RED

Cinescopophilia writes: Curt Pair and Band Pro recently caught up with Red co-founder Ted Schilowitz and he shared some insight into the latest offerings from Red Digital Cinema at NAB 2013.

Red Digital Cinema are leaders in the production world. They started their career at NAB, some seven years ago in a little tent. Many laughed at their “dream” of making a 4K camera. Once a reality, no one laughed anymore! Instead, the biggest projects in Hollywood fell in line, and they started shooting some of the largest projects in the business on Red cameras. It’s only apropos that Red Digital Cinema take the lead once again, this time with the release of their Dragon 6K sensor, at NAB 2013.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

RED writes: Video compression is commonly thought of as being unique to digital, but it’s also been around since the early days of analog. Compression has just become more sophisticated since then. In this article, we will take a look back at one early strategy in particular: 4:2:2, 4:1:1 and 4:2:0 chroma subsampling.

STRATEGY

Vision specialists have long known that our eyes are much less sensitive to color resolution than we are to brightness resolution.

Watch RED's showreel from NAB featuring beautiful shots from films like The Great Gatsby, 42, The Hobbit, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Oz the Great and Powerful and more.

Watch below. (via Cinescopophilia)

RED has released the Spring 2013 version of their RED Camera Survival Guide, available for free download now. The guide spotlights all of RED's products and different configurations as well as providing an intro for still photographers looking to make the transition into film.

Download it here.

Watch Digital Journal on the NAB floor as they talk to RED's Ted Schilowitz who showcases the manufacturing line that they brought with them to NAB last week.

Says Schilowitz, "The only company that RED can beat with technology is ourselves because we're already at the highest end of the industry. So what we're doing now is going from 5K to 6K and we're completely in that leadership position."

Watch below.

RED Digital Cinema introduces the 6K sensor RED DRAGON, the REDlink family of wireless products and the RED ROCKET-X at NAB this week.

RED writes: Most are familiar with how ISO controls a camera’s sensitivity to light and susceptibility to film grain. However, ISO has other consequences with digital, and its implementation often varies. This article explores how ISO is evolving and influencing camera technique in the digital era.

BACKGROUND

With film, one had to select and load a specific magazine in advance, so the ISO speed had to remain constant. If the exposure needed tweaking afterwards, the film could be “pushed” or “pulled” during development. However, doing so was only practical within a limited range of effective sensitivities—otherwise colors, contrast, grain and other qualities would suffer.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

Sam Mestman of MovieMaker writes up his RED and Final Cut Pro X workflow, writing, "How fast is this workflow? Well, what used to take an assistant and me, working around the clock in shifts during the full shoot and probably an extra week or two using Final Cut 7, can now be done by just one person in FCPX, in less time. On the most recent film I worked on using this workflow, I was able to get an assembly edit of the entire film done within two days of the film wrapping, and I didn’t even have to drive myself crazy doing it. How? Simple: The metadata-based project prep in FCP X and R3D proxy workflow. Not only that, but for you RED fans out there, I’m going to let you in on some hidden tricks in FCP X.

RED has posted uncompressed 6K images from their prototype Dragon sensor along with some words from Jim Jannard:

"I have tremendous guilt because we are late. That is the main reason for going silent. Having said that… we are finally about to unleashed a bevy of stuff to blow away everyone’s expectations.

Everything gets better, including color science. OLPF gets better. Color gets better. Resolution is up. Dynamic range is off the chart. Obsolescence obsolete. RED. And we still have no idea what we are doing…. just wait until we figure it out."

See the images here. (via Cinescopophilia)

RED has posted a tutorial on black shading and how and when to use it. They write, "Black shading maximizes image quality by ensuring that pixel sensitivity remains consistent throughout an image. The technique has been used for a variety of high-end applications in digital capture over the years."

Read their full post here.

A new sample image from RED's upcoming Dragon sensor shows that the revolutionary sensor is capable of poducing 20 stops of dynamic range. Explains Filmmaker Magazine, "Jim Jannard said that they see 18+ stops, and that the sensor would have about four stops more dynamic range than Red’s current Mysterium-X sensor with less than half the noise...with this development they say that sensors now surpass the dynamic range of film."

The upgrade price of the sensor, originally quoted at about $6000, is now expected to go up. RED Scarlet will also not be able to upgrade to Dragon. See the sample image and read more here.

Director Peter Jackson talks to Forbes about his longstanding friendship with RED founder Jim Jannard and how it played into the making of The Hobbit. He says, "As we were developing the film, we were telling him the sort of things that we needed for the film. It was really amazing how Jim turned his technicians on to helping us with the problems that we wanted to solve. And they all got built into the [RED Epic] camera...We kept asking him for higher and higher frame rates, because even though we were shooting at 48 frames, we still wanted to shoot slow motion. Which meant that we needed to go up to 120, 150 frames a second. And so we kept pushing him. I know that when we started shooting The Hobbit the cameras were capable of going to about 60 frames, then to 96, and then about three or four months into The Hobbit, they got up to 120. And now I think they’re 150 now.

