Taking Flight with the F55 at red jet films
After I bought the F3 I was surprised at the level of support I received from Sony. As an example, we were shooting these funny inserts for a movie about ceramic fireproof glass when I noticed what appeared to be a dead pixel. I called Mike DesRoches – Sony’s technical guy – to ask if there was some kind of pixel compensation I could run. He asked if he could call me back in a few minutes. Next thing I knew he was standing in my office to help me with my problem first hand. Pretty good considering he lives in LA. It was a dead pixel – on my monitor. Not the first time I have felt like an idiot. And then 4K. I will admit the thought of it overwhelmed me at first. None of my clients were asking for it and my production peers that were shooting it mainly grumbled about the crazy conversion time necessary to prep it for edit. I heard one horror story after another about projects shot 4K in RAW and then spending days in post converting the footage – all of the time knowing the final deliverable was 720p. It just seemed crazy. Our clients just do not have the budget to add two additional days to the edit to down convert footage. It’s as simple as that. But then again, the second you say to yourself, “I’ll just hold here technologically,” you’re already dead in this business. 4K is not just coming. It’s here and being ready with an easy workflow is just necessary. The only thing I had to do was figure it out before a client asked if we could do it and that mainly meant choosing a camera and codec. I have met some very decent people from Sony because of my F3, so when they asked if I could get together a few DP’s from the Seattle area to look at two new cameras, I jumped on it. Keith Vidger brought the F5 and F55 and Josh Ewing with Fujinon brought their 19-90mm Cabrio. There were actually too many folks in attendance to really handle the cameras, but all I needed to see was the higher end viewfinder and I was halfway there. Compared to my F3, the F55 had everything I could see I would need for the foreseeable future. Fourteen stops latitude, 4K onboard recording, RAW if needed, the global shutter, an incredible color gamut plus and all of the other things that make this camera world class. I waited nearly a year to purchase an F55. I had committed to a MoviM10 and the fifteen thousand dollars of additional tools to really make it work correctly. It took a bit of doing on the part of some folks, but I eventually got an F55 camera to test. That was pretty much it. I just needed to find the correct time to extract forty grand from the business. Then Sony announced that 24-month 0% financing deal and we pulled the trigger. For the time being we do not shoot RAW. I purchased the camera with four 128-gig SxS Pro+ cards and the OLED viewfinder. My friends at Ikan helped with two things: a base plate and matte box built by Tilta. Outside of that and Anton Bauer power, I have kept the camera as stripped down as possible. Wireless receivers and wireless video are all rail mounted so they only live on the camera if we need them.
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