For a guy that shoots 90% of his video with an N95, i’m far from a day to day frame puller. 
But, like most gadget-obsessed techies, i’ve lusted over the Red One since the day i saw it’s first glossy prototype rendering. I finally got the chance to check it out in person this weekend, doing a quick Camden harbor shoot with the amazing David Berez of Post Office Editorial.
First off, it really does live up to the sexy design expectations it provokes. It’s gorgeous! Like many other people’s first reactions, it was a fair amount larger than i thought it was gonna be, but the form factor is still relatively small. The 4K sensor is truly remarkable, and the modular design means it’s flexible assembling for varying rigs…
Test 1: High speed water shots
Bumped the frame rate up to 83fps at 4K, then watched playback in slowmo. Beautiful!
Raised the frame rate again to 150fps and grabbed some water footage (storing to the 8BGB compact flash card), amazing!
Test 2: Harbor lighting shots
We grabbed some footage of the boats in the harbor, which had some variable lighting in the late afternoon. The interface displays an intuitive waveform that shows exposure, making it pretty easy to gauge exposure and adjust the shot.
In my opinion, the most amazing feature by far is the ability to import your LUT’s, and view what is essentially the post preview while your capturing raw. The picture quality is truly delicious, check out a sample below:
Overall, i was really impressed with the Red One (beyond the attractive design aesthetic). It’s definitely not a run-n-gun rig, but pretty easy to maneuver by yourself if you have to. Not so sure about sound support, we didn’t test it (and it’s way out of my league).
Next up: Build 16 which stands to distance the field even further. Berez points out the advances in the Blue channel alone are staggering in this forthcoming Sweet 16 release. I applaud Jim Jannard and crew for the approach they’ve taken for rolling out new firmware releases, virtually giving users a new camera every release…
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