Red1 Are you familiar?

[DavePS3]

Red 1 is a state of the art film camera and to get the full poop on what it can do, hit their website but note here, that the guys who digitally shot Crank are using it in their upcoming flick:



Angelina Jolie stars in the upcoming action film Wanted, directed by Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov and partially shot with the RED One camera.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with additional detail since it was initially posted.

In two short years, Oakley founder Jim Jannard has piloted RED Digital Cinema from an unknown upstart to an industry force. Unofficially buyers have reserved over 3,500 cameras, of which several hundred are now out in the wild. If everything is on track, I estimate that by year’s end RED Digital Cinema will have shipped around 3,000 of its innovative RED One cameras. Many in the industry scoffed at first — especially those with a vested interest in such high-end cameras as the Sony F900 and F23, the Arri D-20 or the Grass Valley Viper — but RED One is proving itself out in the field, providing VFX shots on the upcoming action film Wanted and the recently released sci-fi fantasy Jumper, as well as 100% of the acquisition on Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming Guerilla, The Argentine and The Informant. In addition, the directing team that brought you the digitally shot Crank is also shooting thir upcoming Game as an all-RED feature film production. Not to mention many lower-profile productions ranging from commercials and music videos to small indie film projects.

Camera Raw
In creating RED One, Jannard and company decided to apply the concepts of digital still photographic technology to a moving image camera. One example of this is in the development of RED’s Mysterium sensor - a single CMOS 4520 x 2540 pixel chip, which covers the equivalent image area of a 3-perf Super 35mm film frame. RED One captures images as camera raw data using a Bayer-pattern filter. This pick-up pattern was first developed by Dr. Bryce E. Bayer of Eastman Kodak and is used in many digital still cameras. A Bayer filter pattern uses small color filters that are arranged as 50% green, 25% red and 25% blue in a repeating GRGB pattern. From this larger sensor area, RED records 4K, 3K and 2K slices with either a 2:1 or 16:9 aspect ratio.

Early camera builds did not yet have the full feature set turned on and only recorded 4K 2:1 images (4096 x 2048 pixels) at 24fps. Subsequent software builds have enabled more features and those early cameras are being retrofitted by RED Digital Camera. (March is the end of the official beta period.) The Bayer-pattern image is then stored to flash cards or hard drives with the application of a visually-lossless, variable bit rate wavelet code, named Redcode. To give you an idea of the amount of data reduction made possible by Redcode, a 665-frame (about :28) Redcode 4K sample file I used is 738MB. That’s compared to 32GB if this same clip were an uncompressed 4K media file.

A lot of forum posters have debated whether a Bayer-pattern sensor results in true 4K resolution, in contrast to a camera with three separate, smaller chips. I’m not a director of photography, so I won’t dwell on this, except to say that the images look very impressive. They are certainly higher resolution than HD or film scans at 2K, so that’s good enough for me. These 4K images look great when downsampled as 2K, HD and SD thanks to the benefits of oversampling.