When I was doing prep-work as 1st AC on “Red Herring,” shot on the RED ONE, I went ahead and created Red specific camera reports. The document was created out of a variety of different types of camera reports I had seen. Many of them were either for film or for video, but neither tailored to the specific settings of the Red One. The result was a template that enabled easy marking of traditional notes (lens, f-stop, etc.) as well as Red-specific meta-data.
While I haven’t used these specific reports as a 2nd yet, I did find them useful when needing to specify to my 2nd to write something in the report without him having to clog up the “notes” section. Take a look at the image below:
There is the header section which has Date, Shoot Day, Page notation, Production, Camera designation (A, B, C…), Director of Photography, 1st AC and 2nd AC.
We didn’t have a DIT or designated data loader on this production so I did not add a section for their name, however, this may be something that you would want to alter. The reasoning behind my listing the entire camera department was to assure that anybody reading the reports could attribute the rank of responsibility appropriately.
I have also found that page notation is extremely helpful especially if the camera reports are not kept in a tiny book, as they commonly are, and allow the loose transport of the documents without loosing their order. It makes it much easier to keep only a few sheets in a slateboard and the rest safely off-set or with an editor.
For the columns, most of the information is standard and doesn’t need explanation. The one clarification I would give is under Mag. Of course the Red is digital so it doesn’t have true magazines, but it does have CF cards, Red drives or Red Rams. On this production, and every other Red production I’ve worked on, the media is labeled by numbers or letters. This I would denote as the mag. An example would be to note under the mag column “CF2” or “CF-A” or “Drive A.” This designation is extremely useful should a card fail, get lost or become corrupt. It can quickly and efficiently inform what footage was damaged, lost, needs to be reshot and whatnot.
My last note would be in reference to the settings that follow after the notes section. What I had my 2nd do was on each day mark only the first row of the first page with the standard settings we were using. If there was any change in them, say we shot one take at 48 fps or changed shutter angles, then I would have him denote that.
The reports are each a half page making them easy to be cut or folded into a slate board.
I have included two files, a Excel version and a PDF version. Both are under 1 MB. Feel free to take this in Excel and customize it, or write the names in to save that hassle everyday. Hope this helps some of you, let me know in the comments any improvements you can think of.
