The RED Diary, Day Five

Editor's Note: The following is part of a two-week series of guest entries authored by Mark Pederson, Owner and Executive Producer of Offhollywood Studios, about his experiences with the very first two RED cameras to hit the public market. The RED is a boundary breaking technology that offers unparalleled HD imagery in digital format at a price point 1/10th that of similarly equipped cameras.

10:00 am Tuesday. I'm late. I was too tired last night to write this post. Yesterday was a watershed RED day for Offhollywood - we booking our first high-end commercial, and independent feature and second unit on a studio film. We are on RED FIRE! But let's move past my shameless self promotion and talk about what shooting in 4K REDCODE really means to a few client types.

Let's start with the NEW MEDIA. Which is really just media compressed to various formats for cell phone and web. Why on earth would you use a 4K camera for the web. That very easy to answer. Compression does not like NOISE. The more noise free your image is, the better it compresses. RED makes amazing web content. If your client wants to SELL THEIR PRODUCT on the Internet - they want a sexy, crisp, clean image. That's RED compressed to for web. I'll put up a clip in my LAST POST on Zoom-In to prove it.

Let's talk COMMERCIALS and FASHION. Think print work first. These guys shoot with high-end DSLR cameras and camera-backs. They shoot RAW.

They manipulate the images in Photoshop (post). Now, imagine shooting a commercial exactly the same way and be able to grab ANY FRAME and use it for PRINT. This is a no-brainer for ad world. Offhollywood wants to do FASHION. Why? Because we are based in the New York - and the fashion world is HERE. Beautiful models and clothes captures in high-resolution RAW is a no-brainer. The power of RAW and the ability to pull STILLS. And SPEED. You don't need to drop your 35mm film off at the lab, process and telecine. You can see instant results on the set - you can even show your client various color grade choices if you want, right on the set, seconds after shooting. We've done it. And I assure you, people LOVE it.

Let's talk LOW BUDGET, INDEPENDENT FEATURE FILM. You shoot your movie

- 4K REDCODE RAW - you can edit DIRECTLY from that 4K media in a lower resolution PROXY in Final Cut Pro. So, NO digitizing. No decks. No RENDER. Just CUT. REALTIME. If you come to a facility (like Offhollywood) with SCRATCH, a powerful grading system made by a company called ASSIMILATE, you can COLOR GRADE in a lower resolution PROXY directly from the 4K Redcode Raw files. You can OUTPUT you HD screener and hit the festival market. You can pick any frame and extract a high-resolution still for your poster of DVD box or web marketing campaign. Now, after you show your film Sundance, one of the studios buys your little movie. You can basically CLICK a button in Scratch and start rendering out 4K files of with your color grades for a 35mm film record out. No compromise.

I am scratching the surface here -

You REALLY need to see it to believe it.

- Mark L. Pederson