After receiving my camera last week but having no Birger mount yet :-(, I managed to rent a lens and put it on my camera at the weekend for the first time. We fired it up and fed the output from the HDMI port to a HDTV. I was fairly impressed with what we were seeing but I thought the image was noisy compared to footage I have already seen posted on here, and a bit more video like in it's colour and light response. Bear in mind that I don't have any PC in my house that will install Redcine (ATI cards) and so it wasn't until Sunday night that I got a chance to see my footage on a friends mac at full quality and not from the preview port.
All I can say is my concerns vanished when I saw the first shot. I'm totally impressed with this camera. It's amazing. Clearly the preview port is just that ;-) a rough preview. I think over the last few years I've been one of the more cynical posters here. I've looked for the bad, seen where the image breaks down and generally been more critical or analytical of the images that have been posted. I've never been one of the 'awesome dude' crowd when we're shown a 1K downsampled image for analysis, and I don't give praise lightly.
Now I have my Red I will say you've made the camera I've been waiting for all my working life. It's the camera I thought I was getting as a 17 year old when I bought an S-VHS camera with all my savings and was depressed with how awful the image was. Red produces what it promises, cinema quality images. It's superb. The operation of the camera is relatively simple and user friendly. My short films will take on a whole new aesthetic thanks to Red. And whether or not it's comparable to a genesis or an F23 is pretty much irrelevant when you look at the size and cost of those cameras. We shot to Reddrive all weekend and it performed great, no dropped frames and we shot a lot of handheld work, some in a moving car. The output at 1080p seems sharper and cleaner than most quicktime movie trailers or blu-ray movies I've seen, and that's something I couldn't have wished for a few years ago.
For me whether this camera is 4K or not, is no concern. I'm not from Hollywood, we're a small crew of 3 making shorts film and we've been using a HVX/DVX up until now. At 2K scaled from 4K Red delivers an image unlike I've seen from any camera, it's unlikely we're going to need more than that. I'm sure some want 4K and I will use that for reframing fx work or keying, but ILM finishes at 2K and if it's good enough for them, well it's probably more than I deserve.
Granted I paid more than I did for my DVX, or my first S-VHS cam
but it's worth it. I only hope my short films can now do this camera justice.
Thanks to all the Red team for listening to the community and for taking the steps to make such a camera at a reasonable price when you could have charged 3 times as much and still been considered a bargain. I sincerely hope you continue to listen to the community and improve the features with each build.
Now that I've got that out of the way, here are some of my minor concerns or feedback on the camera and current build. We shot with build 14, and a Zeiss 1.3 prime.
Production pack : Very well made, but I will make a comment on the dovetail. It's loose for us when we mount to a tripod. We put washers on the bottom plate to try and stop the erosion problem on the holes. So far so good, but it still all wobbles. I hope Red will fix this. I don't want to spend another $600 on a new mounting plate. Question to Redusers out there, how are you mounting the camera without the dovetail? We tried putting it onto a Satcher and if you don't have the dovetail you have to completely remove the Red bottom plate to mount the camera onto the tripod quick release plate. Of course then you lose your rails and power/drives etc. Not very practical. I'm sure I'm missing something here. The grip handles don't seem to fully tighten either, but it didn't prove to be a big problem.
Skew: Not a killer but it's there. Main concern was on bright parts of the image. I sat in the passenger seat of a car whilst it was driven through the town at night (about 25mph). Parts of the image were wobbling like jelly. Especially street lights or anything bright on a dark image. I guess this is due to camera shake, and maybe I should expect that, so I shot out of the front windscreen to minimise left to right skew, but the bright lights again seemed fluid/wobbly. This was not a rough road but a fairly smooth town road. Like I say, its not a killer as that's not what I'll normally be doing with the camera, but it's worth pointing out and something hopefully Red can minimize. Shutter was 1/25th and 1/50th. I noticed it frame by frame on some daylight footage at 1/50th, but when viewed as a running sequence it was less concerning. Of course I'd like this fixed, but I have a feeling we will have to live with some skew.
This next point may be the lens we used, but on sky footage or a solid colour we did notice a magenta hue in the centre of the image and a green cast to towards the outer edge. I'll report again on this when I shoot with another lens.
