The popular medical TV episodic ER is winding down after a 15-year run. But it’s going out with a bang: after the entire run was filmed on 4-perf 35mm, the last seven episodes were shot with the Red camera. The decision to go Red was not taken lightly. “When I first came on the show five years ago, I was really surprised,” says associate producer Dieter Ismagil. “The post workflow was from 1994. The dailies were standard-def and our final conform was the cut negative. We were the only show on TV to be color-timing off the cut negative. Everyone else was doing HD dailies and tape-to-tape color-correction.”
Above: ER DP Arthur Albert on set with the Red One camera.
All ER photography courtesy Warner Bros. Television Entertainment/J. Stenson
It’s not that executive producer John Wells, who also wrote and directed numerous episodes, wasn’t interested in new technology. In fact, the show did a test early on with the Sony HDW-900 camera but decided against it based on image quality. When Panavision released the Genesis, ER tested that camera as well, but decided it was too heavy. (The show shoots 60 percent of its footage with a Steadicam rig.)
Then Wells went to a party and got into a conversation with director Steven Soderbergh, who had just shot the four-and-a-half-hour Che with the Red One camera. “He was raving about it, and that piqued John’s interest,” says Ismagil. When Wells shot the pilot for his upcoming series Southland, they used the Red camera to shoot a test for interiors and exteriors. “They liked the image, and they liked what they could do with it handheld, so they used it for the Southland pilot,” reports Ismagil. “They were happy with the results and with not having the added expense of film processing.” The decision was made to give it a try for the last few episodes of ER.
On Southland, they had some problems with dropped frames when recording to hard drive. That was an experience they didn’t want to repeat on ER. “I didn’t want to have three hours on one hard drive,” says Ismagil. “What if it goes bad? You lose a whole day’s worth of work. With ten minutes on a CF [compact flash] card, you lose ten minutes worth of footage.” Each 16 GB compact flash card could hold the equivalent of a 1,000-foot magazine: 10 minutes. Ismagil and the entire team was still considered about having a sufficient number of back-ups. The DIT copied material on the CF cards onto a RAID array. Company 3, which de-Bayered the files and made dailies and an Avid-ready version, backed up the material on both their SAN server and LTO tapes. “At one time, we had all of Red’s allotment of CF cards for southern California,” he jokes. “We have enough cards for a couple days worth of dailies, which gives us another safety level. Everything we did with the Red was back-ups of back-ups of back-ups.”
Colorist Fred Eldridge (seated) and associate producer Dieter Ismagil at Level 3 in Burbank; photo by Robert Dennis
Early on, the ER production went to the Ascent Media Group for its Red expertise. Company 3, an Ascent Media company, had done the post for Game, an all-Red feature, in October 2007. “They sent us files every night and we turned them around to HD dailies—colored, digitized and ready for Avid,” says director of nonlinear workflow Dylan Carter. “At the time, there weren’t any tools that did exactly what we needed to do, so we built custom software for data management of the Red, used Red’s software to do the rendering, and built a render farm to deal with that. Throughout the process, we developed a close relationship with Red.”
As a result of this early Red experience, and additional work with other file-based cameras, Company 3 created a new division: DCC, or digital camera capture, focused on Red and any other file-based cameras. But it wasn’t just the Ascent Media companies’ expertise in file-based cameras that made the companies ideal for the ER workflow. “Between Encore, Company 3 and Level 3, a big chunk of Hollywood’s episodic workflow goes through us,” says Carter. “Once we rendered the Red files into something useable, we had to do all the things a lab would do, from logging to audio syncing. What they wanted from us was an Avid bin ready to edit.”
David Lyons, Linda Cardellini and John Stamos in episode 20
Among the ER creatives, the main concern for the Red-acquired episodes was maintaining the look of the show: gritty, urban, with heightened contrast and slightly de-saturated. Cinematographer Arthur Albert had shot 163 episodes since 2001, and Level 3 colorist Fred Eldridge had been with the show all 15 seasons. “Fred was the one constant with the show,” says Ismagil.
