If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

At times the menu of the R1 can be a bit counter-intuitive, for example that phantom power is under System>Sound, while the recording level is placed at Video>Audio. Helpfully, Octamas from Switzerland has been publishing a visual guide of the Red 1 menu system, and they’ve just released their guide for still-warm Build 20.

Bits, pieces and links

And for inspiration, hop over to As the Dust settles, a documentary in progress about the amazing Burning Man Festival – all shot on RED. They have a lovely photo gallery.

If you ever need a manual for an old camera, check out IscanManuals. They charge a small fee.

Trying to hide in the open with your camera? LensCoats makes, well, lens coatings, for pretty much any make, including the Canon 1200mm beast:

A quick fix around the gamma problem in QT and OSX.

Since I did not get my Andy Lesniak (aka. Wicked Circuits) dumb Canon mount to work properly (see previous lens mount test), and Birger Engineering is offering their Canon mount in a dumb version, I have now ordered one of those. Shipped today, and should be with me next week. Am very much looking forward to testing out thier mount. Watch this space for more info.

I finally got around testing the various adapters I bought to adapt my Carl Zeiss Contax Yashica primes to our RED. The RED has the Wicked Circuit dumb mount. All adapters work fine up to about 20 meters, but after that there is a definite difference.

All tests were done on the Zeiss 50/1.4 lens, with the aperture set to 4 and 16. No filters were used, instead faster shutter speeds were employed.

Here is the frame I took in 4k, scaled down to 25% (Click on picture for full size), further down the test you will see 100% cropped images of just the chimney (compressed to jpg in Photoshop with high quality setting) .

El Cheapo

First in line is the £5 adapter off eBay from seller big_is. Very quick and efficient delivery from Hong Kong. Fits nicely. Fairly soft on infinity.

Holds fairly well at f16.

Bad at 4.

Conclusion: if you are on a budget, and either only shoot closer subjects or have plenty of light, this is an acceptable adapter.

DVD Technik

Next in line is the adapter from DVD Technik in the Ukraine at about $35. Has a very nice quality feel to it, and sist very tight on the lens. Best to be fitted once onto the lens, and left in place. Also quite tight once connected to the camera; downside is that it takes a bit longer to change lenses, but they do sit more tightly.

Disappointing at f16.

Appaling at f4.

Conclusion: Not really an option.

Confirm Adapter

Fianally the most expensive option at $85 from Happypage in Hongkong, an adapter with built-in autofocus confirm chip. Happypage offers the option of getting that chip programmed to your specific lens, which is a nice option when you want to use your lenses on a Canon EOS stills camera. Since the RED is thankfully a fully manual camera, I could not test this extra functionality.

At first the adapter would not fit. After an e-mail to happypage they immedeatly sent off a second adapter without any cost to me. The adapter arrived, but would not fit either. This suggests that the Wicked Circuit adapter might be slightly off, since happypage has only happy curstomers. Anyway, using my Dremel drill, I managed to get the adapter to fit into the RED – again, very tight, but not as tight as the DVD Technik one, and run the tests.

Happypage advertizes the fact that their adapters are a fraction of a millimitre thinner than their competitors, and claims that this helps with the focus on infinity. Let’s see how this holds up to reality.

Me likes at f16.

A Bit disappointing at f4.

Conclusion: Clearly the winner.

Conclusion

As so often, if you want quality, you have to pay for it. Interesting though that the by far cheapest option was not the by far worst one.

Also it seems that I still have problems with the back-focus on the Wicked Circuit adapter. My guess is that if that should ever get sorted out (or I might – gasp – order again a Birger Canon mount) the results will improve.

Yesterday the Andy Lesniak Canon mount for our RED One camera arrived. After struggling a bit with the back-focus adjustment, the mount is now installed, and I ran a quick lens breathing test. These were not lit or framed at all, just a speedy test on how the lenses perform under focussing. No follow focus yet either, thus not the cleanest pulls ever. No CC either.

All tests were done with the lenses set at their widest, also to test the focus at infinity.

