Jim's Last Post - Send him off with some pictures of Red in action.

[Phil Holland]

Page 11 doesn't have any images on it yet and there are now final production model Epic Dragons in the wild.

I received my Epic Dragon on 12.16.2013. Got it home, built up the camera, attached the PL Motion Mount and went out into the yard.



As a child I always thought that if you looked at leaves close up you'd see something like what dragon skin could look like. Felt right for that sort of thing to be the first shots out of the new camera. And you know because of all this dynamic range and new tech, just for fun, shoot into the sun and let those highlights go

 

[Nick Morrison]

As a child I always thought that if you looked at leaves close up you'd see something like what dragon skin could look like. Felt right for that sort of thing to be the first shots out of the new camera. And you know because of all this dynamic range and new tech, just for fun, shoot into the sun and let those highlights go

Gorgeous shot Phil. The range, tonality and sharpness is just staggering. Every time you post Dragon footage it looks TOTALLY NEW to me. Like a new format. And nothing like Epic at all. You are really getting me pumped for what 2014 has in store for us.

Thanks for taking care of us all in 2013, btw. You really are the "Mayor of Reduser".

 

[paulherrin]

that's so cool, phil... awesome perspective

 

[Russ Fill]

Thank you Jim, Thank you RED.3shot widerA009_C124_0830G7.0000418.jpgA good birthdayIMG_2113 smaller.jpg70 Islands Palau.jpgBoat at sea S25.0000340.jpgDay at the office.jpgGecko bamboo.0005031.jpgSmoking skull 30 desat.0000419.jpg

 

[Ian Laurie]

This thread made me kinda sad today. I miss all jim's spoilers, life advice, and general positive attitude. Never got to meet him in person, but am greatful for my beautiful red one delivered what seems like forever ago and is still shooting beautiful images. If a little crazy. So here is one of me hanging out the sunroof of a moving taxi cab in Beirut oh the things we do for fun.

 

[Chad Bonanno]

Shooting Tempest Freerunning "Takeover 2" Epic-X, Glidecam, Ruby 14-24

And This One....

 

[Lee Kelly]

Mine breathes underwater.
Cant wait til it breathes FIRE, underwater!

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[Victor Frosteryd]

First time shooting with the EPIC.

 

[Mikael Lubtchansky]

Mine breathes underwater.
Cant wait til it breathes FIRE, underwater!

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Nice image... Looks like you're flying with an EPIC propeller

 

[Phil Holland]

It's been over two years since I started this thread.

I've taken delivery of a RED Weapon 6K Forged months ago and RED has announced 5 (five!) DSMC[SUP]2[/SUP] style camera bodies in 2015. Added a couple important RED Epic Dragon BTS grabs during the last 2+ years as well as a couple of very recent shots of Weapon to the first post.

It's the holiday season. It's also been some great years of shooting all over the world. Thanks again.

Feel free to contribute.

 

[Aaron michaels]

I will say this...Someone had an idea to create sport cars and people talked down about them but now they are classic's. Someone that we were waiting on stepped up and created the digital camera vs film and now we have classic cameras that's still on the market. History was made because these people didn't back down from creating their dreams. Now we have the chance to create our dreams with your inventions. Old school make thing happen and new school complains after great things have been done. We never leave the battle field until what we wanted to accomplish has been done. Only the real inventors and creator's have the balls to stand up and say I'm going to change the world and make my mark..Thank you for having the brass to do what they said couldn't be done. I'm Proud of you and the whole Red Team brother.

 

[Yusuf Thakur]

Thank You Jim & Red for a 16 Year Journey with Red Cameras.
One has aged with them.
The pictures tell the Story from the First Red One in 2008.

 

[lumiere]

NAB 2006. RED ONE ANNOUNCEMENT.

Photos credit: Graeme Nattress


Fred Lumiere and Jarred Land



Fred Lumiere and Ted Schilowitz



Fred Lumiere is about to announce the RED ONE price. Jim, Misha, Mark Pederson, Ted Schilowitz in the background.