False colour : A great feature, please give the option to assign this to user button 1. This is something I will toggle on and off all the time. Love it, but its buried in the menus at the moment. We shot at 320 ISO and the false colour said the skin tone was overexposed but playback and drag the exposure down to 100 and some of the information was recovered. Now when activating false colour at 100 ASA on the recorded image it showed this area as skin tone or normal exposure, not overexposed. Is this correct? Can false colour work off the Raw levels rather than the look applied to it?
Focus assist/magnify : We used this soley to focus and at 2K we hit sharp 95% of the time. Could you put a 1:1 focus magnification on here to help further?
Beta Build 14 feedback/issues :
Playback of recorded clips crashed frequently when cycling through clips on the RedDrive. We had about 100 clips and cycling back to clip number one takes some time. Most of the time it didn't make it because the camera locked up; when you re-power up the playback defaults to the last clip on the drive. I'd love to see in the future either being able to jump to the first clip by pushing the 'skip forward' button (instead of 200 pushes on skip back), or even better it would be amazing to have a thumbnail view on the LCD so we can scroll through the clips to view them and have a reference.
Record error was frequent if we had the focus magnify button checked while we were recording. Easy fix, don't do it but there might be instances where you'd want to view magnified when recording.
Record error was constant when recording a large overexposed area. For example, point the camera at an overexposed sky and it will trip 100% of the time and give an error.
Varispeed : It would be nice when you change the project settings from 2K to 3K for the varispeed to switch down to the maximum rate automatically. It would read 75fps when it was only capabale of 60fps and we'd get an error when trying to record. Also we had to enable and disable varispeed checkbox in order to get the framerates to extend. One time I switched to 2K but my speeds still read a maximum of 60fps when I rotated the dial (like it thought it was in 3K). After several exitings of the menu it did come up with the extra headroom to go to 75fps. A small glitch that eventually worked, but thought I'd point it out.
When you have both the Redrive connected and a CF card in the camera can you choose which one to record to? or does it always default to the Reddrive? It would be nice to choose so we don't have to disconnect the drive every time we want to record a few shots to CF.
I'd like to be able to customise the A,B and C buttons to jump to menu features I use most, as well as the two user buttons on the front. This is minor I guess but I'd love to be able to jump straight to my audio levels and adjust them.
Once again, I love my camera and I'm looking forward to the image improvements you've made in build 15.
thanks
Karl
All I can say is my concerns vanished when I saw the first shot. I'm totally impressed with this camera. It's amazing. Clearly the preview port is just that ;-) a rough preview. I think over the last few years I've been one of the more cynical posters here. I've looked for the bad, seen where the image breaks down and generally been more critical or analytical of the images that have been posted. I've never been one of the 'awesome dude' crowd when we're shown a 1K downsampled image for analysis, and I don't give praise lightly.
Now I have my Red I will say you've made the camera I've been waiting for all my working life. It's the camera I thought I was getting as a 17 year old when I bought an S-VHS camera with all my savings and was depressed with how awful the image was. Red produces what it promises, cinema quality images. It's superb. The operation of the camera is relatively simple and user friendly. My short films will take on a whole new aesthetic thanks to Red. And whether or not it's comparable to a genesis or an F23 is pretty much irrelevant when you look at the size and cost of those cameras. We shot to Reddrive all weekend and it performed great, no dropped frames and we shot a lot of handheld work, some in a moving car. The output at 1080p seems sharper and cleaner than most quicktime movie trailers or blu-ray movies I've seen, and that's something I couldn't have wished for a few years ago.
For me whether this camera is 4K or not, is no concern. I'm not from Hollywood, we're a small crew of 3 making shorts film and we've been using a HVX/DVX up until now. At 2K scaled from 4K Red delivers an image unlike I've seen from any camera, it's unlikely we're going to need more than that. I'm sure some want 4K and I will use that for reframing fx work or keying, but ILM finishes at 2K and if it's good enough for them, well it's probably more than I deserve.
Granted I paid more than I did for my DVX, or my first S-VHS cam
but it's worth it. I only hope my short films can now do this camera justice.Thanks to all the Red team for listening to the community and for taking the steps to make such a camera at a reasonable price when you could have charged 3 times as much and still been considered a bargain. I sincerely hope you continue to listen to the community and improve the features with each build.
