philper
02-14-2008, 07:06 PM
Some friends of mine have a video equipment rental business and got their Red camera. I had PSC make me a camera-fan for the normal PSC style snake, and went over to see if it would work. The connections were ok (TA3F, TA5F) except that PSC wired the return backwards. In E to E the camera sounded fine, although as has been discussed, the fan was very audible even in a fairly chilly room. The line input has no trim, so I plugged in my Loft audio test box to see what level the camera calls zero. According to the Loft +4 out to the camera resulted in the meter going into the red, to get a zero read I had to back it down to about -2.3. I found that my normal setup from an SD302 was under their zero by about 4 db (I think the unlabelled hash marks on the level meter of the Red are about 3 db apart). However, when I talked to the mixer and ran the levels where I would normally have them on the 302's meter, the Red was going into "over" all the time. The return didn't sound bad, but the meter was screaming red. One of the owners of this company is a DIT who does a lot of video+audio jobs, and his mixer is an FP33. The FP33's zero output (in his setup) really is +4, and he had found that it was too hot for the Red camera. The approach to level setting and metering is odd here. After so many years of setting Sonisonic cameras to -20 and having zero be clipping (as in digital), Red has decided to make a sort-of VU meter with 7/8ths of the meter to the left of zero and a tiny bit above their ref level before clip. I think this is dumb--everyone has been trained away from VUs (as on old Betacams) into thinking digital, where zero is THE END, and now we are back to a weird variant of VU. If you are going to work w/ this camera with a mixer in which your ref level really is +4, you might want to consider dropping in a pad between you and the camera. The TC connection (Lemo 5 pin) seems to be the same pin config as Nagra/Aaton/SD/ etc--I hooked up with the TC cable that came w/ my 702T and the camera jammed to the external TC. Oddly, you can't see the new ext TC until the camera rolls, and only during rolls will it show you TC frames incrementing. The rest of the time the frames digits stay @ zero. So if you jam this thing you have to roll a little to see if the jam took. Still no TC out, which is a serious bummer. Levels are only visible in the viewfinder monitor, not on the info display on the back.
Philip Perkins CAS
Philip Perkins CAS