Announcing the $17,500 price for the RED ONE!

 

[Zack Birlew]

Man, I think my brother and I are cut off just to the right a little more in those photos! Feels like yesterday!

 

[lumiere]

Man, I think my brother and I are cut off just to the right a little more in those photos! Feels like yesterday!

Zack, here’s a different angle. Do you see you guys!

 

[Zack Birlew]

Zack, here’s a different angle. Do you see you guys!

Yes! When the camera pans at 0:33 just right near the end that's me on the right in the brown with the backpack straps, that was the year when I was cradling my modified dual L flash bracket handle rig for my Canon GL1! Btw, anybody that uses compact handle grip rigs now, I was asked about my little setup all over NAB and the next year everybody had handle grip rigs, you're all welcome and that's the power of NAB!

P.S. (Yes, I know I should have patented that or something but I was a college kid and thought it was too generic an idea, oh well!)

 

[lumiere]

Graeme Nattress took this video. You can see the back of his wife with the white t-shirt and Nattress plugins logo

 

[Brian Timmons]

Brings back memories.
I wasn't there at NAB but I do remember reading this announcement (while in a grungy edit bay at a certain 3 letter network) and going onto the then very basic
Red.com site to read more about the camera. April 2006 was definitely the period I took notice of RED as a potential option.

Would pre-order my RED One a year later (May 2007) and take delivery yet another year and later (July 2008).
I got a lot out of my investment in that camera.

I believe REDuser (former 4K Ninja) Blair S. Paulson is also in the front with the tan dress jacket.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

 

[Phil Holland]

2006

Blair is an OG. Love that. Awesome dude as well. Since we're strolling back memory lane.

You lads are bubbling up some nostalgia and I'm waiting on my barber. I feel like a lot is lost on the modern generation of filmmakers of just where we were in the 2000s when RED teased and launched the RED One.

I wasn't at the show, but I was tuned in and paying attention. And fortunately I have a semi-decent recollection of this exact time. I was about 7-8 years into my career in the film industry and film was still the primary medium. However, we wrapped on Superman Returns which was shot on the Panavision Genesis, which at the time was the only S35-ish solution at just a smidge smaller than Super 35mm 3-perf, but also 1080p. That moment in particular was when digital was really on the radar for the film industry. I could write a book about the conversations surrounding film and digital during this exact time.

We occasionally used cameras like the Thomson Viper, which was a 2/3" sensor, 10-bit, 1080p. But there were a lot of hangups in the workflow and general quality. And then literally everything else at this time were 2/3" or 1/2" 3X CCD cameras from Sony or Panasonic. All of which were much more expensive and didn't captivate the film industry. Speaking to both companies at that the time, 4K was a distant plan. Mostly targeting 2013-2016.

Though somewhat comical now, the industry really wanted at least a Super 35mm sensor with good color reproduction, dynamic range, and non-video-ish image processing. This was mainly related to sharpening and codec related issues along the way. But yep, the desire for a larger sensor for both the aesthetic reasons as well as decent lens choices was very much apparent.

Interestingly enough, the digital still cameras were doing good things. We had APS-C, APS-H, and Full Frame 135 sensors. We were going to get there one way or another. And notably, the still cameras were of higher quality compared to early digital video systems. The 1Ds took many by surprise.

We had one additional tease of where things were going, and I do credit Panasonic for this a lot. The HVX200 video camera, fixed lens, non-square pixel, smaller sensor, not exactly great color was released in 2005. It was really the first compact HD video camera to record to solid state media, but there was a lot of room for improvement in so many directions.

Sony released the F35, CCD 1080p, but Super 35mm in 2008. Much loved by many, but also after the RED One. Panasonic's first Super 35mm sensor was Varicam 35 in 2014 and that was 4K, 7 years after RED released the RED One. Sony accelerated their plans with the F65 in 2011, which was a 5.7K camera, though marketed as an 8K/4K system w/ interpolation. I liked the F65 despite it's size. That was two years after RED Epic 5K hit the world.

