So… we haven’t been posting much in the last few weeks because we’ve been too busy running around with the camera. The good news is, we’ve learned a lot, and we’ve shot some great footage, and over the next couple of weeks we’re going to be sharing a lot of that.

This first post is going to discuss some physical aspects of working with the camera.

A full Red rig is a bit heavier than the 10 pound body weight might lead you to expect. Red’s accessories are cast steel, and pretty heavily build. They’re solid, but not exactly light. That said, we have managed to build rigs down to 17 pounds with Red Drives (not including lens, matte box, or follow focus, which introduce too many variables). Using CF can knock that down to 14 or 15.

We’ve found the most practical way to get a lightweight rig for handheld use is to eschew all the mounting hardware on the bottom of the camera, and the bottom rails — toss two top mounts, 12″ rails, the top handle (and top handle extension) on the top of the camera, along with a universal mount out in front of the forward top mount to attach the LCD screen to. Another universal mount hangs the Red Cradle off the back of the camera, with enough space to still reach in any use the controls (you don’t really need to see the screen on the back of the camera if you have the LCD screen attached). You can simply sit the camera on your shoulder and reach your arm around to hold it there by the top handle — works pretty well.

On the other end of the spectrum, with bottom rails, lens, matte box, follow focus, etc. a full rig can easily weigh over 30 pounds. Substantially more with a large zoom lens.

As far as Red’s mounting hardware goes, we’re generally happy overall, though the bottom plate shoulder dovetail could use some work. As has been widely reported, the bottom plate + shoulder dovetail wobbles a bit on a tripod. And it’s so heavy, and provides so little padding, that unless you absolutely need bottom rails when going handheld, it’s much easier to just leave it off for handheld configurations as well. As such, we’ll probably replace these parts with Element Technica hardware. (It’s not surprising that the ET stuff is a bit better… it costs a fair bit more.) We’ll probably pick up ET’s aluminum rods as well, to cut weight down more. We’re on the East Coast, where it’s not that hard to find 19mm gear, so we’re planning to stick with 19mm to maintain compatibility with the Red Cradle and QuickPlate.

Up next: using camera features

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 09:52 PM and is filed under Red. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.