Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 19, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
After years of announcements, the time has now come at NAB 2007: The Red One 4K camera is ready for series production. Delivery is to begin at the end of the month. However, those who have not preordered must expect a wait of at least one year.
With an active area of 4,520 by 2,540 pixels, the camera’s chip has an aspect ratio of 16:9. The data is stored with 12-bit color depth (linear) on the Red Drive, a small hard drive enclosure that can be attached to the camera. The Red Drive contains two SATA hard drives connected as a RAID0. These hard drives are fast enough to record the full 4K RAW data stream. This is made possible by the Red codec developed especially for the camera. It offers “visually lossless” compression. This means that image information is in fact lost – but it is not supposed to be visible.
Anyone who wants can also record the uncompressed RAW data stream, which is around 360 MByte/s. This naturally requires somewhat faster drives, which are connected via 10-GBit Ethernet. The necessary module is available as an option.
The camera can record up to 120 full frames per second, which increases the data stream accordingly. The Red One also records in 2K and smaller formats. In this case, only a smaller part of the chip is simply used.
At the trade show, a test film could be seen that Peter Jackson filmed in New Zealand with the two alpha versions of the camera. For the demo film, he used lenses from Cooke (Cooke S4) and an Angenieux Optimo 24-290. Jackson performed the final grading for the test film in Quantel Pablo. With the camera, buyers receive the Redcine software, which they can use to postprocess the RAW data on a Mac and perform an initial color correction.
The lens range announced by Red is not yet complete: So far, a 300mm prime lens and – from July – an 18-50mm lens (f2.8) are available. The latter costs 6,500 US dollars and will be available from July.
The camera itself still costs 17,000 US dollars. To have a production-ready camera, one must expect around 25,000 US dollars. Prices for the individual components are listed on the Red website (see link below).
Further links:
- Red
