Gavin Greenwalt
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LUTs are the bestest. You can apply them in Premiere and AE (And Davcini, and Nuke and everything else). They don't currently tag along with the R3D because RED has no user defined LUT workflow besides RMD. It would be pretty trivial though theoretically speaking to include the filename in the RMD or even the entire CUBE LUT inside of the RMD sidecar. LUTs are generally pretty small and you would only need one per clip.
People shouldn't feel that unfamiliar with LUTS, every single RED user is already a 3D and 2D LUT user. An example of a 3DLUT that everyone already uses is REDColor. With user definable 3D LUTs you could create a 3DLUT that was somewhere in between REDColor 3 and DragonColor taking your favorite aspects of each and creating your own.
You could use it creatively like that SinCity shot (although both people's skin would probably be in color, not just the Girl's). I was reading a thing yesterday that Spock from Star Trek was supposed to be in red makeup but on black and white TVs he looked like he was wearing black face so they went with regular makeup. You could use it like Schindler's list to just pop red on a rose and preview your B&W lighting. In fact speaking of B&W, there is a big difference between Monochrome RED's sensitivity and simply desaturating a color Dragon image. With a 3D LUT you can very closely emulate Monochrome Dragon in your color Dragon (I've done just such a LUT). And different black and white film stocks had very different response curves. Some B&W stocks were more sensitive to blue, some more sensitive to green etc. Taking an image and desaturating it isn't how you want to go from Color -> Black and White since you lose all of that spectral information.
You could also use it for technical applications such as starting with DragonColor but then also get a custom false color that just highlights clipped values as solid red. And you can use it for less specific color correction like FilmConvert which gives a pretty good fascimile of Kodak, Fuji or Polaroid film stocks. The sky is the limit really (And how good your color separation is from the sensor) if you really like the look of Alexa, within the confines of the Dragon Sensor's capabilities you could apply a DragonColor -> AlexaColor LUT that outputs a nearly identical Alexa image. Handy on convincing a DP who isn't RED friendly or if you are mixing cameras on a shoot.
It's handy with VFX if you're planning on shooting someone on Greenscreen but then comping them onto a white Cyc wall, you can create a 3D LUT that takes all of the green and makes it white while de-spilling. That way your client is looking at them on dirty-white instead of green, which is great for product shoots so that their product isn't turning green. It can inform how color looks etc. The only thing a 3D LUT can't do is apply a correction within a window. So no isolating the effect in screen space.
How you use it in post is kind of up to you. You might create all of your dailies with a 3DLUT applied and then just use it as reference for the colorist like a CDL. Or you might completely trash it if you were just using it as a false color exposure guide. Or you might want something like FilmConvert and record directly to DNxHD using an SDI recorder that you give to the client at the end of the shoot--but that looks like it was shot on Kodak.
Mark's right about this, but to be super technically pedantic generally it's not "THIS in = THIS out" since LUTs can't store all 10Billion colors. So for most colors it's interpolated between several key color samples. There are a few times where this crops up as problematic since someone might use linear interpolation and someone else might use cubic interpolation and then the LUT doesn't quite perfectly match. But that's the exception not the rule and only on extreme LUTs.
And the same goes for you Jarred and Brent. :-D
