What Others Are Saying
The Beginning of RED
REVIEW: RED ONE Digital Cinema Camera
Still in Beta, But Already a Dynamic Technology
James Mathers
November 1, 2007 Source: Studio Monthly
It is very exciting to be part, in some small way, of the development of the paradigm-shifting RED technology. Under the terms of a strict NDA, I was barred from previously discussing the camera, but I can now relate how I first became involved. To aid in the search for the "MYSTERIUM," the heart of the camera, I was hired in January 2005 to shoot some tests of the various sensor choices. It amazes me to think that only a few years ago, RED looked like nothing more than a circuit board with a C-mount lens precariously attached. The team at RED wanted to see how the sensors handled such challenges as camera movement, so I mounted this ridiculous looking "camera" on a jib arm, along with the necessary armada of computer towers on the dolly’s base. All these drives could only record just moments of 4K material at a time (data that now fits onto one of RED’s CF cards, which are smaller than matchbooks).
This prior knowledge of the project, and a strong confidence inspired by the tireless team assembled to pull it off, led me to put down a deposit and place one of the very first orders for the camera. Out of the more than 3,000 cameras now on order, I was lucky to be number 30. I received my first RED in early September, and am now well into my testing and evaluation of the camera, having shot in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Jackson Hole, WY. The footage has been finished in everything from DV for streaming to HD, 2K, 4K and even output to film. Although the camera is not yet fully featured and there are necessary work-arounds due to the beta status of the first units, the camera is here and making stunning images. It has a silky subtlety that is far beyond any HD camera and is quite filmic. It does not yet match the quality and dynamic range of 35mm film, but it’s the closest, by a long shot, that I’ve seen any electronic image yet come.
Seeing Is Believing
Conventional wisdom said it couldn’t be done, starting from scratch to build an affordable motion picture camera with a true 4K Super 35 image sensor, and a new compression scheme to somehow make all that data manageable. It would never have been possible without the tremendous passion, determination and enthusiasm of a man named Jim Jannard.
Jannard, a billionaire as a result of his success with designer sunglass and sports apparel company Oakley, definitely has the chops as a businessman. However, it’s probably his hobbies, more than his business acumen, that inspired the RED Digital Cinema project. He’s long been an avid photographer, and also has a keen interest in cinematography. He’s said to have amassed a working collection of top gear in just about every professional film and digital format, both motion picture and still. Yet, it seems, he never found the one camera that could serve all his needs, and this yearning was the genesis (no Panavision pun intended) for the RED camera.
While some asked "Why," Jannard asked, "Why not?" Why not come up with a digital cinema camera that shoots in the kind of resolution and functionality he likes to work in for stills? Movies, after all, are just a collection of still images strung together, so why not figure out how to tap the RAW output for motion photography, just as digital still photographers had been doing for many years? The benefits of working in RAW are many, and I believe a familiarity with these techniques is key to understanding how to get the most out of RED. James Mathers
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/tg-daily-hands-4k-red-camera-unwrapping-lamborghini-video-cameras,5156.html
1:44 AM - April 7, 2008 by Theo Valich
Mountain House (CA) - The story of RED reminds me of a story from the automotive industry. Back in 1963, Ferruccio Lamborghini complained to Enzo Ferrari about the quality of the clutch on his Ferrari 250 GT, and Enzo angrily answered: "You build tractors. How can you know how to manufacture a sports car?". Then, Ferruccio decided to beat Il Commendatore in his own game, and the tractor manufacturer turned into a company that builds fantastic sports cars.
Jim Jannard, founder and CEO of Oakley, known for its sun glasses, wanted a compact and durable HD camera. Oakley is well-known for its relationship with sports, so this wish was not too surprising. Jim's idea did not find any friends at broadcast equipment manufacturers such as Sony, Canon and JVC.
Left with his idea, Jim founded RED Digital Camera, a company that aimed to create a high-resolution "Beyond HD" camera that can capture the fast pacing world of sports - in an affordable way.
The first product, RED One, does not yet achieve this goal, but is an indication of what we can expect to see from this company in the future. The compact and durable HD camera should come with the upcoming debut of RED Scarlet, a "pocket-sized" professional digital video camera. (More details about the Scarlet will be released at this year's NAB convention in Las Vegas - lectures starting on Friday, April 11th.)
