Chris Kenny

Well, it does for some people. The Red One is a very different animal from most cameras in its price range, because it's not an ENG camera. Compare it down the line with, say, Panasonic's HPX2000, which might seem like a natural upgrade path for someone looking for a pro counterpart to the prosumer HVX200 (a popular camera for indie filmmaking). The Red One shoots higher frame rates, captures raw sensor data, uses less (and better) compression, has a 35mm-format sensor (shallow DoF, compatibility with cine lenses) and, of course, captures far more resolution. For ENG work, a couple of those are mostly irrelevant, and the rest are active liabilities. For anything that works like narrative feature production, though, these differences make the Red One far and away the better camera. If you mean the Red isn't all that exciting if you're used to shooting on the F23 or D21, to some extent this is true. But I think this actually reveals another point of contention between the do-it-yourself crowd and some folks on this forum. Some folks on this forum do most of their work on high-priced equipment rented with other people's money, and don't really believe there are viable business models for owning equipment unless you're a large rental house, so they don't care about the price of equipment. As a result of this, these folks can't really understand why anyone would get all that excited about Red. Sometimes they end up attributing the excitement to beliefs few people buying the Red One actually hold. (Like "This camera is all I need to make great movies!") OK, I don't think anyone would disagree too much with that. But at the same time, I don't see people regularly advocating that movies which can afford 35mm should be shot on 16mm instead because the audience won't care that much. And it's worth remembering that the Red One isn't actually all that much more expensive than what we could call the rough digital equivalent of 16mm (the 2/3" pro HD video cameras), and is in fact cheaper than many of them. Another thing to consider is that the people who create images care what they look like even if the audience doesn't (unless they're in it entirely for the money, in which case they're probably in the wrong business). If I invested months of my life in shooting a feature and the image I ended up with was a 4:2:2 heavily DCT-compressed possibly non-full-raster less-than 2 megapixel image, I'd always have a few regrets that the quality wasn't higher. If I'd shot on Red, I wouldn't. Now, maybe other people's thresholds are in different places, and they'd have no regrets with MiniDV, or they would have regrets with anything less than IMAX. But I think 35's long reign as the standard format for "real movies" has calibrated many other people's thresholds to around the same level as mine. So, another reason people get excited about the camera is that it's the first reasonably affordable camera that crosses many potential buyers' personal quality thresholds. It's also worth pointing out again, I think, that both RedUser and the Red forum here are explicitly forums about a camera, so the fact that they're full of discussions about camera tech specs rather than locations or actors or scripts doesn't mean the people who post in them don't think locations or actors or scripts are important.

Yes, of course. That's my point. That's precisely why it's so frustrating that the "Red owners won't be able to use their $17.5K camera bodies without another $100K in gear" and the "The cost of the camera and the workflow doesn't matter anyway because making a movie is so expensive" arguments are so persistent in this forum. At virtually every turn, some folks in this forum seem determined to see barriers standing in the way of Red users -- even when, as soon the discussion isn't Red-related, they seem to know better.

You really don't want to model the human eye too closely in this respect. (Or most others, for that matter.) The human eye's point of sharp focus is unbelievably small. It's literally about one degree. You usually don't realize this because your eyes are constantly scanning and your brain is piecing together a coherent image. That doesn't work for an artificial imaging system. Such a small point of focus would create totally unwatchable images. You'd quite literally be looking at shots where, in a medium close-up of a face, one eye might be in sharp focus, with everything else being blurry. So, for starters, viewers are going to have difficulty recognizing your characters.... If you want a more practically sized point of sharp focus that the cinematographer can control, try a Lensbaby. Or create the effect in post.

Right on cue.... Actually, Internet debates are a rather longstanding hobby of mine, and I find that debating things like this helps me think through and clarify my own positions.

Honestly, what I see happening a fair amount of the time here is that the anti-Red faction (or maybe I should just call it the anti-do-it-yourself faction) will make arguments that don't make any sense without certain unspoken assumptions, and then claim such assumptions aren't there when they're pointed out explicitly. Virtually all of the "Red fan boys won't be able to afford a full camera package and post workflow and even if they can they won't actually be able to afford to shoot features" arguments function like this, for instance, with a set of hidden assumptions about how movies have to be made. When those assumptions are pointed out (and are obviously wrong), the argument suddenly shifts. Frankly, the anti-DIY faction here hasn't got anything resembling a coherent argument. Look at this thread, which started off drifting in the direction of something like "Red DIY types won't be able to afford post for Red because a serious post workflow requires X, Y and Z", and then once some reality was injected in terms of what's actually required for Red post, immediately switched to something like "OK, but having access to gear doesn't help because you still need talent". Let's think about this for a moment. The same faction that started off the thread insisting that making a movie required a laundry list of high-end gear ends up a couple of pages later arguing that gear doesn't matter and that it's the other side which believes it does. This isn't the first time we've seen this pattern. The next step, if we hold true to course, is to start calling into question personal credentials. Cue in 3...2...1... Some folks here seem willing to accept any answer to the question "What does it take to make a movie?" as long as that answer isn't "a Red, a fast Mac, some like-minded people, a lot of hard work and a bit of native talent". Trouble is, that's actually a pretty decent answer these days.

