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First Look: Red One
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By Mike Curtis, November 14, 2007
When I first heard about the Red One project in 2005, I was tremendously excited about the possibility. Here was a camera that was doing everything I’d been writing about and hoped someone would do, and more—the ability to shoot raw footage on a modular, tapeless, flexible, affordable camera.
Less than two years after the company posted its first simple Web page on red.com, Red Digital Cinema has shipped its first batch of cameras. Jim Jannard, founder of Red (and founder/chairman of eyewear and apparel maker Oakley, Inc.), was kind enough to let me come out to Lake Forest, Calif., in late August for the camera developer’s first day as a retail company with shipping product.
DAY ZERO
Most of the customers for the first batch of cameras (serial numbers 1-25) flew out to Red’s offices in Orange County to pick them up in person and get training. (All of the customers present had ponied up $1,000 to pre-order their cameras on the first day that Red went public with its plans, at the 2006 NAB confab.)
Everyone knew this day was something special. Jannard came out and talked about how the Red One was the camera he’d always wanted for himself. (He’s a camera nut—his personal collection numbers over 1,000 models, which he used to shoot Oakley’s ads for two decades.)
Usually, Jannard remarked, you buy a camera, learn its features and limitations, and the newness wears off. When another camera comes out with slightly better features, the old one goes on eBay or into the closet, and you buy an entirely new piece of hardware. Jannard said he wanted to overcome that with Red—to make his camera flexible and upgradeable. Accordingly, Red sends customers an e-mail every few weeks with a firmware update that enables new features or improves existing ones. (I saw three such e-mails through press time in early October.)
Jannard was very clear that the camera was not feature-complete on Day Zero. Indeed, the Red One may never be “done”—by design, it’s intended to be in constant evolution.
We got a run-through of the menu system of the camera from Red’s workflow wizard, Stuart English. We shot some sample footage of ourselves with Jarred Land, recording 4K onto a high-speed Compact Flash (CF) card. Then we received a workflow and processing run-through from Lucas Wilson of Assimilate, who demonstrated Red Alert! (the stop-gap post tool until Redcine, their more fully featured application, ships) as well as Red’s integration with Scratch, Assimilate’s color-grading solution that supports Red’s native Raw format directly.
At the end of the day, we were led back to get what we’d come for—the very first Red Ones, all boxed up and ready to go. But, before that, customers needed to finalize their accessory decisions, which took a while. Red is so modular, it’s a bit like an Erector Set in terms of different ways to make a camera configured the way you want it. The basic camera ($17,500) can’t do anything—it has no power, lens, recording media or monitoring solutions built into it. This was on purpose, so that all of those options could be tailored for the user’s situation and the size of the production.
OFF TO NEW YORK
The next morning, I met up with Mark Pederson and Aldey Sanchez of New York City-based Offhollywood Pictures, as they took serial numbers 6 and 7 home to become the first Red Ones on the East Coast.
We flew out of Long Beach at 7 a.m., landed in NYC at 3 p.m. and were picked up and driven directly to a location. Yes, less than 24 hours after seeing their cameras for the first time in California, Mark and Aldey were shooting in New York.
The only option for recording media that first day was Red’s 8GB CF card. That’s 4 1/2 minutes of 4K at 24p—roughly the equivalent of a 400-foot film load. (Red is able to get so much 4K footage into so little space by using its wavelet-based Redcode Raw codec.) Sixteen-gigabyte cards are expected in October, 32GB early next year.
We only had two cards per camera, but with the right gear we were able to offload faster than real time—so it wasn’t a problem, even when shooting full cards and swapping out for time-lapse shots. The $900 Red Drive (two small RAIDed drives in a camera-mountable enclosure), which should be shipping by the time you read this, will allow for two hours of continuous shooting.
This was all practice for the next morning, when we drove to New Jersey to the Driver’s East stunt driving school. By 10 a.m., Offhollywood was rolling footage in broad daylight, with the two cameras, a Canon 300mm prime and Red’s own 18-50 T 2.8 CF zoom.
