Red One

The Red One was announced in 2006 and released in 2007 as the first camera produced by Red Digital Cinema Camera Company. It has a 12 megapixel bayer pattern CMOS sensor, called the Mysterium. The sensor measures 24.4 mm x 13.7 mm, and has 4520 by 2540 active pixels, though the camera only records data from a 4096 by 2304 pixel area in normal operation. The Mysterium sensor has about the same active area as a Super 35 film frame masked to the 16:9 aspect ratio, allowing the same depth of field to be produced in conjunction with lenses designed to cover the 35 mm film format.

The camera also allows the sensor to be used in a windowed mode in which the sensor can emulate the active area of a Super 16 film frame while capturing 2048 pixel resolution footage. This allows the camera to be used with Super 16 lenses.

Red has measured the sensor's signal to noise ratio at greater than 66 dB,^[2] and claims 11.3 stops of total dynamic range.^[3] However, the dynamic range reported from many cinematographers including Richard Bluck, place the camera's dynamic range significantly lower, at about 8 stops. This difference is probably attributable to the use of different mechanisms for measuring dynamic range. Red rates the sensor at 320 ISO natively.

Lens Mount

The Red One camera has an interchangeable lens mount. It ships with a PL mount, common for modern 35 mm and 16 mm motion picture cameras. The company has also released an adapter for 2/3" B4 lenses, and for Nikon F-mount lenses. Birger Engineering has announced it will soon release a Canon EF lens mount for the Red One, which will provide full electronic control of EF lenses. Other third parties may also have lens mounts in development for the Red One.

Recording media

The Red One records footage to data files on disk or flash based digital storage.

The Red Drive is a 320 GB external hard-drive based digital magazine, containing two 2.5" hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration. It can record over two hours of 4K footage. A Red Drive is usually mounted in a cradle attached to the camera's rod support system. The drive connects to the camera via a specialty locking connector, though the camera and the drive communicate using the standard SATA protocol. The drive has FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB2 ports, and can be directly connected to a computer via any of those interfaces, at which point it appears as a standard external hard drive, and files containing the footage can be copied off like any other computer files.

Red also offers a Compact Flash module for the camera, as well as 8 and 16 GB flash cards. An 8 GB card can hold around 6 minutes of 4K footage and 20 minutes of 2K footage. Compact flash is preferable for cases where the camera rig needs to be as light as possible or in situations where sudden motion or intense vibration could cause dropped frames with hard drive based recording due to the mechanical nature of hard drives. While the camera can use industry standard flash cards, most are presently not fast enough to maintain the necessary data rates.

The company has announced plans to introduce a version of the Red Drive based around solid state disks, which should allow for significantly longer recording times than compact flash cards while eliminating the issues related to recording to mechanical hard drives. This "Red Flash Drive" will be significantly more expensive than the mechanical Red Drive, however.

Monitoring

Red offers three on-camera monitoring options for the Red One, a 5.6" LCD screen, a 7" LCD screen and an electronic viewfinder. The screens have a native resolution of 1024 by 600, while the electronic viewfinder has a native resolution of 1280 by 848. Both the screens and the viewfinder connect through proprietary interfaces and rely on in-camera processing to generate their data displays, so they are only compatible with the Red One.

The camera also has HD-SDI and HDMI outputs for connection to external monitors. These presently operate at 720p. As of build 16 the HDMI output is not compatible with most makes of HDTVs, however it does seem to work with many computer monitors with DVI inputs.

The Red One can generate a variety of data overlays which can be displayed on its video outputs, including histograms, waveform plots, false color exposure aids, and two different "focus assist" displays.

Unlike virtually all HD video cameras, the Red One does not generate a video stream in-camera which represents its final product. Its real-time monitoring outputs do not reflect the resolution and dynamic range captured in the raw files it records. The camera's live outputs are intended to be used only for on-set monitoring, similarly to the way a video tap is often used with film-based acquisition.

[edit] Audio

The camera has four TA3 ("mini XLR") connectors, and can record up to four channels of 24-bit 48 kHz digital audio.

[edit] Physical characteristics

The Red One camera body weighs around ten pounds.^[2] Dimensions are 12.02" long x 6.34" tall x 5.2" wide.^[2] The camera is based around a modular design concept. It has many mounting points, and accessories like recording devices, viewfinders, etc. are mounted to the camera, rather than being integral parts of the body.