Cinematography: painting the town red

A new company launched a camera and started a revolution. Encore looks at how Red has changed the industry and forced the bigger companies to compete.

For a business founded in 1999, the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company has come a long way – and gained a substantial market share in the process, competing head-to- head with the more established players like ARRI, Sony and Panavision.
Founder Jin Jannard wanted to revolutionise the camera industry, which he did with the release of the Red One model in 2007, with the basic body (featuring the Mysterium sensor) costing U$17,500.
Why was Jannard the first one offer such an attractive package? The answer is not just about technology.
“The bigger companies had a stranglehold on the market and they didn’t have to make digital technology affordable,” said Seth Larney from Chaotic Pictures, a Sydney company offering an end-to-end solution for Red, from rental to post-production – with Assimilate Scratch grading and finishing suites, able to handle native Red One footage.

CONQUERING THE MARKET
Australian cinematographer Simon Duggan ACS (Knowing, Die Hard 4.0) believes that the strength of Red and its large share of the digital market is the result of high quality image capture at a very low cost, as well as the creation of an online support community that allowed them to gather feedback from hundreds of cinematographers to incorporate into their research and development.
Panavision’s Paul Jackson agrees: “They brought out a camera that is along the lines of the Genesis and Sony’s F23, expensive cameras, and the way they priced it made it affordable for a lot of people. There are many operators now with their own Red cameras, and that’s certainly changed the market.”
Daniel Graetz, founder of the boutique film and TV services company Graetz Media and producer/ cinematographer of the upcoming Corey Baudinette documentary about the Australian film industry
Masterminds: The State of the Union, is a Red enthusiast, although he admits there were additional costs on top of the starting price (“you still have to spend a bit of money to have a functioning kit”), but even then it was still a fraction of what others cost.
Graetz first heard of the Red One camera when it was a rumour on the website HD for Indies, and then saw a non-working prototype at NAB 2006. He didn’t have money to put down a deposit straight away, but by the time the camera was finally released, it didn’t take him long to get one. It is registered as the 339th ever sold and one of the first in Queensland.
“It started a steep learning curve that took a while. Red cameras up until this point have been almost like prototypes, and the people who bought them were committed to seeing things change dramatically over time.
“A simple firmware update can give you effectively a brand new camera. Some updates have transformed the camera’s capabilities, giving it new frame rates, resolutions and dynamic range, so you make an investment but it increases in value over time. That’s one of the big benefits of Red,” he explained.

Graetz recently returned from the US with his upgraded #339 Red One camera featuring the new Mysterium-X sensor. Abbreviated simply as MX, it offers 13.5. stops of measured dynamic range, a new rating of ISO800, noise-free results as high as ISO2000, 5ms sensor read-reset time (down from 9ms on the first Mysterium sensor) and improved OLPF filter removing issues with IR pollution.
“That turned it completely into a new camera. The amount of sensitivity has changed; you can shoot with next to no light and you’d still get completely usable footage that can go up on a 50-foot screen at a cinema,” said Graetz.
When discussing the benefits of digital, Simon Duggan says that the new image sensors that Red, ARRI, Sony, Aaton and Panavision have or will be incorporating into their new generation systems,
have made digital solutions similar to the latest high speed film stocks, with their 13+ steps of dynamic range and twice the sensitivity of their predecessors.
“If film is the benchmark, digital camera systems with the latest sensors and formats are becoming technically and visually very close,” said Duggan. The benefits are also expanding into postproduction
workflows.
“There are also more streamlined workflowoptions, such as ARRI’s Alexa that outputs raw files as well as Pro Res Quicktime files, and the Red One codec is now also incorporated into many editing and grading systems,” he explained.
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS
If the digital revolution has been about the democratisation of screen production, Red has further taken it to the masses. But it is precisely because of that pricing strategy that, even when updates and accessories have made it a serious contender, some still see the Red One as a ‘cheap’ alternative compared to other brands, a matter that Chaotic Pictures co-director Lisa Shaunessy believes is just perception. According to her, the high-scale level of adoption has been greater in Hollywood, with big studio pictures such as The Book of Eli, District 9 and Knowing all shot on the Red.
“Here, in some ways there is not much awareness that it is as high quality as the high-end digital cameras,” she lamented.
Her business partner Seth Larney says that everyone can now have access to the same technologies as those big Hollywood productions.
One such example is the Oscar-nominated short Miracle Fish (dir. Luke Doolan), which was shot on the Red and post-produced at Chaotic, or John Winter’s feature Black & White & Sex, currently in
post-production at their Surry Hills facility.
“It’s becoming so much more affordable for people to shoot higher quality product for less, and it is levelling the playing field somewhat between mega-budget films and lower budget ones,” he explained.
Red is set to launch its 5K Epic camera this year. No release dates have been announced, but a working model was just shown at NAB in Las Vegas last month. It is likely to be the product that changes
that ‘cheap’ perception that might be preventing some from embracing its cameras.