Simply Red

I ran into a good friend of mine at a local cafe the other day, and he was telling me about a panel discussion he was involved with on digital cinema. Several cameras were on display, including HD cams from Sony and Hitachi, but the star of the show, the real reason everyone attended, was to see the Red One from Red Digital Cinema. Of course, the Red One has been the talk of the industry for a few years now, and is either the most amazing piece of disruptive technology in the history of cinema, or the biggest pile of vaporware to come down the pike, depending on who you ask. 

When the Red was first announced I was as skeptical as the next guy, having been in the biz for a few years and having been through product announcements like the Play Trinity system, among others, products that were the hype of NAB for a few years running, then, if they managed to ship at all, usually

 shipped with greatly reduced feature sets, greatly inflated prices, or a little of both. So, while the Red One sounded cool, I thought it best to take a wait and see attitude. 

Sure enough, at NAB last year Red had a pretty amazing little short feature, directed by Peter Jackson (yes, THE Peter Jackson), using two of the beta Red cameras. I saw it in the Red theater on the show floor, and it was very impressive. It seemed like the Red One was for real, and people were signing up in droves to get on the waiting list to purchase one. The Red booth was more crowded than church on Easter Sunday, and yet there were still plenty of naysayers, people who didn't believe they could possibly ship a camera system with that kind of image quality for that kind of money.

I came home from NAB, and one of the DPs I work with sat down with me and peppered me with question about the Red One. We knew an HD camera was in our future, and the Red was certainly no more expensive than any of the other high-end or even mid-range HD cams, so it was worth considering. And consider we did, but ultimately I decided that the Red just isn't for us, not now.

The way I see it, the Red One is a digital cinema camera, not an HD video camera. What's the distinction? Simply put, the Red is designed to take the place of a movie camera, a 35mm or 16mm camera, not a video camera rig. The Red One is best used with prime lenses, instead of the servo driven zooms video camera operators are used to. For digital cinema that's great, but for a shop like ours that shoots a wide variety of shows, the limitations of the Red make it impractical for us. You couldn't use the Red to go shoot someone giving a speech at a conference, for example, one of those oh-so-boring-but-it-pays-the-bills assignments that most shooters get from time to time. (I suppose, technically, you could use the Red for that, but you get my point. It's not an ideal tool for that kind of situation.) 

No, for us, we need something more versatile, and also something more mature than the Red currently is. As gorgeous as the Red One is, she's still a finicky girl, with software update coming fast and furious. Again, fine if you're doing dramatic work, and can risk the need for reshoots, but not so good for covering live events, or productions with tight budgets,

This is not the say the Red isn't impressive for what it's accomplished. It really is amazing, and I have to wonder how many sleepless nights it's caused for the execs at Sony and Panasonic. It is truly a disruptive technology, and I think having it in the mix is a good thing for everyone. 

But for us, for now, if we need the super high resolution images of the Red One, we'll hire an owner/ operator who's intimately familiar with the quirks of the system, and rely on a more traditional HD camera system for our day to day work.

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