Eldridge notes that the very high-contrast show—with its bright high keys and rich deep blacks—lent itself well to the dynamic range of film. “Shooting digital video, you don’t usually have the same latitude,” he says. Still, he says, everyone was excited about the chance to create the show in a high-res digital format. “For the most part, people embraced [the switch to Red],” he says. “They realized this is a train leaving the station and we all need to be on board, if not to be on the cutting edge at least to be close to it.”
Noah Wyle in episode 17
Shooting with the Red eliminated the mundane problems of film production—scratches, dirt—but introduced a new set of issues, including the levels recorded. “We needed to make sure the dark areas weren’t recorded too dark so we didn’t get digital noise, and that we got as much detail in the highlights as possible to get the most latitude as possible,” says Eldridge. “There were some refinements along the way but it was mostly smooth sailing.”
Finding the perfect workflow for the Red-acquired ER episodes was an evolution. After some tests, the initial plan was to use the two flavors of Avid’s high-definition codec DNxHD: the more highly compressed DNxHD 36 (36 Mb/sec) for offline editing; and DNxHD 175 for mastering. The process began with DIT-created DNxHD 36 files, with a basic LUT applied; DP Albert had a chance to look and give instructions for quick tweaks. “Every shot of the DNxHD 36 had a dailies look applied—good enough for everyone to get an idea of what the camera was doing and what it would look like eventually,” says Ismagil. "It’s the equivalent of what a one-light dailies color would look like.”
While Company 3 de-Bayered the material and created dailies, they also created a DNxHD 36 version for the Avid offline and a DNxHD 175, with log color space, for the version that would get a final color-correction. The editing team upgraded to Avid Media Composer Nitris DX editing systems, which was a smooth transition.
For the first two Red-shot episodes, the DNxHD 175 material with log color space was transferred to a hard drive, which went to Level 3 Post. “They’d dump it off onto a D-5 tape, and that’s what we’d do our tape-to-tape color correction with,” says Ismagil.
George Clooney in episode 19
When the footage went up on the screen for the color-correction, Ismagil immediately saw a problem. “There were about 500 cuts in the show, and in about 50 shots we saw compression banding in the back of the image,” says Ismagil. “Instead of this nice falling-off of light, you see a band of a bright color of light and another band of a slightly darker color, and then another band slightly darker than that. It looked great in all our tests, but when we pushed it in color timing, this is what we got from the DNxHD 175 conform. Ninety percent of the images looked good, but too many shots exhibited compression banding, so it wasn’t good enough.”
For those two episodes, they went back to the original Red files, rendering out uncompressed HD DPX files to overcut those 50 shots. “I think Avid is the best editing system on the planet,” says Ismagil. “However, the software transcoding from the Red files to the DNxHD 175 files didn’t hold up as we needed. I’m sure they’ll have the bugs worked out soon.” [See a footnote from Avid at the bottom of this story — Ed.]
Back to the drawing board for the ER team, which had to come up with a new plan for finishing. “We got together with Level 3 and Company 3, and they came up with doing a DPX conform in the Autodesk Smoke,” Ismagil says. “We’ve eliminated the DNxHD 175 from our process. We still get dailies with the DNxHD 36. Then, when we have a locked picture, we send Company 3 a Red EDL and they use that to extract those shots, uncompressed from the original Red files as log color space and do a conform in Smoke and output a D-5. It’s given us as high-quality a picture as possible off the Red.”
In his da Vinci 2K color-correction suite, Eldridge was pleased with what he saw. “The Red does render colors a little differently,” he says. “There were some adjustments we had to make, to make sure the colors—especially the green walls in Trauma 2 and the yellow walls in Trauma 1—remained the same. We wanted to make sure the green scrubs remained green. I’m very happy with how the Red renders flesh tones. It’s a nice, natural flesh tone that didn’t take a lot of work from me to refine.” All in all, though he declares himself “biased towards film,” he says he’s been happy with the output of the Red. “I think it produces a very nice picture.”