In this story, we will focus on the experience of assembling RED One, one of the most fascinating video cameras you can buy today.
What's all the fuss about?
If you are wondering what is so revolutionary about RED, and why Peter Jackson and Steven Soderbergh can't imagine their life without this camera, there's a fairly simple reason for that: This is the first digital video camera that has a resolution that exceeds 35 mm film, while the dynamic range is coming very close to traditional cameras. At its core, the camera uses a Mysterium CMOS sensor: The physical resolution of this monster is 4900 x 2580 pixels, for a total of 12.64 million pixels. The sensor measures in 24.4 x 13.7 mm (334 mm2).
Depending on your point of view, the camera also does not cost an arm and a leg. Of course, the camera is not in the same category as average HD handycams that currently sell for less than $1000. You have to remember that the RED One gives you the possibility to become a movie maker. The complete product sells for about $25.000 ($17.500 for the body) and records movies in 4K resolution. As a sidenote, a 4K movie feature is something you otherwise can't get, even if you have $100.000 in the bank.
1:44 AM - April 7, 2008 by Theo Valich Tom's Hardware
WIRED MAGAZINE: 16.09
ENTERTAINMENT : HOLLYWOOD
Analog Meets Its Match in Red Digital Cinema's Ultrahigh-Res Camera
By Michael Behar 08.18.08
In 2004, Jannard bought a Sony HDR-FX1—the first hi-def videocam for consumers. When he found he couldn't use the files it produced without translation software from a company called Lumiere, he telephoned Lumiere's owner, filmmaker Frederic Haubrich. "I told Frederic that I couldn't even view my footage on a Mac and that this had pissed me off enough that I wanted to build my own camera. And he said, 'Jim, I know guys in the industry who can help.'" Haubrich introduced Jannard to interface designer Ted Schilowitz.
Schilowitz, Haubrich, and Jannard spent a year trying to design that dream camera, one that would combine the practical advantages of digital moviemaking with the image quality of analog film. They recruited mathematicians, programmers, digital imaging experts, hardware engineers, and physicists. "We needed a bunch of guys who were inventors to come up with entirely new ways of getting to the finish line," Jannard says. He kept the project quiet until his team could determine whether building the device was even feasible, but rumors swirled through Hollywood about some kind of mysterious supercamera in the works. "I didn't know who Jim was," Soderbergh says. "But I heard about Red because they were canvassing filmmakers and cinematographers, asking, 'If you could wave a magic wand, what camera would you design?'"
Most of the work took place in what employees call Jim's garage, a 20,000-square-foot warehouse across the street from Red's massive headquarters. The team quickly concluded that existing technology was inadequate. The guts of the camera—the image sensor and all the accompanying circuitry—would have to be created from scratch. It was a daunting challenge, but the fact that Jannard's management style falls somewhere between Mr. T and Steve Jobs on the autocracy scale helped. "What separates us from other camera companies is that the vision guy is the decisionmaker," he says. "That was one of my biggest advantages at Oakley, and it's the same at Red—I'm in the trenches, in the product development, and I make the final call. Red is a benevolent dictatorship."
The video revolution has been on pause in Hollywood. Just as digital still cameras now rule the photography market, hi-def digital movie cameras were supposed to replace film. But moviemakers never fully bought in. Typical digital videocams use prisms to split incoming light by color and send it to three separate sensors, which tends to soften images. Onboard software sharpens the footage but also introduces halos and exaggerated edges. Worse, the small sensors put too much of the picture in focus, giving it a canned look. Cinematographers hate that; the ability to guide the viewer's eye by selectively blurring focal planes is one of their favorite techniques. "That's a storytelling tool," says Pierre de Lespinois, a producer and director who spent three weeks in April filming a feature in the Mojave Desert with two Red Ones. "In HD, what's right in front of the lens and what's 20 feet away are both sharp, so the image looks flat."
To compete with celluloid, a digital cine-camera would need an image sensor identical in size and shape to a single frame of 35-mm motion picture film. Without that, the Red couldn't give filmmakers the control over depth of field, color saturation, tonality, and a half dozen other factors that 35-mm film provides.
