I can’t tell you how many times lately I’m asked if I have had any experience with the Red One camera. Well, I finally did it. I got a chance to play with one and do some very rough and tumble tests – one with my friend and producer Greg and another with jib op/owner and director, Shane. The verdict? In a nutshell, I really like it (but don’t love it, not yet).
What did I loved? I love the modular design. The menus are great – no more MS-DOS-like looking hierarchy tree. The onscreen information is wonderful and very useful. The onboard monitor produces a great image and it’s light as a feather. The Electric View Finder is one of the best I’ve used. Using it handheld is great – nicely balanced and easily adjustable. The controls are all easy to get to and easy to use. Building the camera is fast and easy.
One feature I really like is the exposure by colors. When activated, the exposure of the scene is represented in colors. So if a window is over 100 on a waveform monitor, the window would be colored yellow, red or even magenta to signify that it is over exposed. Or a chair in the shot that’s would be 45, might be colored green. Very visual and personally, much more useful than a waveform monitor for my needs.
↓↓ Here’s the color scale for reading exposures. Note the over/under stops indicated.
What I didn’t like so much. The Red lens (specifically the 18-50mm zoom) isn’t as good as most. It’s not sharp and it seems to flare quite a bit. Still for the money, it can be perfectly usable for smaller projects. I’m not so sure about the smaller BNC & audio connector. I’m sure I’ll change my mind about this after using the camera. One thing I noticed is that while the shots we got weren’t lit or graded or anything that might go into an actual shot for a scene, the images look and feel very “plastic”. Here too, I’m sure after shooting and finishing a project under proper conditions I’ll feel different about this.
I’m hoping to do some extensive tests before heading out to NAB. Till then, we did some very simple test:
- Lens cap test
- Basic over and under exposure
- Panning
- Wide shots of high detailed object
- Handheld
- Specular highlights test – looking for smearing
↑↑ Director/producer Greg M. plays with the focus on the camera.
↑↑ This is a fast pan to the right. ↑→ This is a slightly slower pan back to the left.
I wanted to see what would happen with very fast panning shots. So here it is.
↑↑ Everyone who wants a shallow depth of field now has it. We shot this with the focus set to 12″
↑↑ This was to see fine detail. Next time we’ll use charts or a newspaper.
Both cameras were using Firmware Build 15.
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