Canon and Nikon didn't have that presence in the motion picture industry to that degree, so it was going to be interesting to see how they responded. Canon in particular had really popular DV cameras in the XL series, but nothing beyond that really in this space. Nikon announced their D90 camera in August 2008, DX format, 720p video. Canon announced their full frame 135 format 5D Mark II in September 2008, about 1 month later, with 1080p video.

Arri was involved here with the D series cameras in development and production from 2005 onward until the eventual release of the Alexa in 2010 building much on where the D series camera from. The D20 and D21 featured the same sensor pixel pitch that the eventual Alexa featured. I think interestingly, the RED One landed and the Epic came out about a year before the Alexa. And really in the motion picture world it was a battle of these two systems with the Sony F55 and Panasonic Varicam 35 somewhat also throwing jabs, with the F55 being pretty popular globally for sure. Sony is a very, very big company.

Rewinding a bit to 2006. At my studio we made the switch from scanning Super 35mm at 4K to 6K, going from our custom and the first 4K film scanner to the Northlight 6K, which is a very elegant machine. The RED One at $17,500 was an astronomical and economical proposition if the image quality was there. Our film scanning setup was well over $1mil when taking into account the scanner, rerez hosts, and service contract per scanner.

2007/2008 I got my first working experience with RED One material and then the camera itself. In the film studio world nobody at this time had a RED workflow, most were really anti-digital despite it popping up more regularly. Semi-ironically, I built a red colored PC in my office to ingest and process R3D footage into our studio's proprietary RLL format. Speed of workflow was relevant here as film scanning was around 27-ish seconds, brought down to about 6-9 seconds. Laser recording was similar, the Lux's at 26-ish seconds, then the ARRILASER was much faster, around 7 seconds. Processing RED day one on a big system was around 30 seconds a frame to convert to 16-bit TIF or RLL.

I was still tied to the studio, so camera ownership of this level was not on my radar just yet. I mainly worked on Panavision films for the first 12 years. But, as the bug grew, and I decided to go out on my own, RED proved to be an obvious choice for my work. Though I couldn't do an Epic initially, I jumped in with Scarlet in 2011. The following year, upgraded to Epic and bought a second camera. So on and so forth from there.

Canon was the question mark here for me. And for those who remember November 2011 with the much anticipated Cinema EOS launch as well as the Scarlet launch, it a crazy day. But it was similarly a 1080p versus 4K sort of moment. The 5.9K C700 took a little longer than expect to get to the market, but their C500 and C500 MK II have been the best production camera offerings to date IMO, outside of rather powerful mirrorless bodies.

I met a lot of the early adopters of the RED One along the way, from owner/operators, to smaller rental people, and larger rental houses. We all faced the similar hurdles of the era.

Looking back at it, RED's real innovation was putting everything together into a 4K digital cinema camera that was production ready at a compelling price with a decent sized sensor and image quality. Plus it was a camera people wanted to approach. They did this about 5-8 years ahead of what the other larger players. There were other systems that didn't really make the cut a few times along the way. RED also developed the full post workflow very effectively. When we got wider support for GPU Acceleration, the whole industry changed overnight as renders were significantly faster. Prior to that, proxies and editorial workflows were very much necessary for larger projects. It is wild, absolutely wild, that we have realtime playback of 8K REDCODE RAW and that transpired in 2016. Moderately insane to how time consuming it all was prior to this.

I still like to highlight the Dragon sensor release though. In Hollywood, for those who haven't dabbled in digital, but were still film focused, it was the sensor tech that turned many heads for about two years. And it was 6K resolution in a small Epic body. Digital on nearly every technical merit has surpassed film as of 2024, but I like to remember the concept of a digital film alternative, which RED positioned themselves as. The primary medium of our industry did change along the way, but the market and work grew many, many times in this span of time as well.

 

[lumiere]

OK Boys, this is as far back as it goes other thank the email exchanges Jim and I had back in 2004. This is the extensive slide deck / business plan I drafted after my first trip to Japan when I recruited Ted. This one is for the history books. I called it the O-CAM:

The O-CAM Business Plan