Carl Zeiss Distagon 25mm/2.8 (Click to see the test at 1024×512)

Focus at infinity is not quite there. This might be because of the Contax/Canon adapter used. A new one is on order. If the lens is stepped down to 5.6, infinity is fine. Stepping down on the 25/2.8

Carl Zeiss Distagon 35mm/2.8 (Click to see the test at 1024×512)

Carl Zeiss Tessar 45mm/2.8 (Click to see the test at 1024×512) This lens is small, not thicker than a thumb.

Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm/1.4 (Click to see the test at 1024×512) The flickering comes from the office fixtures.

Carl Zeiss Planar 80mm/1.4 (Click to see the test at 1024×512) This is one beauty of a lens.

Carl Zeiss Sonnar 135mm/2.8 (Click to see the test at 1024×512)

Carl Zeiss Tele-Tessar 200mm/3.5 (Click to see the test at 1024×512)

Tamron 500mm/8 (Click to see the test at 1024×512) This is just a lens I happend to have, and it was fun trying it as well. It has a fixed aperture of 8, and includes a macro function. Mirror lens, meaning it is relatively compact.

Generally I am happy with the performance of these lenses, their breathing is acceptable to me. The built quality of the Zeiss lenses is phenomenal, they have a very long focus throw.

RED’s boss, Jim Jannard, has pretty much revolutionized the camera business. Here’s a little thank-you-poster I made (after The Last Legion):

Jim Jannard, the ONE legion

I recently bought some 190Ah batteries from Globalmediapro for our RED One and was quite disappointed to see that the camera would not boot up with them, while older, weaker batteries both from Globalmediapro and other manufacturers worked flawlessly. After Globalmediapro did not reply to my e-mail, I set upon finding out what was wrong. more…

RED’s 4k camera is no longer on back-order. So if you order one today, you’ll have it in your hands within no time.

Lucky you

A week ago Thursday I took a drive to the airport to pick up our camera directly from the friendly FedEx crew. Back home two hours later, I genuinely enjoyed putting together all the bits and pieces. No mentionable problems there. Love the fact that RED uses paper, not plastics for wrapping. Very green & cool.

Am again surprised at the high built quality of everything. Solid feel, not too heavy (maybe going to the gym in preparation for delivery has helped, too).

Because of the sudden rise of the dollar, we had to slim down our package, one of the things that went out was the ET Arri base plate. Having read about the wobbliness of the shoulder dovetail, I was very happily surprised at just how steady it did connect the camera to our Sachtler Video 20 III head. As a light-weight setup, I would see no problems using this on paid work.

The 7″ Pro LCD (the only thing I have splashed out on — besides the camera) is gorgeous, lightweight – and I love the ability to be able to control camera functions from it. Would love the function to re-assign the two brightness buttons to something more usable. Some banding, but I can live with that.

Mounting

Since Birger turned out not deliver on his promise, I am glad to have ordered the Nikon mount. This came not installed, but thanks to Douglas´ youTube video, installation was a breeze (one of the many benefits of having kids is ready availability of balloons; and yes, I did use a red one). The only change is that now you have to unplug the i-cable connector.

Besides my lovely set of Contax Zeiss primes, that I cannot yet use, I have a cheap, old, dusty, crappy, plasticy Nikon zoom with stuck aperture blades. But heck, I could throw it on. Did a few pans around the room, and could already enjoy just how better the camera handled the highlights and contrasts than any camera I could afford before. Would love the option to have the histogram displayed while changing the shutter angle.

By now it was Time For Some Sleep.

Day 2

Next day in the office I updated to Build 17. Turns out you need a magazine to do that. Luckily an hour later the friendly postman dropped by with 4 8gig cards from Lexar. On the first attempt at updating I got the rocketio error. Remembering that this might be connected to the CF module (all the hours on reduser were not wasted), I took out the CF card and re-inserted it. Now it worked. Bootup is 10 seconds faster than on build 16. LOVE the 1:1 zoom function. Occasionally, when switching modes, the screen turns black.

