Imagine this – you’re about to roll for a shot knowing that if the shadows move you’ll need to relocate the camera setup in order to make it match. If you don’t get this shot in the next 10 minutes, then you never get it as time and sun position is dictating you must move on. You press the red record button and magically, the camera powers down. Yep. That happened. A lot. Even on the first day, which was cooler (around 30˚C), we had shut downs at odd times. We did our best from the start to keep the cameras out of the sun, shaded and with icepacks on them, which probably helped. I shudder to think of how the REDs would have behaved if we hadn’t. However, when discussing the shutdowns with my DoP Stu, he maintains there was only one shutdown due to overheating. The others were related to a different, unidentified problem.
Which brings me to another point regarding the RED: it is essentially, a computer, not a camera, and so behaves like one. Consequently as well as the shutdowns, we had some other bizarre problems. Halfway through the morning of the second day both cameras decided not to recognise any audio input. We tried everything we could think of; changing settings, rebooting, battery and lead swap, but to no avail. We had signal and output through the external mixer we were using but could not get any audio signal into either camera. Bear in mind that each RED came from a different hire place yet each had similar issues, ruling out an individual camera problem. The audio issue was aneurism territory for me, but fortunately one of the crew had randomly brought a non-sync sound recorder we could plug the radio mics into, so nearly all of the dialogue was captured. (And wasn’t non-sync sound fun during the four days I had to finish the rough edit.) Unfortunately, very little wild sound was recorded as there were only two inputs on the device, and swapping out for the boom to grab some atmos was often forgotten in the pace of the shoot. Not an end of the world issue, but certainly an unwanted complication for post.