You can certainly learn a lot with a DVX100. But you can't get experience with managing the logistics of a shoot involving a heavy camera rig, 35mm glass (and focus pulling), film-style accessories, raw data shooting and workflow, overcranking, etc. And what you can learn about, for instance, color grading or chromakey with a DVX100 is not going to transfer completely to higher-end equipment. More to the point, as I've said quite a few times before, I doubt the Red One is a first camera for many of its customers. The things that can be learned with a DVX100, most people laying out cash for a Red already know. There seems to be a persistent notion on this forum that there are large numbers of people who have never shot anything before buying the Red with dreams of instant success. This notion, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, seems to creep into (and ultimately totally derail) just about every discussion here about where Red fits into the market. OK, yes. These people exist. We've all met them. Are they the same people laying out the cash for pro-level gear, reading and posting extensively on forums to try to learn and share new information, and going out there and doing things all the time to build their skills? Not in my experience. It's almost the exact opposite, in fact. The people who believe that being good is all about what equipment you have access to seem to spend most of their time complaining that they can't afford access to the equipment they need! This is, of course, not at all the same thing as, for instance, taking your Red and going and shooting a short or three. The kind of evaluation you can do at a rental house and the kind that occurs on a real shoot are worlds apart. No, just that there's a vast difference in quality and that photo lenses aren't suitable for "real production", or things to that effect. Yes, but for financial reasons, rather than technical. It would be harder to rent the camera with a Nikon mount. We thought all the slick electronic controls on Birger's EF mount would let us make a pitch that offset concerns clients might have about photo lenses, but we got tired of waiting for Birger to actually ship. We'll probably revisit the whole issue for our own lens collection when the P+S interchangeable mount system becomes available.

That's rather revisionist. Over the last couple of years here I've been told, among other things, that it's impossible to shoot anything worthwhile with photo lenses, that a serious Final Cut editing suite costs $30K+, that color grading can't be done seriously without an expensive control surface, purpose-built room and high-end grading monitor, that a Red package plus post tools costs upwards of $80K, that compression is not "OK", and that the non-technical aspects of filmmaking (cast, locations, etc.) are inherently so expensive that bringing down the cost of the technical aspects doesn't matter at all. The "You won't be able to afford to make proper use of your Red because achieving quality results involves so many other costs" argument is quite common here. As for the notion that a lot of people believe high quality equipment will magically enable them to produce high quality results without having any talent... it's nonsense. What a fair number of people do believe, I think, is that with full-time access to high-quality tools, and an ability to use those tools heavily without much incremental cost (i.e. no film stock or lab processing costs if you shoot two hours of tests with your Red every day), a sufficiently motivated individual can learn to use those tools very effectively. And this is spot on. Someone who owns a Red and has full-time access to it can gain experience much faster than someone who only comes into contact with professional equipment when they can land work on other people's sets and even then probably doesn't come into very close contact.

I'm the one creating the strawman? The issue we're discussing is not whether high-end equipment substitutes for talent, because nobody believes that. The issue is whether self-taught individual filmmakers (or small teams) can develop the skills and acquire the equipment necessary to finish projects at high quality, or whether this is an industry where quality output can only be had if one involves a large number of narrow specialists and has access to extremely expensive equipment.

For some people and some projects, it's exactly the right thing to do. My impression is that a certain contingent in this forum thinks that low-budget indies who do things like this do them because they don't know any better or don't have access to the right specialized talent. For the most part, I think that's not the case. When people wear six different hats on a project, I think they generally know what they're getting into and have some more substantial reason for it.

