See announcement here.

We are preparing for the upgrade for the i/pin upgrade program, and this will unfortunately require sending the camera back to RED for installation.

The good news is.. we have taking this opportunity to also redesign the Audio board in parallel, resulting in audio performance that is vastly, vastly, superior. We have decided to swap all existing camera audio boards at no cost during the /i pin installation ( which is also no charge to you. )

This process will start during the last week of September, in order of serial number, and we are targeting a 48 hour turnaround, and for in-person drop-ins we anticipate a 3 hour turnaround. We will give you as much notice as possible when your number comes up.

I hope everyone is happy with these changes.. the audio performance in the production samples we have received are off the charts, and of course the /i pins are something alot of you guys have been waiting for for some time.

–Jarred Land

Fluorescent lighting is great stuff. Your lights stay relatively cool, they last practically forever, you get three or four times as many lumens per watt, and you have many more color temperature options than with tungsten. This last benefit is particularly relevant with Red, which delivers its cleanest image at around 5000K. Modern fluorescent bulbs have greatly reduced green spike problems, and of course modern high-frequency ballasts make flicker issues a thing of the past, at least at typical frame rates.

I’ve been meaning to build some lighting fixtures around compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs for a few years now. We finally pulled the trigger and did it last week, because we had a shoot last Friday that we thought they’d be really useful for.

We wanted to use CFLs rather than tube fluorescent because it’s much easier to make a fixture based around CFLs, well, compact. Any fixture containing full-sized tube florescents is inherently going to be unwieldy, not just in terms of transporting it, but in terms of controlling the light as well. Tube fluorescent fixtures are inherently very soft sources, and end up spilling tons of light around. Even Kinos, which have fairly well designed light control mechanisms, have issues with this.

This adventure started, as most of this kind do, with a trip to Home Depot (and a couple of other places) to lay in some supplies. Surface-mount screw-on light sockets, plywood, screws, nuts and bolts, foam core, silver spray paint, heavy staples, electrical wire, plugs, electrical tape, and caps. Then a quick run to B&H to pick up some baby plates ($12 each).

Rather than describing how we put everything together, it’s much easier to just take a look at a few photos of the results:

We’re planning to put a coat of black spray paint on the outside of these when we get the chance, to make them look a little nicer and to block the light that currently leaks through the foam core.

We managed to build three of these in about four hours, figuring out the details as we went along. Each one is lamped with five 27 watt nVision daylight balanced CFLs (also form Home Depot), which (our Red tells us) have a color temperature of almost exactly 5000K. One benefit to this design is that you can reduce output, and even aim the light to some extent, simply by removing bulbs.

Each fixture puts out the equivalent of around 450 watts of tungsten lighting, while using only 135 watts. (With the foam core sides, they’d probably catch fire in fairly short order if you actually put 450 watts of tungsten bulbs into one; with the CFLs the foam core gets no more than mildly warm.) One almost comical benefit of this is that you can plug ten of these fixtures (equivalent to over 4000 watts of tungsten light) into a single 15 amp household circuit, and never run out of power on location again.

How do they look on camera? On our shoot last Friday we basically just used them to throw some extra light around a room lit mostly with practicals, so that wasn’t such an interesting test. The two top shots above were lit with a second Five-Z, but that’s not so interesting either. To get a better sample, I tossed one on a stand and borrowed Nick, one of our Nice Dissolve team members, for a quick demo:

That’s a single light about three feet from the subject, shot at f/1.8, 400 ASA, with a 1/500 shutter, on a Canon DSLR. If you map to 1/48 and Red’s ASA 320, you’d be at around an f/5.6.

We’re still looking into various light control mechanisms, but what we’ve got so far is a small, bright, cool, daylight-balanced softbox — a pretty useful item to have around. I can see myself reaching for these in preference to our “real” lights on a lot of shoots. I expect we’ll be building more, varying the design in different ways, etc. We’ll probably try one with nine bulbs, and we’re going to order some higher wattage CFL bulbs and see what we can build around those.

I just posted this over in the Birger Lens Mount Reservations thread on RedUser, in response to the recent flap over Birger’s Canon EF mount voiding the Red One’s warranty:

People seem more angry at Red than at Birger here. Can we have a bit of a reality check? As a third-party developer, it was Birger’s responsibility to keep channels open with Red. This is how it always works with this sort of vendor relationship. Erik has talked about Birger having “more than 200 customers”. Let’s be generous and assume this means ~300 mounts. That’s still well under 10% of the cameras Red has taken orders for. Red’s primary responsibility is the camera, not taking the initiative to check up on what third-party developers are doing.

Given what appears to be a complete lack of communication, I suppose we’re lucky this all came to light when it did, rather than, say, after Birger had already shipped a few dozen mounts and cameras were failing left and right. That would have created a really awkward situation. Like, the sort of situation that doesn’t get resolved without lawyers getting involved.

Of course, it also would have been nice if Red had some clearly written documentation for third-party vendors explaining (among other things) exactly what parts of the camera are considered interchangeable and what parts aren’t. But it’s frankly a little hard to fault Red too much in this instance for not having such a thing, because if communication had been better (which, as noted above, is the responsibility of the third-party vendor), this issue would have been dealt with anyway.

Finally, I feel it’s rather important to note that even if the Birger mount wasn’t stuck in warranty-related limbo, we still wouldn’t have what we were told we’d have months ago. Birger has, whether deliberately or merely by drastically underestimating the relevant engineering challenges, strung its customers along with promises that its product would ship in a matter of weeks (or even days) for seven months now. It took them six months to just confirm many people’s orders. We still have no estimate of when the focus knob system and/or Bluetooth remote (the electronic focus controls that actually make this more useful than a Nikon dumb mount) might be done. And if Birger did offer such an estimate now (again, even assuming no warranty issues) would you feel comfortable planning around it?

