Red Day

We weren’t able to attend to the recent Red Day in Hollywood (hey Jim, how about bringing the show to Pinewood?) but we’ve been keeping an eye on events and announcements with interest. Here’s what we’ve been hearing about the event:

Red have bought Ren-Mar studios in Hollywood. They’ll be keeping the current studio rental business in place, whilst increasing their presence in the filmmaking capital. They WILL NOT be offering direct rental of Red Camera equipment though.

RedRay is now Red 4k. If you haven’t already heard, this is a red-laser DVD format that allows full 4K playback (we kid you not). At the event the guys at Red had it hooked up to a new T-series Sony 4K projector and apparently the results were stunning. Obviously the images are heavily compressed, running at 15 MB/s, but as this is a delivery format apparently this can be done without any noticeable artifacts. In future encoding to this format will be offered by Red as a “one button process”. Shipping of the hardware & software will be announced at a later date.

The new Mysterium-X sensor is ready to ship, and will be offered as an upgrade for existing Red One customers as early as next week. Independent testing suggests a dynamic range of over 13-stops (more than 2-stops greater than the current sensor). Alongside the new sensor is a completely new colour science technology courtesy of Graeme Nattress. They refer to is a FLUT (Floating Look-Up Table) and it allows the end user (i.e. us) to make in-camera (and post) adjustments without fear of clipping. A test version of Redcine-X can be downloaded that includes the new colour science, which will also work on old material. When using this, Color Space should be set to REDcolor and Gamma should be set to REDgamma.

Obviously the new sensor will be standard for the upcoming Scarlet and Epic cameras, although no significant new information concerning these seems to have been released. What they did show were some images shot with the new sensor, including this one by David Fincher filmed on the set of Social Network. The image is of Leonardo DiCaprio lit solely by matchlight with the camera ISO set to 2000. No noise reduction was applied. Hopefully a moving version of this will be posted soon.

We’ll be playing around with the new Color Science on some of our old footage and seeing just how big a difference it makes to some of our previous work. We’ll post more on that later.