If a studio has installed tungsten lighting, you might consider tossing a filter on the lens to correct to daylight. A full CTB is going to lose you a couple of stops, though, so this isn't always a plausible option. Red rates the camera at 320 ASA. Opinions vary. To get the cleanest image, you'll probably want to ignore the light meter and expose as high as you can go without unacceptable clipping. There are some nice on-camera tools to check this. In the build 16 beta, the raw display mode + false color exposure gives you enough information to push things right to the edge with reasonable safety. Shoot your own tests, if at all possible. And remember that the real-time video image generated by the camera isn't your final product; the camera records compressed raw sensor data. Pull the files into Redcine and play around with exposure and curves if you want to see what the camera is really capturing.

I think the whole "one man band" this is basically a strawman. There aren't many people trying to single-handedly write a film, direct it, art direct it, photograph it, record sound, edit everything, grade, and maybe distribute the final product all by themselves. The culture clash with the RedUser do-it-yourself crowd is more because certain people here seem be annoyed by the notion that one person or a small production company could shoot, edit and grade entirely using in-house talent and low-cost equipment.

Just to expand a little more on the cheap end of the possibilities... You can trasncode to 1080p 4:2:2 10-bit ProRes HQ. This is pretty hard to tell from uncompressed HD, but can be played back off of a single desktop hard drive and is under 100 GB/hour. Do a one-light grade in Redcine before you transcode, do secondaries and final color tweaking in Color or Colorista. If 1080p for broadcast or Blu-Ray is your maximum quality deliverable (you know, like 99% of projects), you've got a workflow here that works on a laptop. (Well, with an external FW800 hard drive, and an external monitor when for the color-sensitive bits of the workflow.) You can even finish at 4K with reasonably cheap hardware and software, if you're sufficiently determined. You'll need a lot of disk space, but that doesn't have to break the bank these days if you're not interested in real-time performance. Edit ProRes in Final Cut, conform DPX in After Effects. Seriously, people buying this camera, for the most part, know what they're doing. They're not buying a camera for which they can't afford the post process, or dropping $100K on equipment they can't put to good use. I think some folks in this forum have the impression that RedUser is full of clueless people who have no industry experience and are buying the camera because they've always wanted to make movies. Maybe there are a few people like that, but what's much more common is to see working video pros and/or small production companies buying the camera to move up-market and expand the range of services they can offer. (And maybe work on their own feature projects on the side. Hard to avoid the temptation when you've got so much in-house capability.) And as for the old renting vs. buying discussion.... with lower cost equipment buying is usually a better deal with a reasonable amount of use. Because there are fixed costs associated with stocking and renting an item, cheap gear rents for a higher percentage of its purchase price. People who think shootable Red packages will rent for $400 or $500 a day anytime soon are nuts. Sony's EX1 rents for $450/day and it's a $6500 camera. If a minimal shootable Red package stays at ~$1000 a day, buying gets cheaper than renting pretty fast for a reasonably busy small production company.

Anyone who thinks along the same lines as Keith really needs to study the history of desktop publishing, and the evolution of that industry from non-digital, to using expensive custom digital hardware, to using, essentially exclusively, low-cost commodity hardware and software. And along the way, pay close attention to what those changes in technology have done in terms of lowering barriers to entry and changing the way people learn the trade. As for the "one man band" stuff... it might not be so clever to assume one understands other people's business models better than they do.

The hardware/software needed for a Red post workflow can cost anywhere from around $7K up through $100K+. It mostly depends on how patient you are. And there really isn't a "standard" workflow -- you can transcode footage into formats suitable for video-like workflows, or into DPX for DI-style workflows, and there are workflows emerging that totally blur the lines. Discussing Red workflow in the abstract doesn't really get anywhere because of the range of options that exists. Any useful discussion should start with something along the lines of "I'm trying to do X and I have $Y".

Back in the real world, here are some actual CF card benchmarks, using a high-performance FW800 card reader. You see anything there you'd trust to record a variable bit rate data stream that might goe as high as 36 MB/s? I see one card that might be able to do it. It's -- surprise -- the 8 GB Lexar card that Red is rebranding. And even that card doesn't support 4K 16:9 REDCODE 36 recording -- it's not quite fast enough. Neither Lexar nor Sandisk (the #2 performer on that list) have released 16 GB cards with similar performance yet -- the higher density chips are, at the moment, still slower than the fastest lower-density chips they can make. Now, it's true that Red almost certainly isn't having custom chips made. But via packaging (maybe arranging chips into tiny little RAID 0 arrays) or by simply selecting unusually high-performance chips, it seems entirely possible that Red could make custom cards faster than the ones currently on the market.

I haven't had a chance to do tests yet, but I've had my eye on some of the wireless HDMI equipment that's being sold into the home theater market these days. It's pretty cheap, and the quality should be a lot better than what you get with analog SD video transmitters. The issue I'd be a little concerned about is range. Some systems claim around 33 ft., which is a bit on the short side. Others claim 100+, but I wouldn't trust that without testing. (And you probably know this, but just in case... keep in mind the Red has no analog or SD outputs. If you do end up using an analog SD transmitter, you'll have to use a downconverter to get a signal into it.)

It also weighs twice as much, doesn't support frame rates as high in data mode, is lower resolution, and has no on-camera recording, and is somewhat outrageously expensive. I won't say it's not a better option for anyone, but it's clearly not a better option for everyone. And many of the things that make it less practical than the Red for some projects are pretty direct consequences of the fact that it works with uncompressed data. People really need to understand that the world is more complex than "compressed = bad". There are a whole serious of trade-offs involved, and the sweet spot for all of the relevant considerations most often involves some level of compression, with today's technology.

I'm using it to mean pretty much anything other than extremely close viewing for the specific purpose of spotting artifacts. Take a look at this image. I started off with an 8 megapixel DSLR image shot in raw mode (no lossy compression), and converted it to a TIFF via Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS3. The TIFF file was 23 MB. I exported it to a JPEG at a reasonably high quality setting, and ended up with a 2.1 MB file -- about 11:1 compression. The file at that link is a losslessly compressed PNG file showing a 100% crop of the same area of the image from the original TIFF and from the JPEG. Now, I'm quite familiar with what JPEG compression artifacts look like, and I can spot some in the JPEG version of the image... with the image displayed at 100% pixel size on a high-end LCD and my face 12" from the screen. But keep in mind: 1) Redcode is derived from JPEG200, which has less noticeable artifacts than JPEG. 2) I'm looking at a ~100 ppi display. A 4K display at ~100 ppi would be 41" wide -- 12" would be a comically close viewing distance. 3) It's true the images wouldn't look quite as similar if the source image was razor sharp. But bayer sensor images aren't all that sharp at 100%, so that's not relevant to this application. Is a smaller quality difference than the difference between those two images really worth having to wrangle 12x the data? In my view, in almost all cases, the answer is a resounding "no". I'll note that every movie isn't shot on 70mm anamorphic -- despite that making a far larger difference than (well) compressed vs. uncompressed. At some level, you pass the point of diminishing returns. Fully uncompressed video acquisition is well out in diminishing returns territory with the technology available today. BTW, here is a scaled version of the full image, if you're wondering how much detail there was in the whole frame.

What makes compression "OK" is that it's often better than any of the realistic alternatives. If you're going to discard information, a modern compression algorithm does it in a far smarter way than downscaling, or cramming your image into an 8-bit color space, or subsampling chroma. The Red preserves a larger amount of significant image data by recording wavelet compressed 4K bayer sensor data than it would downscaling to 1080p in-camera and recording an uncompressed 1080p RGB image -- and still manages to keep its data rates significantly below what uncompressed 1080p would require. Of course, you would get a slightly better image if you recorded uncompressed 4K bayer data. But instead of recording to a $200 card a bit larger than a postage stamp, you'd have to record to a $20,000 RAID the size of a mini-fridge. Is that really a tradeoff you'd make on-set, for an image that would be indistinguishable under normal viewing conditions?

Not much is moving. And with secure connections, there's not much reason mechanical vibration should impact electronic sound recording anyway. What's happening is that inside the same enclosure, and connected to the same power supply, are about 70 watts worth of high-performance digital electronics, generating electrical noise that can easily work its way into the analog audio signal before it gets digitized.

The phantom power isn't great (or at least it wasn't the last time we tried it, a couple of firmware builds ago), and there's no built-in limiting, but with an external field mixer to address those problems (one of these, say), we've found it's perfectly fine for dialog recording. I have no trouble believing it falls short of the Sound Devices recorders, but I suspect that's true of virtually all on-camera audio recording. It's just really hard to keep your audio totally clean inside a device which has so much else going on, electrically. I do wish Red had put some sort of digital audio input on the camera, so you could digitize audio using some nice external device with its own power supply, but still get the workflow benefits of single-system sound. (This should be theoretically possible to do with the current hardware though the USB port, with an appropriate firmware update, but I'm not aware of any plans to Red's part on do this.)

