Seeing Red
Photographer David McLain Uses Ultra High-Definition Red One Camcorder to Shoot a Print and Video Campaign in Baja.

Oct 3, 2008
By Dan Havlik

Eight Days in Baja

For the Horny Toad clothing shoot in Baja, the Merge team decided to stick to a formula that had worked for them in the past; keep it loose, keep it simple, keep it real. Rather than use professional models for his commercials, McLain typically hires a "fixer" to set him up with quirky, photogenic locals who might be interested in appearing in the spots.

"This person usually introduces us to his cool friends, and those friends become the models for the shoot," McLain explains. "And along with modeling, lots of times they generate many of the creative ideas for the spots."

One of the concepts for the Baja spots was to create a makeshift fashion "runway" effect by having the models casually parade along a dirt street in front of a colorful 1960s-era mobile home. So, along with capturing playful footage of locals dancing, shooting squirt guns at each other and mugging for the camera in Horny Toad activewear, McLain and Thelia can pull individual still images from the Red footage to use as part of a print campaign.

What they quickly learned about Red is that grabbing individual shots from the high-resolution video has some caveats.

"There's a trade-off in Red between the resolution and the frame rate," Thelia notes. "The higher the frame rate, the lower the resolution of the image. We shot a lot of the stuff with the Red in 3K mode, which gave us a resolution of 3072 x 1536 pixels at 60 frames per second which is unheard of in an HD camera. Out of that we can extract a 10 x 5 image at 300 dpi, which, by digital SLR standards, is not that huge of an image, but is still pretty big. It's certainly big enough to do a small print ad campaign with."

Red Alerts

One of the issues they encountered with Red's RAW footage (known as "Redcode") is that it is completely unprocessed when it's shot.

"When they say RAW, they really mean 'raw,'" Thelia says. "There's no sharpness applied at all so that throws a lot of people off at first. Even with Adobe Camera RAW importer, when you bring in image files from a DSLR, there's an amazing amount of processing that goes on before you see it. When you're working with a Red image, it's completely raw, so there's low contrast, low saturation, and no sharpness. To the untrained eye it looks relatively soft. But this allows you to apply your own sharpness later so you're not a victim to what every Nikon or Canon wants to apply in-camera, or Adobe wants to apply in ACR."

Consequently, it takes a very different, much more labor-intensive postproduction workflow to extracting workable still images from Redcode.

Red Cine, the basic Redcode RAW conversion software, is included with the camcorder, but Thelia prefers Scratch, a high-end video editing program from Assimilate. Video neophytes be forewarned: Scratch is not easy to use and isn't cheap.

McLain doesn't think the technical obstacles of working with Red—or any other type of HD camcorder, for that matter—should discourage photographers from exploring new media opportunities. It should, however, make them seriously consider partnering with others.

"Photographers just need to be smarter about collaborating and understanding what they're good at and what other people are good at. I might not necessarily want to learn Flash or Final Cut Pro, but other people do and you should seek them out. You're much stronger if you partner with someone else anyways."

Despite the video-editing learning curve, McLain doesn't think photographers will struggle with the Red camera itself.

"Using Red in the field is unbelievably natural," he says. "Any still photographer would look through the viewfinder of Red and just fall in love."

For the Baja shoot, McLain pulled many of his old fixed-focal-length, manual-focus Nikon lenses out of mothballs to put on the Red including a 135mm f/2.0, a 35mm f/1.4, and other classic Nikkor glass. Autofocus actually doesn't make sense in a motion picture camera because you don't want your lens racking in and out as it tries to lock in on the movement.

A Big Toolbox

One of the misperceptions about Red that McLain and Thelia learned while using it on the Baja shoot is that it's some kind of technological Swiss Army knife. For now, at least, it's just one tool of many to help you expand your business from still photography into multi-media content.

"At this point we approach each situation by asking, 'What's the story?' Then we sit with an art director and figure out what the best tool for that story is. If it's exclusively a still campaign, maybe the Canon 1Ds Mark III is the best tool. If it's a Web campaign, maybe the Red is the best tool, or the Panasonic HVX-200. Or it could be all three," McClain says. "You need a big tool box to be a modern content provider."

Though the Red One provides enough resolution to extract a usable still image for print, grabbing a frame from Red poses the same problem as grabbing a frame from a 35mm motion picture camera, namely, motion blur.

"One of the limiting factors is motion," he notes. "Anything you can't freeze is going to come out as blur when it's extracted as a still."

McLain and Thelia were also surprised at how much bigger and heavier the Red One was than they had imagined. Thelia estimated that with a battery and lens attached along with other assorted hardware such as a viewfinder, the camera weighs about 25 pounds. "It's pretty damn big and pretty damn heavy," McLain says. "You're not a fly on the wall with that camera."

He added that the downsides of the camera are outweighed by the opportunities it presents, along with the sheer thrill of trying something new again.

"I find shooting motion fascinating. It's the same feeling I got when I first saw a black-and-white print come to life in Dektol developer 25 years ago in my high school photography class. And from a business point of view, when people see it, they get it. You can see the light bulb go off in people's heads."

Though Horny Toad is a small company that doesn't have the budget to use Merge's Baja footage as part of a TV campaign, it plans on showing the video spots on flat screens in their stores, as well as posting them on the Web. Meanwhile, still images from Baja will be used in Horny Toad's catalogues, print advertisements and Web site.

Another client for whom the light bulb went off is venerable underwear manufacturer Jockey, which hired Merge to create still images and a television spot with the Red One after seeing the Baja footage. "They immediately got it," McLain says. "We are so stoked."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------