Red in OZ

[M Taylor]

Hey David,
Thanks a lot for the detailed post/s. Good to meet you last night.

[Terry Delahunt]

Thanks for the update David, much appreciated!! Looking forward to Part 2

[mdo]

Thanks for taking the time to bring us up to speed with the first half. Much appreciated!

[david farland]

We trashed the Transformer theatre with popcorn.

Now, back to Part 2.

The room was open for questions to Ted while the Lucas etc setup the Scratch demonstration.

Q1. How noisy is the camera? About ~20db. When the camera is in standby the fans will stay on. When you hit record, the fans stop. If the camera gets too hot, it will turn the fans slowly on during takes. It also has a band pass filter for fan noise.

Q2. How do you clean the sensor? Sensor is covered by low pass filter. Could see dirt on LPF in ‘Crossing the Line’. Use special photography swabs/cleaning kits (freely available) on low pass filter.

Q3. What will be the lead time on ordering camera in the future? Ted started with reservation process. Start shipping in late August 07. Try to deliver 1500 camera in 9 mths. If you order now, the lead time will be about 9/10 mths. He said that now was a good time to order because there will probably be an ordering surge once the camera starts shipping.

Q4. Service centre plans? Ted: There will be service places to go in roughly same time zone. Though in the beginning everything it will be back to depot. An advantage is, Red can find out directly what the early issues are.

Q5. Have you seen film outs of Red footage? Ted said he goes to Park Road, Wellington NZ tomorrow to see regraded footage. Peter Jackson has re-graded ‘Crossing the Line’ and says the film out looks excellent. They have done a film out which Ted will see in the next couple of days. Did a screening at EGA in LA with Mark Neveldine?, director of ‘Crank’. Looked at some film out test footage they shot. Ted's impression of the test footage was it was locked, pristine, cool, digital technology. They then looked at a 35mm film out of the footage and thought it looked old school. Looked at a ProRes and were also impressed. Falloff is very film like.

Lucas then talked about Redcine. RedCine has 4 views on LHS: project, shot, color & output.
Project: Library has a directory structure of scene & takes where you can scrub through. Timeline along the bottom lets you see you different takes.
Shot: Metadata appears in separate window.
Color: Pick a white balance, exposures, color. Anything you do in Redcine can be saved and ported to camera. Everything you do in the camera will be sent to Redcine as metadata. Lives as non-destructive data. Talked of cumbersome LUT work and how RedCine was so much better.
Output: Can downrez to a dozen resolutions.

Lucas then gave a demo of Scratch playing native Redcode. It had shapes, power windows, curves, tracking etc.

Audience then asked more questions.

Q6. What are the rendering times? Lucas: Taking NAB 07 Red compression rates, Scratch will render out 4K DPX files at 10fps and 1K DPX at faster than real-time.

Q7. Red audio? Ted: Its 4 channel 24bit. People are using camera like a typical film camera with separate audio. Not sure if the first camera will have audio enabled. If not it will be a firmware update.

Weight of camera? Weighs 9 lbs. Demo rig with 18-50 lens and basic production weighted ~20lbs.

Q8. What’s the camera’s reference color temp? Daylight balanced to 5000 Kelvin.

Then there was a little discussion on DCT/wavelet/mpeg codecs.

Q9. Is the camera upgradeable? Some parts i.e. sensor could be upgraded in future.

Q10. What is the Power drain of camera? 12volts /140WH battery. Will run the camera for approx 90mins. He haven’t seen an HMI etc flicker yet.

Q11. What is Red’s low light capacity? Did some test in the middle of night outside Red headquarters. Light meter was showing 0~0.6.They did a comparison with Arri/500 asa Vision stock. Vision was pretty grainy. Red had wonderful, usable images with very little noise.

Q12. Beside FCP, what other vendors have Red been collaborating with? No collaborations, but they are in discussions with very interested parties.

Q13. Redcine is windows & OSX.

Q14. Can anyone other than Dalsa make an uncompressed capture device? Ted: The Dalsa Codex capture box is just one of the ‘fridge’ capture solutions available. Anyone can get the specifications of the fibre port from Red and if they have the smarts, build their own capture box.

Q15. Who makes the lenses? Ted: We have partners. If you know optics and you know lenses, these were made in the England. Grin…….

The camera and discussions then moved into the foyer for 30mins.

Very nice talk.

Cheers,

[Adrian T.]

Q15. Who makes the lenses? Ted: We have partners. If you know optics and you know lenses, these were made in England. Grin…….

This leaves no doubt about it!

[david farland]

Hey David,
Thanks a lot for the detailed post/s. Good to meet you last night.

Nice to meet yourself....should hook up sometime.

Dave,

[Keith Alan Morris]

Paul Haggis is a badass. Yet another great writer/director interested...

[Casey Green]

Q7. Red audio? Ted: Its 4 channel 24bit. People are using camera like a typical film camera with separate audio. Not sure if the first camera will have audio enabled. If not it will be a firmware update.

Is that what Ted said? Possibly no audio in the first shipping Cameras?

Hopefully they can get it worked out. I know we sure would love to test the Audio at LART.

[Seth Larney]

Hey David, thanks for the great review of the night.

I was sitting just in front and left of you. Sorry I didn't get a chance to say hello. I've written my own review over at www.redanz.net as well. Wondering if you mind if I post a copy of yours over there as well ?

Cheers,
Seth.

[Scott Webster]

Thanks David and Seth for the great reports on the evening. 37 days to go...subject to change