RED explains monochrome vs. color sensors, writing, "Monochrome camera sensors are capable of higher detail and sensitivity than would otherwise be possible with color. However, to understand why requires a closer look at sensor technology."

Read the full explanation here.

Jim Jannard doesn't mince words with his claims that RED's upcoming Dragon sensor will outshine film in every respect. He writes,

"OK. This is the final frontier.

The RED Dragon sensor needs to be directly compared to 65mm film.

The Dragon has more resolution than 65mm film when scanned at 4K.

The Dragon has more dynamic range than film... by a lot. 65mm film has about 14.5 stops. The Dragon has an easy 16 stops... without sweating.

The EPIC Dragon will shoot nearly 100fps. 65mm film cameras... not so much.

Cost to shoot the RED Dragon vs. 65mm film... ridiculously not close.

Dragon should never be compared to 35mm film. It should only be spoken in reference to 65mm film from here on out.

So you own an EPIC? You upgrade.

Have a nice day....

Jim"

RED explains how a Bayer array sensor works which might help you in your creative approach to using your camera (Bayer sensors are how most cameras acquire their image).

They write, "Digital sensors capture images using arrays of light-gathering wells or 'photosites.' When the exposure starts, these are uncovered to collect photons of light; then, when the exposure ends, these are read as an electrical signal, quantified and stored as values in a digital file. To assess color, photosites typically also use filters to ensure that only one color is stored at a time. What makes Bayer sensors unique is how these color filters are arranged."

Read the full post here.

Apple has published an updated white paper on RED workflows with Final Cut Pro X. The new edition takes into account version 10.0.6's native ingestion features for RED files as well as providing tips for working with multiple frame sizes and more.

Download the white paper here.

DIT Brandon Lippard speaks to FXGuide about his one-man setup to deliver rushes, syncing and dailies on the set of Hitchcock. He explains, "On a typical day on Hitchcock, I would sit down at the monitors with [DP] Jeff [Cronenweth] and talk over the look of that particular scene. Nine times out of ten I would be applying a look similar to what he was viewing. Typically, I was just giving the shots a little more 'pop' before passing them off to editorial. The technology also played a role with viewing multiple looks, at times, to see what was possible. Case in point: we were shooting a shot from the last scene of the movie at a beautiful Bel Air home. Initially, Sacha, the director, had imagined shooting this on bright and sunny LA day. Unfortunately, we were stuck with slightly rainy overcast weather. Sacha came over to me to see how far we could 'push' the look towards what he had imagined.

RED has two big announcement that could have major implications for 4K television. First, it has made its 4K Redray Player available for pre-order. The $1450 media server has a 1TB hard drive that plays 4K video that has been encoded to RED's new propietary format.

Secondly, RED has launched Odemax, a 4K distribution network that uses the cloud to deliver content to both homes and theaters (and takes a cut of the profits).

Read more here on The Verge.

RED has announced the finalists for the Shot on RED Film Festival, taking place on December 4-5th, now at the Downtown Independence Theater, 251 South Main Street, Los Angeles.

They are:

The Shot on RED Film Festival will be a showcase of short and feature length independent projects shot on RED cameras and will be taking place on December 4th and 5th, 2012.

The December 4th program will feature 20 short films while the December 5th program will screen feature films and documentaries all selected by RED and industry leaders. The festival will take place at RED Studios Hollywood.

Register for this free event here.

RED gives some practical tips as to how to obtain flicker-free video. They write, "Flickering in video and film is a common problem resulting from certain frame rate and shutter speed combinations under artificial lighting. This article gives an overview of why this happens, along with recommending settings for minimizing the chances of this happening in the first place."

Read it here.

RED is offering a 3-day REDucation class taught by Ted Schilowitz and Michael Cioni in addition to a 2-day extension course of your choosing: RED Post Production; Shoot, Post, Present; or Wedding Stills + Motion.

The 3-day class is taking place Monday, December 3rd through Wednesday, December 5th and the extension courses are taking place Thursday, December 6th through Friday, December 7th. Each class runs from 9 AM to 6 PM and is designed for professionals.

Michael Sutton of Wide Open Camera weighs in on all the big camera news to emerge last week. He writes, "So it was a big week for all us gear heads.  Sony announced new cameras and a recorder, Red slashed prices and Canon started to trickle ship C500 EF cameras. One thing that all three companies offer is 4K but only two offer 4K video outputs. I mention this because I think its very important. Codecs get better and workflows become more efficient. Things change down the line as technology progresses. 4K resolution is great but most cannot even view it.