Maintaining the ER look created one unusual situation. Ismagil reports that, for the first Red-shot episode, a 5298 film-grain look was applied using an Inferno. “But we had an incredibly clean master for the 18th episode, so we thought, let’s see what it looks like without the grain pass.” They were happy with how it looked…until they saw what the DirecTV compression did to the image. “HD made some pretty severe compression banding in some flat areas,” he says. “It didn’t have that with the 17th episode, because we degraded the image. So for episode 19, we added the grain pass back again. By degrading the image, we ended up with a cleaner broadcast image.”
Parminder Nagra in episode 20
Ismagil admits that the process for the last seven episodes “felt like putting a pilot together.” “You’re starting from square one,” he says. “I won’t say it was a walk in the park, but we got great support from the Ascent Media companies and New Edit, the Avid rental company that got our assistants up to speed on the Nitris system.”
For archival purposes, the ER team is creating 1080p masters on HDCAM SR. "We are archiving all our DNxHD 36 material, and that stuff looks great although it’s highly compressed,” says Ismagil. “There will also be LTO3 tape.”
With the success of ER shooting in Red, Ismagil predicts that, during the upcoming pilot season, we’ll see more TV shows shooting with the camera. And he—and the rest of the crew and the Ascent Media Group companies—are ready. “I’m confident now that we’re mastering with the best image and broadcasting the best quality,” he says. “It took a couple of steps to get there, but we have a workflow in place. I’d be very comfortable working with Red again.”
Editor's note: F&V asked Avid for comment on the hitch in ER's DNxHD workflow before this story ran. At press time, there was not enough information available about which versions of Avid software were involved for the company to make a specific comment. But Michael Phillips, Avid's solutions manager for post, spoke more generally to the evolution of Red support. “We are continuing to evolve our solutions in order to meet customers' needs and, as a part of that, remain committed to providing customers seamless workflow solutions,” Phillips said. “Prior to our formal relationship with Red, customers were employing creative workarounds that we developed with them in order to work with their preferred camera format and favorite video-editing systems such as Media Composer. Now Avid offers full end-to-end native Red support, which eliminates many of the extra steps inherent in older workflows. The offline editing process is streamlined via Avid MetaFuze, which is a tool that automates the conversion of formats such as Red and DPX to Avid DNxHD media for HD offline workflows in Avid Media Composer and HD finishing in Symphony systems. To complete the process, the latest version of Avid DS offers a smooth offline-to-online workflow with RED file integration for online color-grading and finishing.”
Comments (25) for "ER Goes Red in the Home Stretch"
1.
I don't know what these guys were thinking when switching to the Red camera. Just go to the ER site and look at the episode recaps over the years. The ones shot with red look like mud compared to film. It sounds like a smart marketing ploy on behalf of Red to get the camera accepted in the industry.
Posted by Prescott on Thursday, March 26, 2009 @ 04:18 PM
2.
It's funny that the more you read and hear about the advances that technology bring's us, The more film looks atractive and easier to work with.
Posted by Jason on Thursday, March 26, 2009 @ 05:32 PM
3.
in the above text there is sentence: "For archival purposes, the ER team is creating 1080p masters on HDCAM SR."
hdcam sr is NOT working in 1080p mode! Psf - yes, but not "p"
also - please try to explain better what is "end to end NATIVE support" solution in avid's term???? looks good when reading, but reality is different. even with metafuze, you cannot batch process your files! so maybe from the lawyer's perspective - it sounds ok, but from the practical point of you it's not that good as explained. looks more like wishfull thinking
thank you for possibility for sending a comment.
filip kovcin, warsaw, poland.
Posted by filip kovcin on Thursday, March 26, 2009 @ 09:07 PM
4.
Hey James,
This is the camera I was telling you about that is replacing motion picture film cameras on studio shows.
L8r,
Matt
Posted by James on Thursday, March 26, 2009 @ 10:36 PM
5.
"I don't know what these guys were thinking when switching to the Red camera. Just go to the ER site and look at the episode recaps over the years. The ones shot with red look like mud compared to film."
Because you can really easily distinguish camera quality from small, overcompressed flash videos...
"It sounds like a smart marketing ploy on behalf of Red to get the camera accepted in the industry."