Now that I've got that out of the way, here are some of my minor concerns or feedback on the camera and current build. We shot with build 14, and a Zeiss 1.3 prime.
Production pack : Very well made, but I will make a comment on the dovetail. It's loose for us when we mount to a tripod. We put washers on the bottom plate to try and stop the erosion problem on the holes. So far so good, but it still all wobbles. I hope Red will fix this. I don't want to spend another $600 on a new mounting plate. Question to Redusers out there, how are you mounting the camera without the dovetail? We tried putting it onto a Satcher and if you don't have the dovetail you have to completely remove the Red bottom plate to mount the camera onto the tripod quick release plate. Of course then you lose your rails and power/drives etc. Not very practical. I'm sure I'm missing something here. The grip handles don't seem to fully tighten either, but it didn't prove to be a big problem.
Skew: Not a killer but it's there. Main concern was on bright parts of the image. I sat in the passenger seat of a car whilst it was driven through the town at night (about 25mph). Parts of the image were wobbling like jelly. Especially street lights or anything bright on a dark image. I guess this is due to camera shake, and maybe I should expect that, so I shot out of the front windscreen to minimise left to right skew, but the bright lights again seemed fluid/wobbly. This was not a rough road but a fairly smooth town road. Like I say, its not a killer as that's not what I'll normally be doing with the camera, but it's worth pointing out and something hopefully Red can minimize. Shutter was 1/25th and 1/50th. I noticed it frame by frame on some daylight footage at 1/50th, but when viewed as a running sequence it was less concerning. Of course I'd like this fixed, but I have a feeling we will have to live with some skew.
This next point may be the lens we used, but on sky footage or a solid colour we did notice a magenta hue in the centre of the image and a green cast to towards the outer edge. I'll report again on this when I shoot with another lens.
False colour : A great feature, please give the option to assign this to user button 1. This is something I will toggle on and off all the time. Love it, but its buried in the menus at the moment. We shot at 320 ISO and the false colour said the skin tone was overexposed but playback and drag the exposure down to 100 and some of the information was recovered. Now when activating false colour at 100 ASA on the recorded image it showed this area as skin tone or normal exposure, not overexposed. Is this correct? Can false colour work off the Raw levels rather than the look applied to it?
Focus assist/magnify : We used this soley to focus and at 2K we hit sharp 95% of the time. Could you put a 1:1 focus magnification on here to help further?
Beta Build 14 feedback/issues :
Playback of recorded clips crashed frequently when cycling through clips on the RedDrive. We had about 100 clips and cycling back to clip number one takes some time. Most of the time it didn't make it because the camera locked up; when you re-power up the playback defaults to the last clip on the drive. I'd love to see in the future either being able to jump to the first clip by pushing the 'skip forward' button (instead of 200 pushes on skip back), or even better it would be amazing to have a thumbnail view on the LCD so we can scroll through the clips to view them and have a reference.
Record error was frequent if we had the focus magnify button checked while we were recording. Easy fix, don't do it
but there might be instances where you'd want to view magnified when recording.Record error was constant when recording a large overexposed area. For example, point the camera at an overexposed sky and it will trip 100% of the time and give an error.
Varispeed : It would be nice when you change the project settings from 2K to 3K for the varispeed to switch down to the maximum rate automatically. It would read 75fps when it was only capabale of 60fps and we'd get an error when trying to record. Also we had to enable and disable varispeed checkbox in order to get the framerates to extend. One time I switched to 2K but my speeds still read a maximum of 60fps when I rotated the dial (like it thought it was in 3K). After several exitings of the menu it did come up with the extra headroom to go to 75fps. A small glitch that eventually worked, but thought I'd point it out.
When you have both the Redrive connected and a CF card in the camera can you choose which one to record to? or does it always default to the Reddrive? It would be nice to choose so we don't have to disconnect the drive every time we want to record a few shots to CF.
I'd like to be able to customise the A,B and C buttons to jump to menu features I use most, as well as the two user buttons on the front. This is minor I guess but I'd love to be able to jump straight to my audio levels and adjust them.
Once again, I love my camera and I'm looking forward to the image improvements you've made in build 15.
thanks
Karl
