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Shooting a Feature with the RED One:
A Producer’s Experience with the First Generation Camera

by Kevin Desmond

[Editor’s Note: The following article deals with production on a film with an $80K-$100K budget. While this is a bit more than $30K price point here, it’s certainly close enough to give you a really good idea of the challenges and benefits of the RED in a fairly low budget.]

When I first heard about the Red camera (a digital motion picture camera with a 4k image, all the bells and whistles and a T2 style alloy body) in 2006, I wanted to put my $1000 down to reserve it for myself. Then I got skeptical and thought: this is a start-up by Jim Jannard, the guy who owns Oakley.   What if it never comes to fruition and what if they can’t deliver? Being an independent producer/filmmaker whose last film had a $14K budget, $1000 bucks is a lot. Well, I was wrong! Even though it’s still in its infancy, the camera delivers the same goods as its counterparts that cost 15 to 20 times more.

First off I want to say that this is an article highlights my Red camera experience as a producer and what you should expect as a low budget filmmaker, and not a technical review. Also, when I produced the feature “Anything for You,” we were using a very early version of the software -- build 11. Now they are up to build 14. I was one of few producers shooting features on the first generation of the RED. I will start with my experience, and then go into quality & cost factors and conclude with realistic recommendations.

My Experience
I was initially hired as a Co-producer by a first-time director (who I had produced a multi-lingual travel show for). Another Co-producer, who had no clue and basically did nothing for the project, was eventually (and justifiably) fired, thus making me Producer. Then after weighing our budget, time and logistical challenges, and theatrical quality desired, I convinced the director and his DP to go with RED instead of super 16 because of the potential cost and the time savings. Obviously, with minor exceptions, shooting digital is a huge time saver vs. film. You can shoot as much as you want and don’t have to worry about cost over-runs in film stock, loading times, and processing.

With that said, I will do this a little backwards and start with a few negative experiences before moving to the positive. I have broken down my article into bullets for the attention span–impaired. ADD is quite prevalent amongst filmmakers in general, so do not roll your eyes at me.

Initial Setback: Technical Glitch with Early Codec
We shot in December in NJ on an 18-day shoot where the temperature averaged 20 degrees. But this was just one of many logistical challenges. While we were getting the Red camera from LA, our DP would only arrive from overseas 1 day before the shoot (talk about the stresses of producing!). This resulted in us having no test time with a beta version of the Red running a version of a firmware that had a codec error!

During our shoot, this error resulted in the camera dropping out of record mode due to areas of high detail. In our case we were shooting trees with barren branches or into a overcast sky.

Issue 1: Needs Lots of Light
The first crisis we encountered was that the camera has an f-stop of 3, meaning it requires a good amount of light. Indoors, we were trying to shoot at 320 ASA but given the rainy (and snowy) weather we were not able to place the one (very hot) 4K HMI outside so we shot indoors with the smaller tungsten lights we had. You can get a clean image at 500 ASA as far as I can tell on the 2K monitor, but do not know how much noise will be projected when we do a 35 transfer.

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