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[Cinecom's intro video]
I don’t understand why they give you such a small box.
Anyways, let’s talk about this little boy right here.
The RED Digital Cinema Camera!
which I purchased about… six months ago.
And, am I happy with this camera?
Was it worth $40 grand
or do I regret trowing that amount of money on the table?
Well, short answer: it's complicated.
Yeah, that's my relationship status with this camera.
Anyways, I wanna talk about things like workflow,
what I've learned from working with a Cinema Camera.
It's not a review, because I still see myself
as a complete rookie when it comes down to these cameras,
but what I've learned in the past months with this camera is extraordinary.
And that's something I wanna share.
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Now, Let's rewind to September when I ordered this RED right here.
They told me that I had to wait around 4 to 6 weeks.
Eventually I got the camera in December, which was about 10 weeks later.
But, okay, not a huge problem, I mean, I was super happy
that I finally got my RED camera.
Except for the Nikon lens mount that I also ordered.
That one wasn't delivered yet, so…
…I wasn’t able to use it.
Luckily, I was able to borrow a PL mount from the store,
that I ordered it from.
But I didn’t have any PL lenses.
Again, luckily, I have a friend who had a PL lens that I could borrow as well.
So, I had a fully functional RED camera.
Immediately me and Yannick both shot a music video with it.
But then the footage looked terrible.
That's right, we shot with a $40,000 camera and the footage looked terrible.
So the next day I dug a little deeper into the world of RED.
I knew that a cinema camera needs a little more attention than a normal DSLR
when you get started with it,
but I didn't realized there would be so many things to pay attention to.
I basically thought: we're shooting RAW, so what could possibly go wrong?
And, there I was wrong!
The first mistake that I did was the calibration.
The sensor of the RED camera needs to be calibrated.
And unfortunately, it’s not just one button that you press somewhere
and it’s calibrated for the next of your career.
No, you need to do this every time
that you change the shutter speed of this camera.
So that means, if you’re changing the shutter speed
because you’re filming in slow-motion,
well, guess what, you need to re-calibrate the camera!
Or, if you go outside and the temperature has changed about 15 degrees,
or 60 Fahrenheit, or something,
well, guess what, you can start calibrating again.
Luckily, you can batch-calibrate upfront and save them,
so that you don't constantly need to do this in between.
But RED does advice to recalibrate everything once a month, or something.
So, basically this calibration is gonna fix dead pixels,
create a natural noise pattern, etcetera.
Unfortunately, it didn’t really helped with my camera.
I actually had a bunch of issues with the noise
and I had these flashing pixels and so on.
So, I contacted RED the day after I got this camera,
and super long story short: by the end of January
I was finally able to send my camera back for repair.
A couple of weeks later I got it back and the issue did improved, a little bit.
Sometimes I still see these flashing pixels or dead pixels.
I've actually got about 50 dead pixel, on a brand new camera.
But RED apparently doesn't see that as an issue.
Anyways, whenever I would reboot the camera or recalibrate
those issues are gone, for a little while.
So I still have issues with the camera, but at least I can kind of fix it now.
After all the struggle that I've gone through with the RED support,
I'm kinda tired of it so I'm not sure if I will pursue my issues any further.
Anyways, by the end of February, I also received my Nikon mount!
This little thing right here.
So I was finally able to use my own lenses.
Unfortunately, this Nikon mount lost connection with my lenses
and half of the time it wasn't working, so, time to contact RED again!
And since a month back, somewhere half of March,
we finally got ourselves a fully functional RED camera!
This time they did reply very quickly and they just sent a brand new Nikon mount.
Thank you, RED…
…for that…
…I guess.
Exposure was the next tricky thing with the RED.
I'm very used to my Panasonic GH5 and I know that camera inside out.
What I usually do is underexpose a little bit and then bring it up in post.
That gives me the best results on the GH5.
With RED it works different.
And not a little bit different.
If you underexpose on the RED, you're guaranteed to have a lot of noise.
So what I did was over-exposing a little.
Well, that also didn't turned out so great.
On the RED, you wanna nail your exposure.
There's a very nice tool on the monitor called the giro-scope.
It shows you all the stops of the dynamic range
and you can select one to highlight in that area.
Now skin tones should be at around 11, from what I've learned.