SHOOTING WITH RED
The Offhollywood crew went carefully about their day—metering for exposure and bracketing, then picking a favorite shot by scrubbing footage on a laptop running Red Alert!. The whole shoot was so run-and-gun they couldn’t baby-sit each shot, but they did get over an hour of footage in five hours of shooting.
The crew decided to underexpose to protect the highlights. The reality of Raw shooting hadn’t set in yet. When describing the look of Red, I had repeatedly heard high-level industry folks say variations of “It isn’t film, it isn’t HD—it’s something else.” As it turns out, shooting Red is like that too.
From the sensor forward, you can treat the Red One like a film camera—it uses PL mount lenses, it has shallow depth of field, and hence it benefits from the presence of a focus puller. The sensor should be treated like a high-resolution DSLR shooting Raw at high frame rates.
The only things that matter when shooting in the field is the stuff on the lens—your focus, iris, composition. Everything else that you’d set on a traditional video camera? It literally doesn’t matter in terms of the image quality you’ll have in post.
“Throw out what you know about shooting HD,” Mark said when the day was done. Red is its own animal, not quite like anything else out there that I’ve shot on or posted with. While you can set ISO, white balance, gamma, saturation, etc. in camera on set or location... it doesn’t really matter. All of those things can be changed in post.
Unlike posting footage from other cameras, where you are destructively editing already-baked-in decisions, with Red, you are making adjustments to the source Raw material. The best way I can describe it is the difference between making a Levels, Curves and/or Hue/Saturation adjustment on a Photoshop file, versus having Adjust Layers for all that stuff. The first way, the way most cameras follow, permanently alters the image. Red’s way is to have non-destructive, editable parameters you can adjust at any time. For those that have worked with Raw images from a DSLR, it’s exactly that kind of image manipulability, but with some high quality compression thrown into the mix. (This also implies that many of the tasks a traditional DIT would do on set aren’t required.)
Reviewing the first day’s worth of Red footage back at Offhollywood, we realized that we’d been overly cautious—shots that were clipping whites at ISO 320 might be fine at ISO 250 or 160
. We learned to keep testing.
Throughout the week, it was a back and forth process. I’d hang out and occasionally advise as Offhollywood shot; we’d post it converting with Red Alert!, then I would discuss best practices for future shoots with Pliny Eremic, Offhollywood’s director of operations.
That first day, we didn’t use the Exposure Assist, a/k/a false color (or “Predator Vision,” as I later dubbed it). When activated, this tool shows up on the EVF or LCD. It converts the monitored image to black and white, then overlays a color to indicate exposure levels. Darker areas are in a range of cooler colors (dark to light shades of blue), and brightly exposed areas are shown with hotter tones (yellow, orange and red). Darkest blue indicates underexposed areas, and red indicates clipped whites. This allows you to look at the EVF of LCD and not worry about whether the display is accurately representing the difficult extremes—you just watch out for red clipping areas and iris accordingly.
By the time we were doing camera tests for a New York director (which turned into a sync test for one of the major movie studios), we were wedded to that false color for exposure, and wishing it was already one of the pre-defined assignable hot buttons on the side of the camera.
Later in the week, Offhollywood was invited to a big-budget 35mm cosmetics production to shoot some Red footage side by side with 35mm film: the ultimate test. By a quirk of who was there doing what that day, I ended up operating the Red, alongside a fully rigged ARRI 435 35mm setup. False color made it easy for me to properly expose, and the focus assist (a button on the side of the camera zooms in previews 200 percent) helped me nail focus with a very shallow depth of field. Considering that I’m a post guy and had never operated camera on a serious, “for real” set, this was comical—but it served as an excellent example of how easy Red has made it to shoot good images with the camera.
We were able to connect to a Cine-tal display via HD-SDI for on-set monitoring, and in other tests connected to a DVI monitor via HDMI for a lower-cost solution—I like the flexibility of options to handle whatever budget level is appropriate for the day.