Yeah, they'd definitely pay NBC to shoot an ER episode or two with it, because four Soderberg films (two starring Benicio Del Toro, one starring Matt Damon), a Peter Jackson short, a film starring Nicholas Cage, and many others aren't any bigger than that, are they?
Posted by Stephen Gentle on Sunday, March 29, 2009 @ 09:36 AM
6.
I find it funny that the spiel about working with digital cameras is the cost saving. Yet I constantly read stories like this that explain how they had to spend time (=money) fixing shots, having extra post companies compile editing batches from original files and fiddling with incompatible file formats etc.
This is the future? Not yet. I'm sticking with film. Once it's scanned, I know what I've got.
Posted by mike on Sunday, March 29, 2009 @ 08:02 PM
7.
Mike I loved your ending "Once it's scanned I know what Ive got" - Yeah, so do I, digital.
Posted by Ash on Monday, March 30, 2009 @ 01:36 PM
8.
I remember editing audio on a 286 computer when digital audio was replacing analog. It was much harder than making analog tape recordings. I'm sure that in time, Digital video will also come of age, and we'll all look back and laugh.
Posted by David on Thursday, April 2, 2009 @ 09:54 AM
9.
I agree with Stephen about being able to differentiate between Film and RED using .JPG on a webpage but RED is not the best choice for digital cinema, they just spend the most in marketing. I find their Pseudo Film workflow to be backwards thinking rather than forward thinking. But it's a choice and we have to deal with it like it or not.
Posted by Clark on Thursday, April 2, 2009 @ 11:11 AM
10.
Thanks for another great article Debra. Very exciting stuff.
We just did a preview screening of the film I'm on and projected our DNx36 "offline" in a theater. With 5.1 playing through the new Dolby CP750, it was the best looking and sounding preview my director and I ever had.
The times they are a changing. And changing fast!
Best Regards,
Lawrence Jordan
http://HDFilmtools.com
Posted by Lawrence Jordan on Thursday, April 2, 2009 @ 11:17 AM
11.
I directed a short last summer just to be able to work with the Red Camera. It's just a great camera. Image quality is tremendous. Robin Charters who is an experienced operator owner made the camera "sing". Quick set ups, and the ability to do numerous "look" changes in the camera made me a huge fan of the Red. I'm hoping to shoot my next picture, a period piece set in New Hampshire with the Red in the fall. Try it You'll become a fan too.
Posted by John Stronach on Thursday, April 2, 2009 @ 11:54 AM
12.
We've looked at DnX 36 and DnX 175 projected and it holds up remarkably well. However, it's surprising that they decided to finish with the DnX media. I've had occasions with D5 where banding was introduced by the Panasonic Hardware, we subsequently switched to HDCamSR and the banding problems went away.
Posted by Michael on Thursday, April 2, 2009 @ 12:15 PM
13.
also - please try to explain better what >>is "end to end NATIVE support" solution in avid's term???? looks good when reading, but reality is different. even with metafuze, you cannot batch process your files!<<
Batch encoding MetaFuze should be released before NAB. As with everything Red, changes happen daily. One of the nice things in working with Red, is all that lurvley metadata that tracks through the post workflow. As Red releases more SDKs, it opens up speedier transcodes and the turnaround on dailies is only going to become faster. Avid's end to end solution is pretty simple, MetaFuze creates DnX media and a bin,start cutting, then the final, offline cut gets sent to Avid DS, DS conforms the timeline but links or captures the .R3D files.
Posted by Michael on Thursday, April 2, 2009 @ 12:28 PM
14.
Stop thinking it's cheaper. It's not cheaper. It's the same amount of money -- for now. But it will be cheaper and the companies who know what they are doing will be way ahead.
We just shot a feature on-location with our Mobile HD Edit Bay. We had dailies up, daily editing, and a rough cut ready for the wrap party. We shot in the middle of the desert and had no problems with the camera holding up. The software is getting better and better and the next camera is on it's way.
Plus, like it or not, mainstream 3D is coming and that will be the end of film, so you might as well have fun with it while you can.
In Sum: Please embrace the future. If you help us instead of wait around picking us apart, the native digital workflow will serve all your needs. Honestly, the technology is moving to fast to use a 1990's workflow.
