Red Day London

The Red Day international roadshow (in the shape of Ted Schilowitz) came to the UK yesterday and we finally managed to get our hands on the new Epic and Scarlet! Well, prototypes at any rate. And we’re happy to report that the new technology is shaping up to be something special.

First up, Ted gave a little overview of how far Red had come since the first cameras shipped just over 2 years ago. The one statistic that surprised me was that around 50% of all films shown at Sundance this year were shot on Red. He was also (unsurprisingly) delighted that a Red-shot movie has, for the first time, been nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. That would be District 9, if you were wondering, and the film has also been nominated for a Best Cinematography BAFTA.

He then showed us the latest version of the Red Reel and then a specially shot Mysterium-X reel. The later features a variety of footage shot around the world on Red One cameras upgraded with the latest Mysterium-X sensor. The opening shot (missing from the downloadable version but available here) was by David Fincher, specially staged on the set of Social Network. The camera was set to ISO 2000 and the only lighting in the scene is from a table lamp in the background and the match in Leonardo DiCaprio’s hand (I assume the shaft of light on the stairs is daylight). No noise-reduction was applied to the image.

Ted then talked about the upcoming Epic and Scarlet prototypes, which were available to handle at the end. For those in Steadicamland we can confirm that there is an HD-SDI out on the Epic brain itself, so you can really strip it down to the bare minimum to go on your rig. The multiple modules are well designed and genuinely take the concept of modularity to a new level. There really is nothing else quite like this in the marketplace (or even planned from anyone else, so far as we can tell).

We were also treated to presentations by OnSight, who are the first rental company to convince the BBC to shoot an in-house production on Red (for Jonathan Creek), Jamie Milner-Smythe from Post Factory talking about Post workflows and how much easier they are with a Red Rocket card and Jonathan Smiles who worked as Red Supervisor on (amongst others) the aforementioned District 9. Finishing off were the guys from Assimilate showing off a Rocket-accelerated version of their Scratch grading suite.

It was great to see the upcoming new tech, and also to look back at how far this upstart new company has come in only a couple of years, and where it is planning on going next. Thanks Ted for bringing the show to the UK.