Why The Red Rocks, Part II
You'll find that kind of full-frame sensor at the core of any high-end digital single-lens reflex camera. But they're designed to shoot no more than 10 frames per second. That's warp speed for still photographers but barely first gear for filmmakers. Movies are shot at a minimum of 24 frames per second, with some scenes topping out at 120 fps for slow-motion effects. The Red's sensor would have to do everything a DSLR sensor does—and do it significantly faster.
The camera also had to be able to record in the same bulky file format that DSLRs use—called raw. The format preserves picture data in essentially unprocessed form, which gives photographers more latitude to tweak images with software the way they once did in a darkroom. (Cinematographers do the same thing with 35-mm film, but it's a complicated, expensive process: The film must be scanned into digital to be manipulated, then converted back to analog for projection.) Since a movie is just a long sequence of still pictures, using the raw format presented bandwidth and data-storage problems. A two-hour feature could run up to 7 terabytes. The Red engineers built a workaround, a lossless compression codec they call Redcode Raw.
Finally, in August 2006, Jannard's team flipped the switch on Red's first prototype, codenamed Frankie. It wasn't really a camera at all, just a mechanical test bed containing the new sensor. "Our whole business was predicated on this sensor," Jannard says. "If it didn't work, we'd be cooked. When it did, it was like giving birth and counting all the fingers and toes to make sure everything was there. It was phenomenal. Everybody went nuts." Schilowitz remembers that moment, which camera makers call first light, as mind-blowing: "Everyone started screaming like little kids, 'First light! First light! It's alive!' The thing actually worked."
Two weeks later, at an industry event in Amsterdam, Jannard showed test footage taken with Frankie—a clip of two perky women in '50s garb chugging milk from glass bottles—on a 60-foot screen. "People were stunned," Schilowitz says. "They were standing around scratching their heads. That moment made a lot of people into believers." Filmmakers didn't care how the Red One worked, but they liked what they saw. "The Red camera is the closest thing to film I've seen," says Tristan Whitman, a cinematography lecturer at USC.
By March 2007, Red had assembled two additional prototypes, named Boris and Natasha. But now, with three weeks to go before NAB 2007, Jannard wanted new footage to show what the camera could do. He emailed Jackson, asking if the director could recommend a good cinematographer in Los Angeles to help create a Red promo spot. Not long after, Jackson telephoned. "Jim, why don't you fly down here to New Zealand, and I'll shoot the footage for you," he said.
"Don't tease me," Jannard replied.
"No, I'm serious," Jackson said. "Bring the cameras down."
Jannard packed up Boris and Natasha, still crude machines with no features other than a run/stop button and a shutter, and headed south. When he got to Wellington, Jackson was ready. "Peter had put together an army," Jannard says. "He was going to shoot a mini-movie to put the cameras through their paces, using them on helicopters and Steadicams, crawling on the ground with them—and I'm thinking, 'Oh my gosh, I just hope they keep working through the weekend.'" Boris and Natasha performed flawlessly. "We stayed at Peter's house, and he was just beaming because he was having so much fun." Jackson delivered his 12-minute featurette, titled Crossing the Line, the night before the NAB Show opened.
Jannard shows me the film at Red headquarters. His desk is in an open workspace that he shares with six staffers and his puppy. Next to his computer there's a box of the Montecristos he favors and a pinewood crate from Napa Valley Reserve, the world's most exclusive wine club. Members reportedly pay up to $145,000 to join, in exchange for which they can partake in grape harvests and create their own blends. There's something oddly honorable about a billionaire with insanely expensive taste in wine but no office.
I watch Crossing the Line on Jannard's 30-inch HD display while he stands behind me. The film, set on the front lines of World War I, alternates between aerial dogfights and bloody ground combat. The screen resolution is about half what it would be in a theater. Nevertheless, it's like looking through a window onto a battlefield. I can barely discern a single pixel. The detail is stupefying; the colors are rich and sensual.
After NAB 2007, Jannard showed Crossing the Line at the Directors Guild in LA. "I rearranged my travel plans to be there," Soderbergh says. After he saw the film, he called Jannard.