When I tried the black shading, the camera just eternally displayed the Matrix screen (nice touch, btw) until the battery died half an hour later. Through trial-and-error I found out that you have to format the magazine at first. Suggestion for build 17 release: before black-shading, check that the magazine is formatted. Even better: when an unformatted magazine is inserted, give automatically the option to format it right away – heck, I would love the option of automatically formatting whenever the magazine is empty. (I know I will get scolded for this suggestion…) Another suggestion: in the maintenance menu, display the date/time of the currently used black shading functions.

The same postman also brought an adapter cable that allowed me to hook up the camera to one of our 24″ dell editing screens. Not perfect colours, but great for the director.

Finally I could do some recordings. Even with my crap lens, the picture quality is just light-years ahead of what similarly priced cameras can deliver. I am soooo thankful that we could skip the HDV crap.

When we went from a small miniDV camera to a fullsize DVcam camera, that step was evolutionary. Two years back I thought the next evolutionary step would be an HD camera. Then I heard about RED. First it sounded too good to be true. Glad it wasn´t. Very, very, very glad.

This camera loves power. The electrical one. It sucks a battery that would´ve lasted half a shooting day on the DSR570 empty within an hour. So I ordered some more batteries.

Also ordered a 2.8ghz MacBook Pro, but that will take 2 weeks. Anecdotal evidence proved that a MacBook air is not suitable for field-use :o)

Well, that wraps up my first and second impressions of this ***-kicking camera. Thanks for reading.

Some thanks

Jim – for making his vision a reality. It really shows that this camera was not made by a company whose goal is to make a profit, and does so by making good cameras. RED is about making awesome cameras and then (and only then) turning it into a profitable business. And having fun along the way.

Redheads – everyone at RED for building this revolutionary (pronounced “badass” in Jarredian) camera. I don´t know you, but I command you! Thank thee! Keep it up.

Jarred – for Reduser. Without it I would not only be flabbergasted, but wouldn´t have met all the people I already have. Thanks to everyone participating on this forum.

Justin J. – for keeping up with my “occasionally” changing order. Thanks for all your help.

Douglas Underdahl – for (still) being the only one that actually delivers an alternative, non-warranty-voiding mount. Douglas went further out of his way and sent me a GDX (sp?) mount without before I sent him mine, thus avoiding my camera sitting around for 2 weeks. His mount arrived today, installation was a breeze and the original mount is sent off today.

Brandon – for jumping to my rescue and sending me his better Nikon lens. Arrived yesterday and our RED rocks even more. I can only imagine what it will be like with the Contax lenses.

Gunleik – for letting me play with his RED and thus sealing my fate. We reserved our camera a few days later. Enthusiasm does rub off.

Are – for tipping me off about the contact at FedEx that not only sped up the import (all paperwork was done and all fees paid while the camera was still in transit) but allowed me to pick up the camera from the airport, thus giving me a whole weekend to play with the camera.

Hunter – for making this light-weight solution for the battery. I finally can put it to use :o)

We finally took the plunge and paid for our RED One camera, 40% more than it would have been a few months ago, 20% more than a few weeks ago. But these are turbulent times, and even at 140% the camera is still a steal.

I had to slim down our package, and for now we will get the camera with a Nikon mount, modified by Doug Underdahl to accept G/DX lenses, the base production pack and the CF module. I´ll pick up some Lexar 8gb UDMA flash cards locally. For power we will use our IDX and Globalmediapro batteries. Tripod will be a Sachtler Video 18 III head.

So, fingers crossed, next week will be very RED immersed for me, lots of trying and testing and pushing buttons.

More “beyond HD” cameras

On other RED news, November 13th the California based company will reveal details of their next two camera offerings, the pro-high-end Epic and the run-and-gun Scarlet. RED has already said that this will be their biggest announcement ever. So, sit tight and don´t buy that HDV camcorder yet.

Reduser down?

Not down, but moving to a new server. Today this popular site is only accessible via http://205.234.135.241/forum

Finally some solutions for still lenses are coming along for the Red One camera. And with it some exciting new possibilities, like simple remote focus and iris control. And image stabilization; all lenses that have IS will make for very sexy, light handheld lenses: