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RED for Real: Unlocking the Mysterious Mysterium
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by Mike Curtis
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When I 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, offering the ability to shoot RAW footage with a modular, tapeless, flexible, affordable camera.
Less than two years after the company posted its first simple Web page on red.com, RED has shipped its first batch of cameras. Jim Jannard, founder of RED Digital Cinema (and founder/chairman of eyewear and apparel maker Oakley), was kind enough to let me come out to Lake Forest, Calif., in late August for the delivery of the first cameras.
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 up their cameras and get training on them. We got a run-through of the menu system 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 stopgap post tool until REDCINE, the 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 to 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. RED is so modular, it's a bit like an Erector Set in terms of configuration. The basic camera ($17,500) can't do anything--it has no power, no lens, no recording media and no monitoring solutions built into it. This configuration is intentional as it allows the user to tailor the options for their situation and the size of their production.
Shooting with RED
A few days later I met up with Mark Pederson and Aldey Sanchez of Offhollywood Pictures to test their new RED ONEs at the Driver's East stunt driving school in New Jersey. The production kit consisted of the two RED cameras, a Canon 300mm prime and RED's own 18-50mm zoom.
The only recording media for the camera at that time was RED's 8GB CF card, which holds 4.5 minutes of 4K at 24p, or roughly the equivalent of a 400-foot film load. (Red is able to store so much 4K footage in so little space by using its wavelet-based REDCODE RAW codec.) 16GB cards are expected this fall and 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. The $900 RED Drive (two small RAIDed drives in a camera-mountable enclosure), which should be shipping this fall, will allow for two hours of continuous shooting.
The Offhollywood crew treated the day like an HD shoot--metering for exposure and bracketing, then picking a favorite shot by scrubbing footage on a laptop running RED Alert! The crew decided to underexpose to protect the highlights. The reality of RAW shooting hadn't yet set in.
From the sensor forward, you can treat it like a film camera--it uses PL-mount lenses and it has shallow depth of field. 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 are the lens settings: your focus, your iris, your 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 postproduction. "Throw out what you know about shooting HD," Pederson 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 or hue/saturation adjustment on a Photoshop file versus having Adjust Layers for all that stuff. The first way, the way most cameras work, permanently alters the image. RED, on the other hand, uses non-destructive, editable parameters you can adjust at any time. For those who 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 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.
That first day, we didn't use the Exposure Assist, aka 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 colors are in 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 presentation allows you to look at the EVF or 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.
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 window burn for editorial--one quick and dirty version for dailies for speed with window burn and a higher-quality version for online.
Post
At Offhollywood, they were cutting in Final Cut Pro 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 home, I was using the converted ProRes HQ files I'd made. I could have simply color corrected with those, but I chose to go with a higher-end workflow in which I exported an EDL and conformed to the 2K DPX I'd previously 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 and 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 a one-light telecine transfer. In other words, it's how you get your source material (film versus 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 transcode directly to ProRes. My point here is that, while some feared RED would lock them into a specific workflow, there will be many options available.
Love at First Sight
Another thing I really like about RED is that, since it uses 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 tape decks. With RED, 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 frequently, be it to 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 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 enough, big enough and reliable enough for their needs.
Video traditionalists may decry these additional 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 really, or a film replacement, which it's more akin to. But with RED, unlike film, there are no expenses for film stock, developing or telecine. Data archiving is peanuts compared to high-end videotape dubbing, so while it may be more involved, it's far less costly.
In summary, I'm tremendously excited about my 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. I believe this will be a game changer for the kinds of projects I'm interested in working on. Commercial productions, along with narrative and documentary filmmakers, have a tool that's priced for the independent market but delivers results that top-end users (Peter Jackson, Steven Soderbergh, etc.) are praising.
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