Hey guys,

Had to share that I booked my first wedding to be shot on RED next year! Not charging them any more than DSLR rates because they will be the first but I will be shooting on RED next season!

Louis

Epic? Or Scarlet?

Congrats, wonderful to hear you are working for free way to go on the business plan :P Looking forward to hearing your report on the camera and seeing results.

Won't the complex menus/workflow with these cameras put a huge strain on you in the production and post-production? Just curious.

as soon as I'll get my, all weddings that I do will be shot with Scarlet, and some in 2012 season on Epic and Scarlet

I personally would not use red for weddings on a regular basis because setting up shots require speed, which reds aren't too good at.

Congrats - but just an FYI (and you probably know this if you booked it) you should probably hire a camera tech exclusively for that camera and a BRoll/second shooter as there will be down time with that camera unless you have a LOT of SSDs and a LOT of batteries constantly charging.

Do you have someone running DIT? You will be producing footage faster than you can ingest at one point so just be wary and pace yourself that you dont run out of SSDs/Batteries when the vows are happening.

Where are you renting from and what rig/tripod are you using?

Louis,

I'm assuming that you have a Red already and are familiar with it. I just spent a week with an Epic, and I would be very reluctant to shoot a wedding with one. As mentioned media cost is through the roof, and batteries do not last long at all. We also had lots of emergency power downs/reboots required. At least 3 per day. If this happened at a critical point during a wedding, you'd better have back ups... And I'm not trying to be a downer here, but I think 4k is major overkill for a wedding, unless its royalty or something.

This is an excerpt from a Phil Bloom blog post 2 days ago

"First off, and this is the biggie. Buying a Scarlet is NOT going to make you a better filmmaker. It is NOT going to make your camerawork any better. It WILL cost you more than many of you think financially. So I just want to put down the facts on paper so you can make a better informed choice and also my opinions…less important than facts but may be worth listening to! These facts are gathered from my own experience as a RED Epic owner for the past 5 months…

First off I love my Epic. The images out of it are so beautiful. I also swear at my Epic more than I have ever cursed another camera…why? Because it goes wrong. The reliability is not the same as any other camera I have owned. Nothing close. But, this is expected (and effin annoying!). The Epic is effectively a BETA camera. When you buy this you need to know this.".

"The reliability is not the same as any other camera I have owned. Nothing close. But, this is expected (and effin annoying!).The Epic is effectively a BETA camera. When you buy this you need to know this"

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I just cant understand the logic of paying good money on this basis. Would you buy a car that was likely to break down?

Steve

we'll see how it goes, I always have all my DSLRs and EX1 in case of unexpected camera failure, and I never shoot one camera. We did a few weddings with RED1 as A cam, and I didn't really like that experience, R1 is not a run and gun camera, but you know the rule of the game - whatever client wants;
but Scarlet/Epic is a completely different camera, it's smaller, lighter, it boots just a couple seconds longer than EX1; unless you shoot wedding 3:1 @ 4K media is not terribly expensive, just about SxS media price when EX1 was first out; having redvolt in the side handle at all times lets you hot swap IDX any time you need without camera restart; my only concern is reliability, but that I will have to learn on my own, and I definitely will report how RED Scarlet X behaves in ultimate R&G situation, because what could be more run and gun than shooting a wedding?

@Steve Think demolition derby. Sure stuff is going to break and you might be in serious pain later on, but damn it was a fun ride.

Wow Missed a lot of comments, I'll try to address as much as I can.

Right now I'm planning on shooting a little with Scarlets, a Little with an Epic, and having 5D's and 7D's on site as a back up.

I'm not working for free. I'm getting a little over $2200 for a highlight only package.

I definitely understand the worries about batteries not lasting long which is why I am going to have REDvolts on hand but not going to shoot with them but shoot with some Dionic 90's.

Media is definitely an issue I agree. At 5K its a huge investment but I'm thinking for this wedding we'll stick to 4k and 3k shooting and since Scarlets will be part of the equation we'll limit the compression to 8:1 so we can match.

I will be bringing a camera tech / DIT to be part of the process. However, this is a wedding so the point is to not be seen so I'll keep them away from the action until the reception where they can be in a back room.

Philip Bloom did have some pretty harsh things to say about the Epic, and tried to convince many people to not buy a Scarlet because of them. It is important to keep in mind though that if you bought an Epic-M, RED made sure you knew that you were buying a beta camera. It still says that the Epic-M is a beta camera on their website. However, Philip did buy a scarlet himself so it couldn't be that bad.