"Jim, I'm all in. I have to shoot with this."
"OK, great," Jannard said. "But what does that mean?"
"I'm making two movies with Benicio del Toro. Come to my house, and we'll do a test. If it looks as good as what I saw in Peter's film, I want these cameras for my movies."
Soderbergh took two prototypes into the Spanish wilderness. "It felt like someone crawled inside my head when they designed the Red," he says. What impressed him most was the cameras' sturdiness. Movie sets are often a flurry of crashes and explosions, which can vibrate sensitive electronics, introducing visual noise known as microphonics into images. "A lot of cameras with electronics in them, if you fired a 50-caliber automatic weapon a few inches away—which we did—you'd get microphonics all over the place," Soderbergh says. "We beat the shit out of the Reds on the Che films, and they never skipped a beat."
Then there's the economics: The Red One sells for $17,500—almost 90 percent less than its nearest HD competitor. The savings are even greater relative to a conventional film camera. Not that anyone buys those; filmmakers rent them, usually from Panavision, an industry stalwart in Woodland Hills, California. Panavision doesn't publicize its rates, but a Panavision New Zealand rental catalog quotes $25,296 for a four-week shoot—more than the cost of purchasing a Red. "It's clearly the future of cinematography," Peter Hyams says. "You can buy this camera. You can own it. That's why people are excited."
Even so, traditionalists cling to film's reliability. Film is tangible. Hard drives crash; files get corrupted. "You put film in a can and stick it on a shelf, and it costs $1,000 a year to store," says Stephen Lighthill, who teaches cinematography at the American Film Institute. "With a project that starts as data, you have it on a hard drive, which has to be nursed and upgraded. It's an electronic, mechanical device that can't be left unplugged." Preserving a 4K digital master of a feature film would cost $12,000 a year, according to a report by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And that doesn't address the reliability of the camera itself. "In the slammin', jammin' world of production, you want a really tough machine that takes very simple approaches to problems," Lighthill says. "I'm not sure Red is the way to go. It's a supercomputer with a lens on it."
Michael Behar (michael@michaelbehar.com)
Still in Beta, But Already a Dynamic Technology
James Mathers
November 1, 2007 Source: Studio Monthly
It is very exciting to be part, in some small way, of the development of the paradigm-shifting RED technology. Under the terms of a strict NDA, I was barred from previously discussing the camera, but I can now relate how I first became involved. To aid in the search for the "MYSTERIUM," the heart of the camera, I was hired in January 2005 to shoot some tests of the various sensor choices. It amazes me to think that only a few years ago, RED looked like nothing more than a circuit board with a C-mount lens precariously attached. The team at RED wanted to see how the sensors handled such challenges as camera movement, so I mounted this ridiculous looking "camera" on a jib arm, along with the necessary armada of computer towers on the dolly’s base. All these drives could only record just moments of 4K material at a time (data that now fits onto one of RED’s CF cards, which are smaller than matchbooks).
This prior knowledge of the project, and a strong confidence inspired by the tireless team assembled to pull it off, led me to put down a deposit and place one of the very first orders for the camera. Out of the more than 3,000 cameras now on order, I was lucky to be number 30. I received my first RED in early September, and am now well into my testing and evaluation of the camera, having shot in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Jackson Hole, WY. The footage has been finished in everything from DV for streaming to HD, 2K, 4K and even output to film. Although the camera is not yet fully featured and there are necessary work-arounds due to the beta status of the first units, the camera is here and making stunning images. It has a silky subtlety that is far beyond any HD camera and is quite filmic. It does not yet match the quality and dynamic range of 35mm film, but it’s the closest, by a long shot, that I’ve seen any electronic image yet come.
Seeing Is Believing
Conventional wisdom said it couldn’t be done, starting from scratch to build an affordable motion picture camera with a true 4K Super 35 image sensor, and a new compression scheme to somehow make all that data manageable. It would never have been possible without the tremendous passion, determination and enthusiasm of a man named Jim Jannard.