We really wanted Birger’s project to succeed. Back in December of last year, when the Birger mount was supposed to ship in a couple of weeks, I made a post on Indie4K which concluded that “EOS lenses with the Birger mount are shaping up to be the indie option of choice for Red”. And we hung in there for quite a while, despite the fact that it was costing us money (for lens rentals) and that we weren’t using our camera for our own projects as much as we would have been if we’d had our own glass. I don’t think we were the only ones experiencing such inconvenience and expense.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, when Erik posted the pictures of FedEx boxes (implying mounts would really ship this time), and then shortly thereafter explained the new electrical problem would cause yet another delay, we gave up and ordered a Red 18-50mm lens, and four days later we could actually shoot with our camera without renting glass. We weren’t sure it was the right thing to do, because Birger was still saying they’d be shipping very soon… but then again they’d been saying that for half a year already. When these warranty issues surfaced, though, and when another week passed with no information about the focus knob, etc. we knew we’d made the right choice.

From our perspective, the only thing Birger has ever actually handled at the standard I would expect was promptly canceling our order when requested.

I still hope Birger’s product eventually succeeds — I still believe that the ability to use EF lenses (with electronic focus controls) is a very compelling idea for the do-it-yourself indie crowd.

But we couldn’t wait anymore. And if someone just getting their camera asked me whether they should wait, I’d probably advise them not to as well. Seriously. Don’t sit there staring at a $25K paperweight. If you can afford the Red 18-50 lens, buy one. It’s not high-end Zeiss glass, but it’s sharp, it’s lightweight, and it’ll put a nice image on your sensor. If you can’t afford that, get a Nikon dumb mount. Maybe you’ll be able to swap it out for Birger’s Nikon smart mount in a few months. But just get out there and start using your camera!

There’s a certain demographic which seems to sit around thinking of reasons why the Red One can’t possibly be any good. We’ve all run across these arguments. One that has really been bugging me recently is the notion that RedCode compression somehow constitutes, essentially, cheating; that Red shouldn’t really be considered a high-end camera because it shoots compressed footage.

The notion that uncompressed is always better for a professional camera shows a complete lack of understanding of the trade-offs involved with this sort of decision. Sure, uncompressed is better if all other things are equal. But all other things aren’t equal.

What particularly annoys me is the notion that the Red One is somehow less professional than cameras which output uncompressed 1080p as their final product. Modern compression algorithms are extremely smart about what data they discard. The idea that you’re better off with an uncompressed image with a much smaller number of total pixels simply doesn’t hold up to even the most cursory analysis.

Even very low bit-rate consumer formats like HDV, when shooting HD, produce much better looking images than uncompressed SD, despite having far lower bit rates. (And HDV compression for 1080p footage is something like 85:1 or 90:1 compression. RedCode 28 is 12:1, and with a much more advanced algorithm.) You’re far better off capturing lots of detail and having a modern compression algorithm figure out what it can safely get rid of than you are capturing less detail in the first place, or capturing lots of detail but throwing lots of it away immediately using more primitive techniques like downscaling or subsampling chroma.

OK, so why doesn’t Red just record uncompressed 4K bayer, instead of compressed 4K bayer?

I’m quite confident in saying that given today’s technology, the Red One is a far more compelling product because of RedCode than it would be if it only shot uncompressed data. In fact, the camera wouldn’t be nearly as significant to the market if it didn’t shoot to a compressed format.

RedCode is what allows you to shoot to CF cards and Red Drives, rather than being tethered to a RAID the size of a mini-fridge. It’s what allows footage to be downloaded in a practical way on-set. It’s what allows you to play back footage from a single SATA or FireWire 800 hard drive, and store about 10 hours of footage per terabyte, instead of around 50 minutes.

Of course, you don’t get all of this for noting. The Red One probably could probably use less power and run cooler if it didn’t have to do 4K wavelet compression in real-time. And there is some loss of image quality vs. a totally uncompressed 4K image.

But the fact is, the Red One wouldn’t be a remotely practical camera for the vast majority of the projects it’s being used on, if Red had bought into the myth that professional recording must be uncompressed. RedCode is the major factor that makes the Red One usable by low-budget indies. Without RedCode, the data situation would simply be unmanageable for low-budget indies, both on-set and in post. Without Redcode this blog, which after all focuses on the technical issues surrounding low-budget indie filmmaking, probably wouldn’t talk about the Red One at all. As it is, that’s practically all we talk about….

We’re still here, we’ve just been rather busy. Regular updates should start again… about now.

See major new features and menu map. Camera owners can, of course, get it in the usual place.

The biggest enhancements are related to image quality. Red appears to have rather dramatically reduced compression artifacts and noise levels. 16:9 4K is also now far more practical to shoot and worth with, with the codec errors during recording supposedly fixed, and 16:9 4K QuickTime proxies now working.

Red has also introduced a new color space, REDSpace, that allows for better WYSIWYG exposure on-camera. Or, for those who work in a more technical way, you can now directly monitor raw, so you know exactly what the sensor is capturing.

Build 16 also introduces 1080p output in playback mode, though not for live monitoring, and many user interface conveniences and fix-ups, like user buttons that are now actually programmable, and the ability to adjust a range of parameters with the rotary encoder on the EVF.

Be warned, however, that Build 16 changes the format of R3D files. There are QuickTime plugins and RedAlert/RedLine builds for the new format, but not RedCine build that can work with Build 16 footage yet. So if your workflow relies on RedCine, you’ll probably want to hold off until that shows up (possibly as soon as next week).

Update: the Build 16 compatible version of Redcine has just been posted. Get it in the usual place.