seeing Red

The relationship between the virtual and the real is at the heart of contemporary life. We believe things we see in the media, it persuades us to believe things of which we have no personal experience. If seeing is believing then on what level do we accept the things we see on TV and on the net as real. With this in mind after reading hundreds of online pages about the revolutionary Red camera it was interesting to see and test one first hand.
It actually is pretty much as has been described, a digital camera with a computer welded to it. It appears rugged and a little stockier than I expected with avery un arri easthetic of its own.
After dynamic range testing using widely varying exposures on a gray card adjacent to a black and white card I have come to the conclusion that the ISO is 320 as stated. Using the old Ansel Adams zone system things fits beautifully. With middle gray at zone V at 320, the last tone with detail is zone IX with zone X being pure with ( actually zone IX 1/2 seems to be pure white too) . Interestingly zone O is the last shadow exposure with tonal difference from black, however I'm going to say It's zone I and allow a little latitude.
Actually I'd be pretty happy shooting at 640 iso giving you detail from zone I to X with acceptable grain. This would be great with night scenes allowing a little more highlight detail in lights in frame etc.
This was tested under tungsten light fully corrected with an 80A (blue filter), actually slightly more than corrected as the native sensor setting is 5000K not the standard 5500K. I additionally tested it without the 80A to see how this affected noise. Well without the filter the blacks are definitly noisier as the blue channel ( the traditionally noisiest channel) obviously needs to be driven up out of being underexposed to regain neutral gray. This produces a non organic yellow / green digital shadow grain not fatal but not great. This issue isn't widely discussed because you generally need more exposure when shooting under tungsten and no one wants to loose 2 stops with an 80a. My compromise that I tested is to use an 82c which is closer to 2/3 of a stop and seems to be pretty close to the shadow grain of the fully corrected version. Now this is on a first generation camera number 65? from the farsighted and helpful Lemac in Melbourne, I'm guessing I'll have to test speed, noise and dynamic range with the new version of the camera which may or may not arrive while we are shooting. Any way the camera we have is pretty great.
My only current reservation is with the record times on the CF cards, a whole 4 1/2 minutes each. this is pretty hard to get used to after 45mins per tape on HDCAM or DVCAM or even 10 mins on a 400ft 16mm mag. When we are out on location we are going to back up onto a pair of Nexto Ultra back up units. These are basically laptop drives in a tiny case with a CF card reader 3 line screen and one button to backup and verify.
Actually there is another odd thing about the camera , when shooting the fan runs down to very quiet, but not silent, also the LCD monitor emits a quiet high pitched whistle , stangely onto from its back , I'm interested to hear the opinion of Chris Roland our sound recordist.
The camera is actually pretty easy to use , the menus are not like the labrynthine Sony Hdcam menus, with much of the image decision making occuring in post, it really means the camera just has the basic essentials,
speed, shutter timecode playback formatting etc. For the money nothing comes close.
The best part about comprehensive testing is that once its done you don't have to think about the science of things so much, just start looking at how things actually look, which situations create those intangibly better or more interesting looking images. More testing next week. Then shooting in 2 weeks. Busy times.
Marcus