Red One Hit or Myth

Author: Dennis Lennie

Published 1st April 2009


So – after having arrived a year ago to these shores the Red is starting to settle into everyday living here in the UK.
Possibly being American and designed by an iconic trendy sunglasses designer, we shouldn’t be surprised by its many foibles.
The Red started life in the UK as whispered conversations about a piece of equipment being developed that would give 4k resolution ! – How exciting.
Then came images of this new and bizarre camera body that looked like a reworking of a Cybermen’s helmet.
Then was the offer of depositing $1000.00 to aid the development and research and stake a claim on your camera serial number. Worrying. Was this going to be the biggest scam since pyramid selling or an event to equal the second coming ?
Well the answer to that question depends on who you talk to. If the red does nothing else it is a major talking point in the industry right now.
So why the fuss ?
The Red One is the first high-end camera with a low-end price tag. Owners can have a 4k resolution camera that gives great results whilst using 35mm lenses and an easy integration into edit systems.
There is a huge bubble surrounding everything Red at present – so we went to Red to get our Tech guys up to speed. We figured it was worth a couple of hundred quid on an air ticket to get some straight answers.
The Red camera itself is a fairly simple piece of equipment from the operators view point : There are only 3 menu buttons that lead to the varying functions. All those functions are fairly easy to use and understand. So nothing too shocking or surprising there.
The theory behind the camera is not that difficult either a 4k sensor that will record RAW images like a stills camera would, but obviously for continued periods therefore giving very high quality moving images.
The work flow is a little new to us and there are many schools of thought on how it should be done properly. Thankfully Red themselves are to be found all over YouTube and various other sites, where they have posted small nuggets of information on how to download footage and how to deal with in various editing situations.
The recording media is either Compact Flash cards (it seems at present that only Red Branded cards seem to work ???) or Red have released Red Drives which have 320GB of memory or Red Raid memory (which I believe is not available yet).
The memory of choice appears to be the Red Drives which hold approx 4hrs of footage .
These then connect to the laptop edit station and download in a matter of minutes to be viewed and coloured corrected as required.
What’s exciting or worrying at this point in the process is the fact that :
a) If your DOP has done sterling work and light a scene beautifully – it can be destroyed in seconds as you can manipulate the footage and play with the RAW files to your hearts content.
b) If you have a DOP that hasn’t performed as you would have liked you can again play with the rushes to your hearts content. Could be a blessing or a curse depending on where you stand.
What is definite is that the Red One and it’s follow on successors will take us back a step to an era gone by – whereby a proper technical team is required on set:
Your DOP, to head up the camera department and light the project. Possibly a separate camera operator to handle the Red.
A Focus puller.
A DIT (Digital Interface Technician or Data Wrangler as I prefer !) to be the digital clapper loader
A Sound Recordist to either record separate sound or the Red will take 4 channels of sound into the hard media. A note here would be that when you power down the camera and change battery all audio settings are lost (eg phantom powering options and mic / line decisions) – Could catch you out if not aware !
A Grip.
A Spark.
Money may not allow for all this but the red kind of deserves it, and seems to be commanding it on higher end projects.
The other area of hire for the Red is the young Film Maker, who has the money. There is a huge market place for smaller features to shoot on the Red and we are seeing a lot of work come from this market place.
So in answer; is the Red a saviour or a charlatan ?
You will have to decide yourself.
We at KRM like it and are shooting a lot of projects with it. It is not without its problems and we have had 2 visits to Red to deal with issues and get our DIT’s trained.
Our advice: talk to everyone and get lots of info.
The Red is the biggest thing to hit our shores in a long time and is generating plenty of feed back – check out the Red User Forums at Reduser.net
Lets see what happens when the Scarlet and Epic cameras hit our shores and of course the Red 3D imaging cameras !!!!

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