Jannard, a billionaire as a result of his success with designer sunglass and sports apparel company Oakley, definitely has the chops as a businessman. However, it’s probably his hobbies, more than his business acumen, that inspired the RED Digital Cinema project. He’s long been an avid photographer, and also has a keen interest in cinematography. He’s said to have amassed a working collection of top gear in just about every professional film and digital format, both motion picture and still. Yet, it seems, he never found the one camera that could serve all his needs, and this yearning was the genesis (no Panavision pun intended) for the RED camera.
While some asked "Why," Jannard asked, "Why not?" Why not come up with a digital cinema camera that shoots in the kind of resolution and functionality he likes to work in for stills? Movies, after all, are just a collection of still images strung together, so why not figure out how to tap the RAW output for motion photography, just as digital still photographers had been doing for many years? The benefits of working in RAW are many, and I believe a familiarity with these techniques is key to understanding how to get the most out of RED. James Mathers
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/tg-daily-hands-4k-red-camera-unwrapping-lamborghini-video-cameras,5156.html
1:44 AM - April 7, 2008 by Theo Valich
Mountain House (CA) - The story of RED reminds me of a story from the automotive industry. Back in 1963, Ferruccio Lamborghini complained to Enzo Ferrari about the quality of the clutch on his Ferrari 250 GT, and Enzo angrily answered: "You build tractors. How can you know how to manufacture a sports car?". Then, Ferruccio decided to beat Il Commendatore in his own game, and the tractor manufacturer turned into a company that builds fantastic sports cars.
Jim Jannard, founder and CEO of Oakley, known for its sun glasses, wanted a compact and durable HD camera. Oakley is well-known for its relationship with sports, so this wish was not too surprising. Jim's idea did not find any friends at broadcast equipment manufacturers such as Sony, Canon and JVC.
Left with his idea, Jim founded RED Digital Camera, a company that aimed to create a high-resolution "Beyond HD" camera that can capture the fast pacing world of sports - in an affordable way.
The first product, RED One, does not yet achieve this goal, but is an indication of what we can expect to see from this company in the future. The compact and durable HD camera should come with the upcoming debut of RED Scarlet, a "pocket-sized" professional digital video camera. (More details about the Scarlet will be released at this year's NAB convention in Las Vegas - lectures starting on Friday, April 11th.)
In this story, we will focus on the experience of assembling RED One, one of the most fascinating video cameras you can buy today.
What's all the fuss about?
If you are wondering what is so revolutionary about RED, and why Peter Jackson and Steven Soderbergh can't imagine their life without this camera, there's a fairly simple reason for that: This is the first digital video camera that has a resolution that exceeds 35 mm film, while the dynamic range is coming very close to traditional cameras. At its core, the camera uses a Mysterium CMOS sensor: The physical resolution of this monster is 4900 x 2580 pixels, for a total of 12.64 million pixels. The sensor measures in 24.4 x 13.7 mm (334 mm2).
Depending on your point of view, the camera also does not cost an arm and a leg. Of course, the camera is not in the same category as average HD handycams that currently sell for less than $1000. You have to remember that the RED One gives you the possibility to become a movie maker. The complete product sells for about $25.000 ($17.500 for the body) and records movies in 4K resolution. As a sidenote, a 4K movie feature is something you otherwise can't get, even if you have $100.000 in the bank.
1:44 AM - April 7, 2008 by Theo Valich Tom's Hardware
WIRED MAGAZINE: 16.09
ENTERTAINMENT : HOLLYWOOD
Analog Meets Its Match in Red Digital Cinema's Ultrahigh-Res Camera
By Michael Behar 08.18.08
In 2004, Jannard bought a Sony HDR-FX1—the first hi-def videocam for consumers. When he found he couldn't use the files it produced without translation software from a company called Lumiere, he telephoned Lumiere's owner, filmmaker Frederic Haubrich. "I told Frederic that I couldn't even view my footage on a Mac and that this had pissed me off enough that I wanted to build my own camera. And he said, 'Jim, I know guys in the industry who can help.'" Haubrich introduced Jannard to interface designer Ted Schilowitz.
