Zoom-in Online

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.

Tuesday. The last post of the Red Diary on zoom-in.

Size DOES matter

Here's a frame, shot this weekend with one of our Red cameras in 4K.

The "window" in the lower left shows you the relative size of HD - 1920 x 1080. More pixels. More information. Crisp images with finite details. Down-sampling to HD or SD or even WEB encodes results in dynamic images, which in my opinion, rival ANY digital cinema camera.

RAW RULES!

Shooting moving images in RAW is so powerful and logical, I am not sure why someone hasn’t done this already. Today we were up and running with a new build of SCRATCH, a powerful DI application which can work directly from the REDCODE RAW media in real time. No transcodes, no renders. (See attached screengrab)

PRICE POINT

$17,500 for the camera body. This is a small FRACTION of high-end HD cameras. This is a camera priced to OWN, not to RENT. RED wants to put as many of these cameras in shooters hands as possible. They are basing their price on their estimates of demand.

I asked RED today if you were to order a camera right now, how long would the wait be. They told me the best estimate was about 9 months as orders are pouring in every day.

I am finding it hard to keep up with everything that's happening, on top of testing and experimentation. But I am pretty excited to go to work every day.

The camera is also FUN. It's almost too easy to shoot amazing looking stuff. I am actually looking forward to shooting some home movies in 4K!

I feel very, very lucky. So glad that Offhollywood plunked down that $2000 back at NAB 2006. It's like winning the lotto. Now the challenge for Offhollywood is to position ourselves to provide value to a market that will be eventually flooded with RED cameras.

The RED revolution IS real. It's happening. Those big companies that make the high-end HD cameras can't stop it. The snowball is rolling down the mountain.

To all those that cried "Vaporware!" ... you were WRONG.

The RED revolution has begun!!

Thanks to zoom-in for inviting me to be a guest here - and thanks to all that read my posts!!

- Mark Pederson