you
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can zoom into the footage reframe it crop it pan and scan without any
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noticeable loss of sharpness up to a certain point of course but you can zoom
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in 150 180 sometimes even 200 and you
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can't tell that it was zoomed in david fincher actually does this quite a bit on house of cards it's one of the ways
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he can get those perfect symmetrical compositions because in post they'll go
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in and reframe the frame to make it perfect another thing you can do with
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the extra resolution is get better motion tracking because more resolution
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means more detail to track more detail to track means more points more points
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means a better camera solve so for visual effects artists the extra resolution can be nice and finally
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the thing that i find most useful is down sampling so if you're shooting in
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8k and you're delivering to a 4k television
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well you down sample that 8k 4k that means that you take four pixels and
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average them out to one pixel for delivery so it makes your image cleaner
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for example if it's underexposed or you push the color grade quite a bit and
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it's starting to get noisy that noise starts to disappear and if you're delivering to 1080p and you're shooting
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in 8k that's a 16 to 1 pixel ratio so
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you're taking 16 pixels averaging them down to one pixel for 1080p delivery
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meaning you have a lot more leeway with getting grainy footage or pushing your
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color grade and maybe it's not perfect but once you downsample it that far it
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looks really clean so there's a couple different perks for a filmmaker to shoot
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in a higher resolution and those are just some of them anyways i hope that was useful hope i could help a little
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bit and i'll give it back to brandon thanks
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but resolution is actually just a small part of the story here much more
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important is helium's impressive 16.5 stops of dynamic range the 10 years of
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work redis put into their color science and the post-production flexibility
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afforded by the proprietary red code raw file format some of you might not know
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this but outside of Linus tech tips i actually spend a great deal of my
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personal time shooting shorts web series and pretty stock footage that i mostly
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don't get paid for but i do it because i love it and i guess that's where the
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weapon shines for me flexibility every time i take it or it's little cousin the
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epic w out into the world usually with a ferocious guard dog to keep us both safe
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it puts a big smile on my face both during shooting and while reviewing
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footage later this gear was obviously a huge investment for us as a company but
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shooting a mix of our daily releases our bigger projects and my personal stuff
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i've been hard pressed to find something anything i can throw at in the real
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world that it can't handle and that's ignoring the fun yes i find
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it fun upgrading the files in premiere even at high compression ratios which
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helps us save space on red's proprietary mini mag ssds i am super impressed by
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how much latitude there is especially when trying to pull out details out of
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dark areas of a scene even at a high iso
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which is an area where the previous 6k dragon sensors struggled not to mention
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that as a relatively new red user the ability to change iso or white balance
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after the fact contribute a layer of flexibility that i am still getting used
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to however this flexibility is not an
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excuse for shooting incorrectly in the first place like any piece of
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professional equipment a red weapon does not make you the next roger deakins sure
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you can crank the iso to 2000 in an effort to mask your lighting errors with
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a high quality camera and a lot of people would never notice but to truly
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get the most out of it you have to be aware that a camera has a native iso
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where its dynamic range capabilities are ideal and everything lighting makeup nd
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filters exposure aperture shutter speed everything needs to be balanced to get
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the right amount of light on the sensor if you want the highest quality digital
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negative and that's important because with red's
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new image processing pipeline even users of older red cameras can go back and
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reprocess the red raw footage with ipp2 for a fairly significant improvement in
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image quality it's still beta but it shows a dedication to support that i
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have to admire okay so this is the dream camera that
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everyone thinks it is right smooth sailing right
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well actually like any camera nerd i was more
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excited than i had almost ever been to open a box when it arrived but from day
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one until now we've had such a laundry list of issues with both of our cameras
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that i don't have enough time to talk about all of them so i'll just give you
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the highlights our biggest consistent issue has been with our 960 gig mini max
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i've heard the arguments defending red's proprietary SSD media it's more reliable
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and therefore worth the high cost but any SSD can fail and while we haven't
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actually lost any footage between these stress inducing mounting issues and
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having four of our 960g mags fail over a span of six months i'm with Linus on
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this one the solution to reliable storage remember this is a camera that
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might be used for a 50 million dollar production or higher is not three
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thousand dollar mcat ssds no matter how much pixie dust is in them the actual
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solution to reliable storage is redundancy two reds credit they offered
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us a three year warranty upgrade for both of our cameras with two free 960
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gig mags as a way of saying sorry your seven inch display mags weapon brain and
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epic w brain twice had to be r made but
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just speaking honestly as a customer it's caused delays in our production
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schedule and hasn't given us the warm and fuzzy feeling that we should be
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getting when we're buying the best of the best with all of that said however Linus
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might feel about the price tag we clearly haven't boxed them back up for a
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refund are they overkill for youtube yes but does that mean we will continue
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to bring you guys videos shot in 8k anyway
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also yes we aren't going to turn into fanboys but the image quality and
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flexibility have brought us into the red ecosystem for the foreseeable future
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one of the worst parts of being a small business owner let's say you uh you're
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www.freshbooks.com tech tips and enter Linus tech tips in the how did you hear
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about us section so thank you guys for watching if this
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video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that
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like button or check out where to buy the stuff we feat well where to buy red
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in the link in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store which you can buy cool
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t-shirts not like this one and our community forum which you should totally
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join also let me know in the comments down below if you guys want us to do a
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video covering our 8k post workflow and any further questions please hit me up
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on instagram or twitter linked below