Schilowitz, Haubrich, and Jannard spent a year trying to design that dream camera, one that would combine the practical advantages of digital moviemaking with the image quality of analog film. They recruited mathematicians, programmers, digital imaging experts, hardware engineers, and physicists. "We needed a bunch of guys who were inventors to come up with entirely new ways of getting to the finish line," Jannard says. He kept the project quiet until his team could determine whether building the device was even feasible, but rumors swirled through Hollywood about some kind of mysterious supercamera in the works. "I didn't know who Jim was," Soderbergh says. "But I heard about Red because they were canvassing filmmakers and cinematographers, asking, 'If you could wave a magic wand, what camera would you design?'"
Most of the work took place in what employees call Jim's garage, a 20,000-square-foot warehouse across the street from Red's massive headquarters. The team quickly concluded that existing technology was inadequate. The guts of the camera—the image sensor and all the accompanying circuitry—would have to be created from scratch. It was a daunting challenge, but the fact that Jannard's management style falls somewhere between Mr. T and Steve Jobs on the autocracy scale helped. "What separates us from other camera companies is that the vision guy is the decisionmaker," he says. "That was one of my biggest advantages at Oakley, and it's the same at Red—I'm in the trenches, in the product development, and I make the final call. Red is a benevolent dictatorship."
The video revolution has been on pause in Hollywood. Just as digital still cameras now rule the photography market, hi-def digital movie cameras were supposed to replace film. But moviemakers never fully bought in. Typical digital videocams use prisms to split incoming light by color and send it to three separate sensors, which tends to soften images. Onboard software sharpens the footage but also introduces halos and exaggerated edges. Worse, the small sensors put too much of the picture in focus, giving it a canned look. Cinematographers hate that; the ability to guide the viewer's eye by selectively blurring focal planes is one of their favorite techniques. "That's a storytelling tool," says Pierre de Lespinois, a producer and director who spent three weeks in April filming a feature in the Mojave Desert with two Red Ones. "In HD, what's right in front of the lens and what's 20 feet away are both sharp, so the image looks flat."
To compete with celluloid, a digital cine-camera would need an image sensor identical in size and shape to a single frame of 35-mm motion picture film. Without that, the Red couldn't give filmmakers the control over depth of field, color saturation, tonality, and a half dozen other factors that 35-mm film provides.
Why The Red Rocks, Part II
You'll find that kind of full-frame sensor at the core of any high-end digital single-lens reflex camera. But they're designed to shoot no more than 10 frames per second. That's warp speed for still photographers but barely first gear for filmmakers. Movies are shot at a minimum of 24 frames per second, with some scenes topping out at 120 fps for slow-motion effects. The Red's sensor would have to do everything a DSLR sensor does—and do it significantly faster.
The camera also had to be able to record in the same bulky file format that DSLRs use—called raw. The format preserves picture data in essentially unprocessed form, which gives photographers more latitude to tweak images with software the way they once did in a darkroom. (Cinematographers do the same thing with 35-mm film, but it's a complicated, expensive process: The film must be scanned into digital to be manipulated, then converted back to analog for projection.) Since a movie is just a long sequence of still pictures, using the raw format presented bandwidth and data-storage problems. A two-hour feature could run up to 7 terabytes. The Red engineers built a workaround, a lossless compression codec they call Redcode Raw.
Finally, in August 2006, Jannard's team flipped the switch on Red's first prototype, codenamed Frankie. It wasn't really a camera at all, just a mechanical test bed containing the new sensor. "Our whole business was predicated on this sensor," Jannard says. "If it didn't work, we'd be cooked. When it did, it was like giving birth and counting all the fingers and toes to make sure everything was there. It was phenomenal. Everybody went nuts." Schilowitz remembers that moment, which camera makers call first light, as mind-blowing: "Everyone started screaming like little kids, 'First light! First light! It's alive!' The thing actually worked."
Two weeks later, at an industry event in Amsterdam, Jannard showed test footage taken with Frankie—a clip of two perky women in '50s garb chugging milk from glass bottles—on a 60-foot screen. "People were stunned," Schilowitz says. "They were standing around scratching their heads. That moment made a lot of people into believers." Filmmakers didn't care how the Red One worked, but they liked what they saw. "The Red camera is the closest thing to film I've seen," says Tristan Whitman, a cinematography lecturer at USC.
