For many microfilmmakers, the idea of a RED One or 35mm film is a bit higher priced than they can afford. However, a lot of low-budget filmmakers are looking at moving up to the realm of Indywood, where budgets can vary from $100K to $7 million. The point of this article is aimed largely at filmmakers who can take that leap. But, if you can't, don't worry. You'll get a good idea of what it's like to use some of these tools from my perspective as a cinematographer who does so on a daily basis.
As I've had a chance to compare them, here are my thoughts on the characteristics of the Red One versus a 35mm film camera. Having recently shot a feature, a commercial and a music video on the Red One, I would be happy to share the primary differences between Red One and a 35mm film camera, and the tricks I’ve learned in making the best images possible on either format, depending on your preference and budget.
To begin with, the Red One is not a film or HD camera; it is like a large digital SLR camera, except it captures metadata at 24-30fps at 4k, 60fps at 3k, and up to 120fps in 2k resolution. The Red One currently uses a CMOS digital sensor capturing images at 4520k pixels of resolution by 2540k pixels of resolution. It is retrofitted with a film PL mount, which means its digital sensor is able to gather light, utilizing and taking advantage of the finest optical quality film lenses ever made. This gives the Red the equivalent characteristics of 35mm film’s narrow depth of field in terms of focus.
The Red One’s proprietary hard drives allow up to 3-hour takes compared with 10-minute takes in traditional film. Without a doubt the Red One’s tapeless workflow acquisition is unparalleled in facilitating post-production schedules and budgets, but at what cost visually?
On film shoots you are able to overexpose your negative, blow out the highlights and recover them later. Personally, I overexpose film negative by two-thirds of a stop in order to get a thicker negative, in other words more image information. There is an assumption that with Red One the look is not “baked” into the raw files when you shoot, and that with color correction software you have infinite information to manipulate. Not true. The Red One is not immune to digital exposure rules and it has a hard floor for the blacks and a hard ceiling for the whites. If you blow out the pixels on a Red One digital sensor they will “hard clip,” leaving you with no image information to manipulate. The reason digital cameras have limited exposure latitude is that they capture information in a linear color range space, as opposed to film which captures information in a logarithmic color range space. The human eye perceives contrast, light and detail logarithmically, so it is no surprise audiences still have a natural disposition toward a “filmic” versus “digital” look so deep into our digital generation. In defense of the Red One I will say its wavelet compression and 12-bit color space do hold highlights in a fairly pleasing and organic manner for a digital camera, but nothing has ever compared to the controlled and pleasing manner negative film’s highlights roll over the exposure curve.
