Lessons Learned 1: RAW

So we finished the film… Unfortunately we missed the deadline for the My Røde Reel competition…. Ironic, considering this was the initial impetus for starting the film in the first place! A communication problem between Røde’s emails and the timer on their website meant that we thought we had eight hours more than we actually did… }:-(

As you can imagine, the swear words were flying… But I got over it quite quickly; I figured that we set out to make a short film and we made a short film… The Røde competition was irrelevant in the end.

So having missed the deadline we just said “Let’s get it finished!” and we did!

Given that our budget wouldn’t buy coffee for most other low budget films I’m happy with the result. Very happy. At one point I wasn’t sure what result we would get but I’m satisfied. There is a story, character development and even if you don’t exactly get everything, you get a sense of the character’s urgency and his ultimate madness…

Yes, there are things that I would do differently; yes, there are things I would change and, yes, there were a few problems along the way… But we set out to make a short film and we did.

We learned a lot of lessons along the way! And we’re going to share them with you (whether you like it or not!!!)

Lesson 1:

Magic Lantern / RAW on a Canon 600D

TL:DR version – Too much hassle!

Not being able to see the shot you’re shooting, not being able to quickly preview and review footage is a great pain in the ass. And there’s one other problem – a biggie…

As I’ve said before, if you’re thinking of using this setup, do tests and mask off the screen so that what you see is what you get…

I completely messed up a two-shot because most of the two people were outside the portion of the view screen that was captured by the RAW frame…!!! Even using a wide angle adapter! Imagine how stupid I felt when I saw that my two-shot was a no-shot!!!! Lol! d’oh! If we had been able to review our shots as we took them, we would have picked up on this before we (I) embarrassed our (my) self!

Other than that, the work flow is long, tedious and expensive on hard drive space. You end up with the RAW footage, the Cinema DNG files and then the (in our case) Pro Res 444 files that are being used for the final edit. Only when you have the shot in CinemaDNG form can it be viewed and that’s far too far down the production line.

Whilst making the film, RAW Magic was updated a few times – unfortunately, it wasn’t until the film was nearly finished that the vertical line artefacts were (supposedly) removed. Where the exposure wasn’t ideal, such as in the derelict house, any attempt to correct things resulted in purple, vertical line artefacts. Not ideal. Luckily, I had planned these shots as flashbacks and so the effect added to them masked the problem. There’s no way we could have used these shots as standard shots.

The film was edited in Final Cut Pro (The first project I used it for – I found it very enjoyable and quick to edit with.) on a Mac Pro 1,1 running Mavericks (a story in itself!). Not many twelve or thirteen year old machines would even be capable of this but definitely a newer, faster machine would have made the process less stressful and tedious.

All in all, RAW had a few good points but a lot of drawbacks… Its up to you. In future I’ll give it a miss unless the camera is capable of doing it natively and playback is possible.