I'm not even so sure of this. Remember, Bayer-pattern sensors don't actually sacrifice chroma resolution for luma resolution, relative to striped RGB sensors. They actually sacrifice blue and red channel resolution for green channel resolution (which happens to effectively increase luma resolution because the eye is more sensitive to green). If we return to our hypothetical 8MP single-sensor camera, if that sensor is RGB striped, it has 2.67M photosites for each color. If it's Bayer-pattern, it has 4M green photosites, and 2M each for blue and red. This doesn't seem like it would be a disaster for chromakey, as long as you're using a greenscreen rather than bluescreen anyway. Maybe I'm missing something, but, what you really care about with greenscreen is whether something is green or not-green, right? So what should matter is not the fact that red and blue only get 2M photosites each, but the fact that there are 4M green photosites and 4M not-green photosites. Couldn't this actually work better for greenscreen than having 2.67M green photosites and 5.33M not-green photosites? Most people seem to say (and my own experience seems to confirm) that in practice Red footage keys rather well. I haven't done side-by-side testing with a striped RGB camera like the Genesis, though, nor have I run across any examples of such testing. (And the Genesis has a higher photosite count anyway, so even if it did do better that wouldn't really settle the debate over which color filter arrangement gets the best results for a given number of photosites.) (Mind you, the discussion in this post is specifically about striped RGB vs. Bayer. With three chip cameras, another variable enters the equation, because they provide much better color separation than any type of single sensor camera.)

I think it has been a problem, and we're starting to see it get solved now. If you look at Red's situation, for instance, RGB recording and live 1080p output, both once planned features for the Red One, haven't materialized. But these are now planned features for the cameras Red will introduce next year. This all strongly implies that the electronics in the Red One are right on the cusp of being able to handle this (Red considered it possible for a long time), but aren't quite there, and the electronics improvements in next year's cameras will take them over the top. (Of course, in terms of bringing sufficient computational resources to bear on the problem, it probably also helps that one of next year's cameras is only 3K, while the other costs twice as much as the Red One.) And sure, you've got low-end bayer cameras like the HV20... but there you're looking at many fewer photosites than a DSLR or Red sensor, and I would guess the debayer algorithm is simpler than what Red or DSLR engineers would consider ideal for professional products. You'd expect that to become possible rather sooner.

Calling bayer 4:2:0 is comparing apples to oranges. Let's say you have 8M photosites to work with for a 16:9 single-sensor camera. If you arrange these in a vertical RGB stripe pattern, you end up with a sensor with 6528x1224 photosites. The theoretical maximum resolution you can get out of this camera is 2176x1224 pixels. In reality, of course, it will be lower. The good news is, you will get that on each color channel. In other words, you've got a 4:4:4 camera Pretty impressive. But now let's take those same 8M photosites and arrange them in a bayer pattern. You end up with sensor with 3771x2115 photosites. Exactly what useful resolution you end up with after processing the image depends on a lot of factors and can be argued over endlessly, but pointing bayer cameras at resolution test charts has confirmed repeatedly that bayer sensors, even after taking into account low-pass filtering and all the rest of it, have luma resolution upwards of 70% of their photosite count in each direction. In other words, this hypothetical bayer camera should resolve better than 2640x1480. Chroma resolution will, of course, be lower than luma resolution, meaning you don't have a 4:4:4 camera, however. But think this through. The bayer camera isn't 4:4:4, but this is at least in part not because it provides lower chroma resolution, but rather because it provides higher luma resolution, and the 4:x:x notation simply defines one relative to the other! Given that humans are far more sensitive to luma resolution than chroma resolution, it's very difficult to avoid the conclusion that for a given number of photosites, for general purpose imaging, a bayer pattern provides the best image. Of course, you don't get anything for free. The big catch with bayer is that extracting a useful image from the sensor data requires far more processing. And this is probably the primary reason why you've seen bayer adopted almost universally for photo cameras, but many vendors seem to avoid it for motion picture acquisition. A professional still photographer might shoot a couple of thousand images in a day. A motion picture camera rolling at 24 frames/second shoots that many in a minute and a half. Running every one of those images through a sophisticated debayer algorithm requires vast computational resources. Processing gets faster every year, though, and file-based acquisition means you don't have to process sensor data at full quality in real-time on-camera anymore. I expect that as a result of these trends, bayer-pattern sensors will become more common in large-format motion picture cameras over time.

Most of Red's accessories are fine. The bottom plate, shoulder dovetail, and right and left handles are rather iffy, and you're much better off with Element Technica stuff. (But you'll probably end up owning most of the iffy Red accessories anyway, because they come with the Base Production Pack, the other components of which are useful, and cost more than the entire Production Pack if purchased individually.)