So every time we shoot something now,
we make sure that the skin tones lay at around that value,
unless there's an artistic choice.
If something else in your shot is too dark, we add light to the scene.
And although you do have much more room
to play with colors and exposure on the RED,
it kinda does feel like you don't.
But that's exactly what the camera is intended for.
It's a cinema camera.
It feels like you're forced to put more effort into lighting your scene.
We were taking out this little device right here other day,
it’s called a light meter.
And I’ve never really used this with my GH5, but now on the RED
I caught myself using this thing.
Measuring lights, wow!
And that's really strange.
It feels like the camera is forcing you to pay more attention to cinematography.
And when you get that right, the RED shines!
It's unexplainable, I guess.
Well, I'm still learning and kind of figuring out this camera.
I'm definitely not a professional RED user, I’m still a rookie.
Oh, by the way, ISO on the RED camera doesn't exist,
it's meta data.
So I always leave my ISO at 800
and I make sure to light a scene according to that 800 ISO.
With my DSLR, I would change the camera according to the scene.
And now I'm changing my scene according to the camera.
Last thing that I wish to talk about is color grading.
Over the past months you've probably seen
a ton of different looks on the channel,
some were very bad and I think only a few were actually good.
Color grading RED on the footage
is not much different than Log footage from a DSLR.
I thought it was, and I was making it myself a lot more complex than I should.
Because since you're shooting RAW,
you can chose your gamma curve and color space afterwards.
And with all these options, I didn’t really know what to pick.
Also, you have a dedicated program called REDCINE-X,
which kinda looks like Lightroom, but then for RED footage.
And I thought that we had to use it.
But apparently it's completely incompatible with Premiere Pro.
So I kept struggling with the workflow.
And since I was constantly changing my mind,
Lorenzo and Yannick did not really know how to follow.
Which was kind of funny.
Because if you're working with three people on the same project,
and I’m constantly changing my mind
things can go wrong easily
when you still haven't figured out the color grading workflow.
So, I got in touch with other RED users.
I met some great people online and the RED community is really amazing!
One of those guys is Scott Balkum,
I'm gonna leave his Youtube channel in the description below.
He makes some great tutorials as well.
And what I learned from him is if you edit in Premiere,
then I should do everything in there.
Just set your footage to Log and work with a rec-709 Lut in Premiere.
Problem solved!
It’s the exact same workflow as I was doing with the GH5.
I just get to have a few RAW settings in Premiere as well,
like ISO and white balance and such,
but for the rest it works the same.
My entry into the world of RED has been a very bumpy ride.
I came to a point where I really regret buying one
and I wanted to make a video about that.
Luckily, I didn’t do that,
I’m very happy because of that.
The reason why I bought a RED was not to suddenly get superior image quality,
which is also not the case.
We've all seen those DSLR versus RED comparison videos before
and you can barely tell the difference.
But the reason I bought a RED was to learn new things.
I wanted to learn more about cinematography.
And for the past months, I've been learning so much!
So, I do not regret buying a RED at all!
It’s amazing.
Although sometimes I feel like I bought this maybe too early.
You don't buy a RED whenever you got the money for it.
You buy a RED when you're ready for it as a filmmaker.
There's a certain knowledge about cinematography you have to master first.
And if you like to spend cash on gear,
then you should do that first on lighting, sliders, tripods, maybe a studio.
And the last step in line is a cinema camera like the RED.
So, to answer that question I've been getting so much lately:
how superior is the RED camera?
Well, it's not sticking out so far, actually.
Technology has really come so far that the gap between picture quality
is getting closer and closer.
Just take a look at the picture that comes out of your phone.
If you had a flagship smartphone from 2019 ten years ago,
you would have had the best camera in the world.
Stand still with that idea.
So you probably not need that new camera,
unless you're still shooting on a potato.
Other than that, the camera that you have right now
can take you on a very long journey.
And that is the moral of the story…
…said someone who just bought a RED.
Anyways, thank you guys so much for watching,
thank you Storyblocks Video for the support
and as always:
Stay Creative!
-RED, I know that we have a complicated relationship
but my friends are making fun of me on Facebook,
so I was kind of wondering, can we change our relationship status to, at least, friends?
Maybe, you know…
Would be nice, I think.
She’s a girl, by the way, a girl.
A girl camera.