Shooting a feature on 5DMKIII RAW

[kevinmathein]

Hey guys,
In three weeks I am the DP on a super low budget feature film. We are shooting on 5DmkIII and after reading all the news about RAW I am now strongly considering taking the risk and going for it. Do you guys think at this point it is stable enough for me to take the risk?

Thanks
Kevin Mathein

[arturochu]

i think its stable enough if you have what it needs (fast CF cards, a usb 3.0 laptop and lots of hdd to save all the data) i've been trying to shoot all my work in raw now and it has never failed, i even shot a short film in raw.

[arturochu]

biggest downside of shooting a fiction in raw is the recording information display in camera or monitor, a lot of times it gets in the way of actors faces or maybe you cant see the boom is in the shot.

[squig]

Have you calculated how much disk space you're going to need? I calculated I'll need a 16 terabyte raid 6 array (8x 3Tb drives) and an LTO6 tape drive for backups which comes to $6000.

[AnotherDave]

We shot a short with it 2 weeks ago for 5 days straight.  42 camera rolls of 64gb KB 1000x cards for 2.68TB of data.

There are a few bugs, and a few things that make it annoying.

1. Don't shoot over 1600iso (it is noisy past that).
2. The record data is in a terrible place on the screen and often blocks the action.
3. 12min rolls, and NO data display for the remainder means someone has to clock your card with an iPhone so you know how much you've got left.
4. USB 2 - 27mins to DL a 64gb CF.  USB 3 - 9-12mins to DL a 64gb CF.
5. Shoot only in STANDARD and don't apply a LUT - it'll just trick your eyes into thinking it isn't underexposed.
6. ETTR!!!  As much as you can, expose to the right of the histogram.
7. Leave ALL of the display data off while rolling or you might get a broken frame.
8. Use the DISPLAY PRESETS so you can cycle info on and off while not rolling.
9.  Image Finetuning = -1 EV (to help you ETTR)
10.  A smart slate makes sound syncing a total breeze in Resolve.

Data management.

To save money, get a drive dock and 3x 4TB Sata drives for every 9hrs of recording (2 BKups for .RAW, 1 for DNG) = $600/9hrs.

You'll need someone to be the media manager, and it is a full time job.

Happy shooting!