By March 2007, Red had assembled two additional prototypes, named Boris and Natasha. But now, with three weeks to go before NAB 2007, Jannard wanted new footage to show what the camera could do. He emailed Jackson, asking if the director could recommend a good cinematographer in Los Angeles to help create a Red promo spot. Not long after, Jackson telephoned. "Jim, why don't you fly down here to New Zealand, and I'll shoot the footage for you," he said.
"Don't tease me," Jannard replied.
"No, I'm serious," Jackson said. "Bring the cameras down."
Jannard packed up Boris and Natasha, still crude machines with no features other than a run/stop button and a shutter, and headed south. When he got to Wellington, Jackson was ready. "Peter had put together an army," Jannard says. "He was going to shoot a mini-movie to put the cameras through their paces, using them on helicopters and Steadicams, crawling on the ground with them—and I'm thinking, 'Oh my gosh, I just hope they keep working through the weekend.'" Boris and Natasha performed flawlessly. "We stayed at Peter's house, and he was just beaming because he was having so much fun." Jackson delivered his 12-minute featurette, titled Crossing the Line, the night before the NAB Show opened.
Jannard shows me the film at Red headquarters. His desk is in an open workspace that he shares with six staffers and his puppy. Next to his computer there's a box of the Montecristos he favors and a pinewood crate from Napa Valley Reserve, the world's most exclusive wine club. Members reportedly pay up to $145,000 to join, in exchange for which they can partake in grape harvests and create their own blends. There's something oddly honorable about a billionaire with insanely expensive taste in wine but no office.
I watch Crossing the Line on Jannard's 30-inch HD display while he stands behind me. The film, set on the front lines of World War I, alternates between aerial dogfights and bloody ground combat. The screen resolution is about half what it would be in a theater. Nevertheless, it's like looking through a window onto a battlefield. I can barely discern a single pixel. The detail is stupefying; the colors are rich and sensual.
After NAB 2007, Jannard showed Crossing the Line at the Directors Guild in LA. "I rearranged my travel plans to be there," Soderbergh says. After he saw the film, he called Jannard.
"Jim, I'm all in. I have to shoot with this."
"OK, great," Jannard said. "But what does that mean?"
"I'm making two movies with Benicio del Toro. Come to my house, and we'll do a test. If it looks as good as what I saw in Peter's film, I want these cameras for my movies."
Soderbergh took two prototypes into the Spanish wilderness. "It felt like someone crawled inside my head when they designed the Red," he says. What impressed him most was the cameras' sturdiness. Movie sets are often a flurry of crashes and explosions, which can vibrate sensitive electronics, introducing visual noise known as microphonics into images. "A lot of cameras with electronics in them, if you fired a 50-caliber automatic weapon a few inches away—which we did—you'd get microphonics all over the place," Soderbergh says. "We beat the shit out of the Reds on the Che films, and they never skipped a beat."
Then there's the economics: The Red One sells for $17,500—almost 90 percent less than its nearest HD competitor. The savings are even greater relative to a conventional film camera. Not that anyone buys those; filmmakers rent them, usually from Panavision, an industry stalwart in Woodland Hills, California. Panavision doesn't publicize its rates, but a Panavision New Zealand rental catalog quotes $25,296 for a four-week shoot—more than the cost of purchasing a Red. "It's clearly the future of cinematography," Peter Hyams says. "You can buy this camera. You can own it. That's why people are excited."
Even so, traditionalists cling to film's reliability. Film is tangible. Hard drives crash; files get corrupted. "You put film in a can and stick it on a shelf, and it costs $1,000 a year to store," says Stephen Lighthill, who teaches cinematography at the American Film Institute. "With a project that starts as data, you have it on a hard drive, which has to be nursed and upgraded. It's an electronic, mechanical device that can't be left unplugged." Preserving a 4K digital master of a feature film would cost $12,000 a year, according to a report by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And that doesn't address the reliability of the camera itself. "In the slammin', jammin' world of production, you want a really tough machine that takes very simple approaches to problems," Lighthill says. "I'm not sure Red is the way to go. It's a supercomputer with a lens on it."
Michael Behar (michael@michaelbehar.com)
