LAS VEGAS - Okay, I think we can all agree that Red Digital
Cinema is pretty good at marketing themselves. With no actual shipping product,
they became one of the most talked about companies at NAB last year when they
showed up with a red curtain, non-working proto bodies and an idea: an
affordable digital camera that records 4K images. Industry pros (about 1,200 of
them) literally bought into it, plunking down $1,000 to reserve a future, working
model. And those early reservation holders will most likely have the camera of
their dreams in hand shortly.
Red (www.red.com) has come a
long way since last April, says Red Digital Cinema’s Ted Schilowitz. As it stands
now “we are going to do exactly what we set out to do, which is show working
cameras at NAB, show 4K footage from those working cameras at our theatre in
the booth and have a few more surprises.”
They also intend to have a shipping Red One camera — for $17,500
— this month as well. It will not be a final version with all the bells and
whistles, but it will have RedCode — which is the key to shooting 4K for under
$20K.
“Everything ties to this advanced codec that we’ve developed
called RedCode. It’s a 4K wavelet 12-bit codec that is visually lossless from
full uncompressed 4K, which would need to record to a massive amount of drives.
What we are doing is giving the ability to record this compressed 4K onto this
onboard drive system or onboard Flash system. The onboard Flash will give you
probably 20 minutes of recording time in various configurations. The onboard
drive system, which is actually slightly off board — it’s not on the camera
body itself, it lives right behind it where the battery lives — that’s going to
be a couple of hours of onboard 4K recording. So you’ll be able to take this
and use it in a way that is almost like you are using DV today, except it’s
going to be 4K, and that is what is going to blow people’s minds.”
MORE THAN THE CAMERA
Literally gearing up for the camera’s release, the company
recently put two accessory packages with pricing information on its Website.
And Red is also offering its own lenses for those interested: The Red 300mm
f2.8 is due in late 2007 for $4,995.
But the accessories don’t all have to have the Red logo on
them. “There are a lot of things that are industry standard on the camera,”
explains Schilowitz. “There is HD-SDI out dual link so you can connect your HD
monitors. There is a [standard] mount on the front of the camera so you can use
your existing cinema grade lenses.”
THE WORKFLOW
Red is also offering RedCine software that will be used on
the post side. “It’s designed to take the RedCode files in 4K, or whatever file
size you’ve shot — 2K or HD – but you record in our RedCode codec in either RAW
mode or RGB mode. You hook up your red-drive to your computer, and load the
media to work within RedCine. Let’s say you put it on your Mac or PC and
the files are still in RAW mode, so you import them and the software will do
the de-Bayer on the fly, create a “best light look” and then you can color
correct them more precisely and you choose to export them into any codec or
file format that you want.”
Schilowitz likens it to working with a very high-end Digital
SLR “We are doing something very similar to what a digital still camera
does, only we are doing it at 24 or 60 frames a second in 4K. So if you are
shooting with a high-end digital still camera you are shooting RAW Bayer
pattern images and then you bring it into some software that understands what
raw is and that can debayer it — essentially turn into RGB and then you can go
work with it. Aperture or Light Room does that and RedCine is a kind of a
moving version of that in sort of an initial software release. You then take
these files and process them and turn them into whatever codec you would want
for offline, creative editing, then you can link back to the original files for
a 4K finish.
He says it’s called RedCine because it’s essentially a virtual
telecine. “In a telecine session, you take your film — your negative — you put
it up on the reels and you convert it to something, typically on a piece of
tape. Now it’s typically HD, so it’s probably D5 or HDCAM SR, and you work with
those files. Red and RedCode RAW
is the digital version of that, so you shoot a digital negative and use RedCine
for your processing and file creation, but instead of putting your files to
tape, and then creating your offline and online files from that HD master, we
skip that step since we are all file based. ”
Schilowitz says that for broadcast work, you never have to
go back to your digital negative, “you’ll just create files in whatever codec
you want and then edit them and finish them in whatever codec you want for a broadcast
deliverable. For a guy doing a filmout, or a DCI package for theatrical,
they are going to go back to their 4K files and relink to those and do a
film-out via DPX or Cineon.”
They haven’t figured out the backend licensing side of
things yet, but if you own a camera, the software comes with it free. “We’ll
see how that extends to the post houses when they start reaching out to us
saying, “We’d like to have a site license for RedCine.’”
In the meantime, keep an eye out for an affordable 4K camera
that comes in around eight pounds.