Posted by Michael David Weis on Thursday, April 2, 2009 @ 01:08 PM
15.
Last episode of ER tonight. Boo hoo! Great story here on the technology behind the shooting...
Posted by Carolyn Russell on Thursday, April 2, 2009 @ 04:23 PM
Again, I think the marketing people are driving this surge to Digital because ultimately it is about image quality isn't it? I simply feel that film is superior and stable. Che looked pretty good but I think it would have been better on 16mm. Please define PROGRESS!
Is it really just bottom line oriented?
Posted by bob carmichael on Thursday, April 2, 2009 @ 06:59 PM
17.
As a post supervisor who has worked on Episodic TV and Features with film and digital files, including the red camera I can tell you that the Red camera causes more headaches than it does blessings. There are so many issues with the footage that all the labs in town have had to create their own "proprietary" software to deal with the issues the camera creates.
In fact the features I worked on that shot with the Red spent extra money in post dealing with issues, some of whicht he ER folks delt with. We even had so called "red" experts on set and to help is post and we still had lots of issues. In the end it cost the same as shooting on film and did not look as good as 4 perf film or HD. Until the kinks are worked out, I suggest sticking with film or finding other digital formats to work with.
Posted by Post Sup on Friday, April 3, 2009 @ 01:50 AM
18.
I thought the article did a good job of putting things in perspective. The 12 bit digital from red is damn near the latitude of 35mm. That's it.
Re: the workflow - its not any more complex than getting from an offline back to feet and frames.
Re: the marketing people - as far as I know the only money Red has spent on marketing was a one page sheet of paper they handed out at some trade shows.
Posted by Will Wagner on Saturday, April 4, 2009 @ 02:42 AM
19.
I have shot the RED camera nd think that it is fantastic video. Truly has producers excited. Given a choice I will always shoot film because I like the look,feeling and the way it works. I will shoot RED camera at the drop of a hat when given not other choice. It can certainly make movies and tv shows just fine. Plenty of people care less about the look and feel. I do notice that 99% of movies in the theaters are still FILM. Since the success of "Knowing" I can guess this number wil now change next year. Each medium is just a paintbrush. To me film is just my medium of choice.
Posted by Nohn Lazear on Monday, April 6, 2009 @ 02:53 AM
20.
Just shot a feature film on the RED. Couldn't have been happier. If you take the time to think through the process and consider the risks and mitigate them, it works. It really works - and looks great. Film is awesome, but if money is a concern, RED has a lot to offer.
Posted by Stephen Marinaccio on Monday, April 6, 2009 @ 08:56 PM
21.
Quantel has a great solution for RED post workflow. Check it out. http://www.quantel.com/page.php?u=e68256ce263cb93869525d538398ea71
Posted by michael on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 @ 11:34 AM
22.
My question is more regarding archive. Sure, both SR and LTO are likely to be "strong", but I wonder: if it comes up to show this in the future (like an I Love Lucy) there's 15 years of cut neg to re-transfer to whatever format (even now Europe's PAL HD thinking to go 50p!). What will survive the best/longest? the "early episodes" or the last ones on SR/LTO ?
Eventually all data will be server-based in a "cloud" and self-update. But for now...
Posted by Mark DP on Thursday, April 9, 2009 @ 09:58 AM
23.
I haven't watch ER in a while but I wanted to see the last episode. I didn't realized they had switched and I was thinking why does this show look soooo flat. I really thought RED would look much better.
Posted by Jon on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 @ 01:07 AM
24.
I watched the last show and was thinking the whole show how flat it looked. I wondered if they were doing anything differently, now I know.
Posted by Jon on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 @ 12:41 PM
25.
Lots of bashing on Red and digital cinema camera technology. Time will tell who sticks to what. The same people who told we wont edit on Non-Linear can't find a linear film edit suite nowadays and its already evolved for Digital Cinema Cameras. Whether People agree or not things are be treated differently in post and post plays a major role in end product and for the post to look best you need better shooting condition and expertise. So start bashing Digital Cinema technology and start learning it people. Its time to evolve and not revolve around what you know?
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