RED rides again

Last week we got hold of a RED camera kit and lenses for testing for an upcoming indie feature film shoot i will DP. The gear was courtesy of Lemac Films in Sydney, who currently have two RED kits and are expecting a few more soon.

I was interested in having a look at the latest update, known as 'Build 14', and Lemac boys updated their camera to 14 when we arrived, which only took a couple of minutes. A few things have changed since i shot with the camera last year and have really helped the camera along as a viable option for a feature film shoot.

We tested the new 3K mode at 50 fps; recording to the CF card and switching to the REDDRIVE - when you change the shooting mode from 4K to 3K you must reformat the record media, ie 4K and 3K material cannot exist on the same media. So a good method may be to record the bulk of the film at 4K on the drives and put slo-mo 3K footage on the CF cards. Audio can be recorded and played back in the headphones; and the startup time seems to be halved, about 45 secs. All in all some good improvements. Simultaneous video outputs are still not enabled but apparently this will be fixed in Build 15, due in March.

We will be staging a location test shoot soon.