Post production process: My plan right now is to ingest and edit with a rocket and then export down to HD video when I'm done editing, grading, and finishing to be displayed on their television set, while still making a 4k master of the project incase I ever find a need for it. I hear you can rent the move theatre for presentations which might be a cool way to show the bride and her family if they are interested.

Doesn't it cost more than $2200 to rent the cams, pay people, and edit the highlights? Just curious. If I were you I'd charge at least 5x that amount.

Cool can't wait to see the results, especially slow mos! Personally I would be going for the C300 at the moment =)

Doesn't it cost more than $2200 to rent the cams, pay people, and edit the highlights? Just curious. If I were you I'd charge at least 5x that amount.

It would indeed but I'm hiring a DIT who is going to give me a deal, my second shooter works on me on every wedding and he has his set rate, and I own the cameras so I don't need to worry about rent... prices will go up for red camera but this time I'm shooting on RED leaving the DSLR's in the kit and charging DSLR prices in the even that what they end up getting is a DSLR video.

Perhaps Scarlet has improved thermal performance compared to Epic. That would reduce surprises, and everything else is predictable.
It's surprising how well wedding shooters have done with the limitations of DSLR. No reason to think that won't happen with Scarlet.

Exactly why I figured I'd give it a shot. The only reason why I don't think every DSLR shooter shooting weddings won't move over to it at some point is because its probably cost prohibitive for most people when you get down to media, storage, and editing. I bought it more so for corporate jobs and commercial stuff but figured if I had it it would be a waste not to shoot a wedding with it.

Anybody else doing so as well? What are your plans?

I think this is another perfect example how we as wedding filmmakers have the tendency to work for free.
When DSLR came on the wedding industry was the chance to all of us double the price of packages and take advantage of the image quality. It did not happen.
Why? this situation is part of that answer...
In my workshops I always bring the example: "Imagine if you had a lens broken or lost in a wedding that you were just charging just 2k" and please don not get me wrong.... When you start in the industry you need charge cheap to start.. we all did it at some point.. but the idea is to make money and using a RED in a wedding would not make a different on quality for the eyes of the 90% of Brides.
I personally believe using this expensive tool in wedding will increase the chance to loose money.

Good luck and I can not wait to see the footage!! But please even for highlights charge them more if you are using a "better" equipment.

Jose brought up an excellent and very important point. If a bride today is out shopping for a videographer and discovers that Louis charged only $2200 for a Red Epic, Red Scarlet, DSLRs, plus a 3 to 5 man crew for the entire day and night, she has justification to argue with other videographers who are NOT using Red that their price should be a LOT lower than $2200.

After you consider the equipment cost, manpower, and all the hours involved with shooting and editing, there is no way you could even come close to breaking even if you charge only $2200. Think about it. Louis, rather than making gains for the industry, you are actually hurting everyone in it.

Seams wedding video budgets are coming close to that of small indie films haha.. Would love to see it though.

After you consider the equipment cost, manpower, and all the hours involved with shooting and editing, there is no way you could even come close to breaking even if you charge only $2200. Think about it. Louis, rather than making gains for the industry, you are actually hurting everyone in it.

Agreed. Reinforcing perceptions that our time is worth nothing.

Jose brought up an excellent and very important point. If a bride today is out shopping for a videographer and discovers that Louis charged only $2200 for a Red Epic, Red Scarlet, DSLRs, plus a 3 to 5 man crew for the entire day and night, she has justification to argue with other videographers who are NOT using Red that their price should be a LOT lower than $2200.

After you consider the equipment cost, manpower, and all the hours involved with shooting and editing, there is no way you could even come close to breaking even if you charge only $2200. Think about it. Louis, rather than making gains for the industry, you are actually hurting everyone in it.

The way I do it is this. I'm not charging for the camera because they're not getting that camera quality, later down the line I will charge but this is a one time only thing to make sure the camera won't' die in the middle of something important. My second shooter gets $750 a day. My DIT will pull in $250 leaving $1200 remaining in the budget. That gets me working for a little bit more than $100 an hour but then I have to factor in over head. My office is above my Dad's doctors office in a building he owns.. I'm a little bit spoiled in the fact that I don't pay rent because I'm still newish to the industry and I spend all my profits on new gear. I do pay for advertising but even after all my overhead is paid for, the total amount of profit I'm making is still a lot , I know its low, but for the first time where I know I'm going to be experiencing camera problems I think its a justified price point. Future RED weddings are not going to be $2200, but I think $2200 for a 4 minute video is a good deal for both them and me because I get to test this camera, and they get a high quality finished project. Especially when my competition in my area is charging 3500 for a 40-60 minute video.