While crew set up another shot, I walked a CF card over to Offhollywood’s table, where Mark put it into his laptop, scrubbed through the footage in Red Alert!, found a good frame and extracted a 4K still. He opened it up in Photoshop, asked me to tweak it, and I spent maybe 30 seconds color correcting it. Then I called the director of this $300,000 shoot over to look at the still on my 30-inch Cinema Display we’d brought along. The director stared at the image intently for about 3 seconds, smiled, and said, “I want THAT.” Later he pointed at the Red next to the ARRI 435 and teased the 20-year veteran film DP that this is what he’d be shooting his next commercial on.
After each shoot, we brought the footage back to Offhollywood’s post facility and worked on smoothing out the early kinks in the workflow. At the time of first delivery, only 2:1 was working, not 16:9, so I made some custom converters to scale and letterbox to 16:9 with windowburn for editorial—one quick-and-dirty for dailies for speed with windowburn, another higher-quality for online.
POST
At Offhollywood, they were cutting in Final Cut with 1K proxies and EDL conforming into Scratch, Assimilate’s color-grading tool that can read the 4K Redcode Raw native files, and access all the dynamic range the Raw contains.
When I got back to Austin, I was using the converted ProRes HQ files I’d made, and could have simply color corrected with those, but I chose to go with a higher-end workflow. I exported an EDL and conformed to the 2K DPX I’d made in New York.
Once Redcine ships and is freely available to all, anyone will be able to convert Redcode Raw to any “normal” codec they have installed on their Windows XP or Intel Mac system. That includes DNxHD, DV, ProRes, DVCPRO HD, uncompressed—whatever works for your needs. Still image format support will include Linear, Rec 709, or log gammas as well, so if you need TIFF, OpenEXR, Photoshop or DPX sequences for your higher-end workflows, you’ll be covered. And, of course, you’ll be able to crop/scale/rotate/reposition as needed in Redcine—named such to make it clear that this is the equivalent of your one light telecine transfer. In other words, it’s how you get your source material (film vs. Redcode Raw) to a more usable format.
Red and Apple have promised us full native Redcode Raw support in Final Cut Pro, meaning you’ll be able to directly ingest and edit native files with real-time effects, and be able to transcode directly to ProRes as well.
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
Another thing I like about Red is that since it is a tapeless workflow, there is no deck, not even a pricey ingest device. Most other high-quality cameras record to high-end tape formats, requiring high-end decks. Instead of a $100,000 HDCAM SR deck, you use a sub-$100 CF card reader to get the footage into your NLE or VFX system. In terms of media management, the Red system works like Panasonic’s P2: its small, solid-state cards have to be offloaded to somewhere, be it a laptop or laptop-attached drive. Once the Red Drive ships, you’ll be able to record up to two hours of nonstop 4K, but, again, you’ll have to manage the data.
Also like the P2, it’s up to you to archive your source footage data, since the recording media is too expensive to put on a shelf for most jobs. Depending on the budget and criticality of the footage, anything from DVD-Rs (an 8GB card fits onto a dual-layer DVD) to hard drives on a shelf or data tape cartridges will be used by Red customers. I’ll be helping my clients figure out what is fast, big and reliable enough for their own needs.
Video traditionalists may decry these workflow steps and archival overhead, but, compared to film, this is cake. Part of this depends on whether you consider Red to be a video camera, which it isn’t, or a film replacement, which it’s more akin to. But, with Red, there’s no expense for stock, developing or telecine. Data archiving is peanuts as compared to high-end videotape dubbing, so while it may be more involved, it’s less costly.
In summary, I’m excited about Red and my first few weeks with it. Jim Jannard and company have delivered on the kind of camera I’ve been hoping to see for years, utilizing all the latest technology at a price point that blows the competition out of the water. Better yet, you don’t have to have expensive, heavy iron to do post with it. Commercial productions, along with narrative and documentary filmmakers, now have a new tool that’s priced for the indie market, but delivers results that top-end users (including Peter Jackson and Steven Soderbergh) are praising.
Mike Curtis runs HD for Indies (www.hdforindies.com), a website and consultancy specializing in HD, 2K and 4K workflows.
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