A red future

Digital Studio catches up with director of photography Stuart Gosling who hails the Red One camera as the best piece of kit that the production world has seen in a long time.

This is the new sensation in the camera world; it has managed to ruffle the feathers of some of the big brand camera manufacturers and has brought a smile to the lips of many cinematographers.

For under US $18,000, the Red One camera brings a whole new dimension to the world of digital acquisition with its 4K resolution - an achievement that gives it an edge over even the very high-end High Definition cameras that cost more than ten times its price and cannot deliver the same resolution or the same high quality.

Director of photography Stuart Gosling will endorse that. As a cameraman who has always extolled the virtues of 35mm and done several of the United Kingdom's most prestigious music videos, Gosling had the chance to tinker with the Red One on five different jobs, and his verdict - "Fantastic!"

"We initially did a short film and then, a small commercial," says Gosling.

"They were very minor, experimental kind of jobs. Most of my work is usually big budget, music videos based primarily out of London. I mentioned the Red to Cynthia Lole, at Universal Records in London, who has often hired me to do the big 35mm kind of shoots. I told her that if she ever had a low budget project, where they needed to shoot on tape or HD and still get the kind of glossy look that 35mm can provide, we should shoot on the Red."

The opportunity came soon enough when Lole only had a small budget of US $50,000 to shoot for the solo debut of Jazz artist Jonathan Ansell, an ex-G4 singer'.

Gosling was called in to shoot on the Red One camera.

"It was the perfect time. This was in December. I had already shot a couple of things with the Red so I was comfortable with it and knew I could deliver the goods. It was a very fast day and I treated the camera just as I would a 35mm camera. My lighting and exposure and composition methods were exactly the same, and as usual I relied mainly on my instincts to move quickly and not shoot multiple takes," he explains.

"What makes the Red One special is that it gives you the depth of field (dof) and the perspective that 35mm can give you. This is something that we have always strived for, when we shoot digitally. What determines the dof is the size of the sensor. Even on most high-end HD cameras, the size of the sensor is about the size of your thumbnail as opposed to the Red One's sensor, which is as large as one of the 35mm frames. This makes all the difference to the dof and the quality of the footage," explains Gosling.

Additionally, the Red One camera can capture images in 4k - a feat that no HD camera has been able to boast so far.

As a result, even Hollywood has picked up on it.

Peter Jackson's latest movie Crossing The Line, for instance, was shot on Red prototypes.

The Red One captures images in 4K, 3K and 2K resolutions with frame rates from 1-75 frames per second depending on the resolution selected. All it does is act like a scanner and record raw data.

It captures very high images in a data file and after that, the end user can manipulate it to their taste. This completely digital acquisition pipeline produces beautiful, clean images that can be used in every production from feature and Indie films, advertising/commercials and marketing to HD broadcast and HD digital signage/display.

To change to HD or SD formats, one merely has to downconvert the images. Any existing P/L mount S16mm or 35mm lens can be used with this camera.

The Red One has been designed to support all current HDTV and Digital Cinema distribution master standards, from which an NTSC or PAL standard definition version can be obtained via standard down conversion techniques.

READERS' COMMENTS

MORE FROM ARABIANBUSINESS.COM