New Video Camera [The Red camera]

[tonyvdb]

Have any of you seen or for that matter used the new Red Camera?
Looks to be very promising as it uses flash memory and has a much higher resolution than other pro video cameras. It is apparently said to be the next step for film making.

Thoughts?

[tweeksound]

It looks pretty impressive.
Some big names are giving it great reviews.

Shooting with RED is like hearing The Beatles for the first time. RED sees the way I see. Someday I hope to find out exactly how Jim and his team made something so technologically advanced seem so organic, so beautifully attuned to that most natural of phenomena, light. But for now I'm just glad I've got my hands on the **** thing, because it's actually making the film(s) better because of it emotionality. At the same time, I am still figuring it out, still trying to discover its secrets, still interacting with it. For me, this is Year Zero; I feel I should call up Film on the phone and say, "I've met someone." Is it perfect? Not yet. But the flaws are fixable (the heat issue, which is being worked on; buttons that should be recessed; power cable from the rear of the camera), and anybody who doesn’t embrace the flashcard--regardless of time restraints--is an idiot.

But the best news of all is: If my lame hyperbole could adequately describe the image, it wouldn’t be RED." Steven Soderbergh

- Academy Award winning
Director, Steven Soderbergh
Director and Cinematographer of Ocean's Eleven, Traffic and Solaris

I have not used one but I did the location audio for a trailer last summer for a new movie that's seeking funding. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dVQKtgsMng )

The film maker plans to use a Red One on teh feature. I'm hoping he'll have me back for the shooting of the feature.

I did not do the mix and master of the audio so don't hold that against me ;0)

[Basspig]

Dunno about the hype behind this. Sure it's a nice camera, but it's a single CMOS imager, so it's real resolution is not much better than 2K and the images look soft. Adam Wilt ran a test of the RED One, Sony F23 and Sony EX1 cameras, side by side. The F23 looked the nicest, with lots more dynamic range and much more detail, the EX1 looked so close as to be negligable. The Red just looked soft to me. Only nice thing was the 35mm depth of field.

The BBC ran an interesting test of Arriflex 35mm with Kodak 500 film, the Genesis Viper, Sony F900, Sony EX3 and a dozen other cameras costing up to around half a million dollars. I still liked what I saw from the EX3, regardless of price. The Sonys look the most realistic to my eyes.

I got to see EX1 footate on a 110" projection screen last week. It was almost like looking out of doors (which says much for my friend's projection system too). I was expecting it to look soft on that large a screen, but no, it simply made the footage more lifelike and immersive. This footage was playing from a Blu-ray disc that I authored myself. I have compared it to my growing collection of Blu-ray discs and the EX1 footage is consistently more detailed, much less grainy (actually no visible grain or noise at all) and has color that really pops when something in the frame is brightly colored, like a parade float. I could spent two hundred grand more for an F23 and not make a substantial gain in picture quality. Shooting an EX1 and recording off the uncompressed HD SDI stream should be even better, but shooting with detail enh off on to SxS and sharpening in post really produces unbeatable pictures. There's no color like 3-chip cameras produce. I'm just not all that excited about the Red. And then there's the cumbersome workflow. It's a slow and demanding process.