Behind The Lens
Digital cinema cameras like the RED ONE offer advantages and disadvantages depending on your production style, shooting schedule, budget and expectations. Learn the basics of the camera system you are considering and then have someone on your crew that knows the rest.
RED GEAR
Read the latest on new RED gear by James Mathers, President and Cofounder ofthe Digital Cinema Society!
Shoot
New digital cinema cameras are being introduced with ever greater frequency. Unfortunately, these cameras are usually ahead of current postproduction capabilities. For example, a digital cinema cameras acquires images in a RAW format unreadable by most editing systems. This means the RAW files have to be converted to QuickTime or other "native" media formats for post.
You can save time and money shooting on a digital cinema camera but media management, file conversion, storage and archival costs could end up eating up your savings, complicate postproduction and delay your delivery schedule.
The bottom line, digital cinematography technology presents a promising future to revolutionize filmmaking. And while the technology advances at a dizzying rate, the establishment and standardization of clearly understood and convenient file based workflow's, however, is still a work in progress and will be for years to come.
Do your homework or else!
The RAW News!
Motion picture images can be captured on film, videotape or as data on a compact flash drive or other solid state recording device. You know about film and video cameras, but you may be new to data or digital cinema cameras.
Digital cinema cameras require a different approach to shooting and how you handle your post and media afterwards. The Red One, for example, records images in a digital RAW R3D file format, Red’s native file image structure. These R3D files can’t be used by most editing systems so they have to be converted to a file format that NLE systems like Avid and Final Cut pro can use.
The Phantom 65, ARRI D20/D21, Silicon Imaging SI 2K/Mini are examples of other digital cinema or file based camera systems that record RAW images. These RAW digital images are sampled and encoded with minimal or no compression. After the shoot, the RAW images have to be converted to a codec or file format like DPX, that allow NLE systems to read, edit and manipulate the RAW camera images.
Yes, this is a great analogy. Think of RAW images like a digital negative. The digital negative has to be developed before it can be used for editing, color grading and other critical post functions. Like a film camera, the RED ONE, for example, simply captures a series of still frames, but instead of recording images to film the RAW images are recorded as data. In a way the workflow is similar to using a digital still camera. Once you take the picture, you download the pictures file(s) onto our computer and use a software program for color, and other adjustments.
DON'T GET ANY ON YOUR SHOES!
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There are a growing number of Red camera fans out there. The popularity behind the Red phenomenon is partly due to the fact that you can buy a basic Red One starter package that includes a camera body, lens and basic accessories for about $29K. Most other digital cinema cameras are 6 figure products that are only available as rentals. Some rent per week for the amount of a RED ONE body purchase. For busy producers, the cost of purchasing a Red system could pay for itself over several productions. At last count Red has pre-sold about 4,000 cameras so there will be many more Red Heads out there learning RAW based workflow. You can also rent RED ONE cameras. See the following links for more information.
The RED ONE captures unprocessed information off of a Bayer Pattern CMOS sensor. All the information that the sensor is able to "see", comprising all color information in a single channel, is recorded as raw data is and, unlike traditional video cameras, is not processed.
REDCODE
REDCODE sounds like a scary spy and dagger novel but its not. REDCODE is the codec that compresses 4K RED RAW into a manageable file size that can be recorded on any compact flash card or hard drive. Without REDCODE, a 4K 24 fps information stream runs as high as 20GB/min.
R3D 
A cute little robot? No! The native RAW file format produced by the REDCODE codec used to create RED ONE camera images? Yes!
At this point there are 5 applications that can work with Native R3D footage, they are REDCINE, RED Alert, Scratch, Final Cut Pro 6.02 (and later) and most recently, Quantel. REDCINE and RED Alert are complimentary applications for transcoding footage from the RED ONE camera and also allow for some basic “One Light” color correction and Shot Framing. REDCINE is cross platform; RED Alert is Intel Mac only. Final Cut Pro is Mac only and needs to be on an Intel Mac in order to utilize the REDCODE plug-in.
Digital cinema camera versus a film camera
Using a digital cinema camera can save you money by eliminating film stock and processing costs, but the primary benefit of digital production is being able to watch dailies immediately, in real time. It can be argued, however, that there is a tradeoff for this convenience. The RED ONE and other digital cinema cameras capture high quality 4K images but so do film cameras and many DP ‘s and Directors love the warmth and latitude of film.
Film quality is the benchmark to measure all other motion images so you can't go wrong with shooting on film. Another good argument for film is that celluloid is a proven and reliable long term archival medium. The most common way to archive RAW camera files is on LTO or similar data archival tape drives. Tape, however, is more susceptible to deterioration while film stored in a proper environment can last for decades. The greater issue to consider is backwards compatibility. Will there be tape drives devices twenty years from now that can read LTO or other current .TAR configured archival formats? Will future computer systems be able read today’s RAW codec file formats? If this is not an issue for you, then a digital cinema camera is a very cost effective means to shoot. The good news is that if you do a DI, you’ll have a film master to preserve your work for future generations.
RED 4K
4K refers to the horizontal measurement of the RED ONE sensor as being over 4000 pixels wide at 4520 x 2540. At 4K 2:1 the RED ONE captures a frame 4096 x 2048, at 4K 16:9, the frame is 4096 x 2304 pixels. This area would cover 4 separate HD frames at 1920 x 1080 each.
The more informed you are, the better equipped you will be to choose the best tools for your project. We hope we provided enough perspective here to help you do that.
This concludes our overview on digital cinema cameras. Now it is time to edit!
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