There is absolutely no way this film would have been what it is without the RedRock M2 Adapter. I can’t say enough about Brian Valente and all the guys at RedRock for making the products that they do. The RedRock forum was part of my message board addiction when I was going through all the research on what camera system we wanted to get. If you are an HVX owner and you do not have an M2… basically… you’re crazy.
Don’t get me wrong, the HVX looks wonderful on it own… amazing actually. But if you are shooting a narrative dramatic piece, the image difference with the M2 will blow your mind. The depth of field you get with the adapter, in my opinion, is worth any trade offs that may come with the adapter. And those trade off are small.
In production on "Coyote" we exclusively used the RedRock M2 Adapter for every piece of footage. For those who don’t know already, the adapter attaches onto the front of the camera and then you attach 35mm lenses onto the adapter. You lose the AF feature of the camera and have to focus manually on the lens. We used RedRocks Follow Focus system which worked flawlessly for us. Since RedRock did not have a mattebox available we used a mattebox from Geardear. It worked sufficiently for some things, but we are anxiously awaiting the upcoming Mattebox release from RedRock.
We used the following lenses on our system:
- Nikon 28mm 1:2
- Nikon 50mm 1:1.4
- Nikon 105mm 1:1.8
We would constantly be amazed at the image quality coming from the set-up. No one would guess that it was video. In fact, when we would test screen, the comment would often come back, "What did you shoot on? Was that 35mm or 16mm?" People were amazed to find out that it was HD, but they were floored when we said it wasn’t the Viper or the F900 or even the Varicam, but the HVX that we shot on. The M2 is what gave our footage that "wow" factor.
You do lose light with the system. Our lighting package was very simple (2 4×4 bank kinos and an arri kit), but we managed to shoot interior nights and exterior nights. Just get ready to live with your stops wide open and testing your AC use of the follow focus! Exterior days and situations with lots of light are easy to work in.
The M2 does flip the image, so we had to deal with that in a nubmer of ways.
First, for our DP, Robb Hanks, who also operated the camera. We performed a bit of an operation on our HVX where we tricked the LCD into thinking that it was flipped. Yes, it was scary to do this operation, but it worked great, and actually is not hard at all. We go back and forth between the flipped and non flipped trick with the HVX depending on if we are using the adapter or not and we have not had any problems with your camera. You can find out more about this crazy process at the following dvxuser thread.
What would be great is a firmware option to flip in camera. Panasonic… are you reading this?
The second adjustment was for our AC, Chad Peters. He had to pull focus constantly. We gave him the Marshall V-R70P-HDA monitor. Mounting this monitor was more trouble that it was worth since we were dealing with SO much handheld stuff. Chad would simply hold the monitor upside down with one hand and pull focus with the other.
The final adjustment was in post where we needed to flip the images in order to edit. We did this by using a great simple app developed by Andreas Kiel called Rotate Clips. This app helped us flip all our footage in a couple simple steps. While editing in FCP you do have a filter on every single shot, so while this does NOT affect the image quality, it DOES effect what you can playback realtime depending on your system. We had no problem editing flipped footage realtime, even with color correction, with a 2.0 Ghz Intel iMac with 2GB or ram. But on my G4 Powerbook, where I can edit raw HVX files in realtime, I was unable to watch flipped footage in realtime.
Those 3 adjustments being said, you soon should not have to make any of them when RedRocks MicroX comes out. Also, perhaps Panasonic will offer this option on a firmware upgrade (PLEASE PANASONIC!)
The M2 does have a 9V battery to power it, but it’s not in the easiest place to swap out, especially if you are mounted on the rods. Thankfully they have a separate power jack. To utilize this, we got this battery from global-batteries which was designed to power a DVD player, but it worked GREAT for powering the M2. We charged it at night and it worked all the next day. We sometimes even forgot to charge it and it still has the juice for two full days of shooting.
I could go on and on about RedRock’s products and how they helped shape the movie into what it is. This may sound like a plug, and it is, but I have no affiliation with their company, I do not get any proceeds from sales, I just can’t thank them enough for making the product they do and what it meant to our picture.
THANKS REDROCK!
3 Responses to “RedRock’s M2 Adapter - Coyote’s Best Friend”
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Kenn
Posted: Oct 25th, 2007 at 7:53 pm1Reply to this comment.One of the issues I have with the RRM2 is that most of the footage I see tends to be soft overall. Your footage was nice and sharp. I was wondering if you knew what you did to get the sharp footage.
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Rick
Posted: Oct 26th, 2007 at 8:13 am2Reply to this comment.The Canon XL-H1 does all this in camera. You can tell it to flip the image, and in FCP you just tell it to flip. While shooting–you can hook up a hard drive and record to take (as a back up)at the SAME time, and the resolution is 1440×1080 for both! Plus it’s a larger chip sizes to begin with.
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Ameer
Posted: Jan 13th, 2008 at 9:34 am3Reply to this comment.I’m planning to get a Sony XDCAM EX-1 to break into the business. I’m still deciding between the LetusExtreme and the Redrock M2, any suggestions?
