Digital Video - December 2007 - (Page 20) FIRST LOOK RED ONE PHOTOS BY MIKE CURTIS AND JENDRA JARNAGIN Assistant Cameraman Alex Beav (left) and Offhollywood Studios’ Mark Pederson assemble Red #6 on a Brooklyn rooftop. The body of the Red is modular so that you can build up with as many or few accessories as the day requires. YES, IT’S REAL RED ONE ARRIVES—FOR A FEW DOZEN SHOOTERS, ANYWAY. BY MIKE CURTIS W hen I first heard about the Red One project in 2005, I was tremendously excited about the possibility. Here was a camera that was doing everything I’d been writing about and hoped someone would do, and more—the ability to shoot raw footage on a modular, tapeless, flexible, affordable camera. Less than two years after the company posted its first simple Web page on red.com, Red Digital Cinema has shipped its first batch of cameras. Jim Jannard, founder of Red (and founder/chairman of eyewear and apparel maker Oakley, Inc.), was kind enough to let me come out to Lake Forest, Calif., in late August for the camera developer’s first day as a retail company with shipping product. DAY ZERO Most of the customers for the first batch of cameras (serial numbers 1-25) flew out to Red’s offices in Orange County to pick them up in person and get training. (All of the customers present had ponied up $1,000 to pre-order their cameras on the first day that Red went public with its plans, at the 2006 NAB confab.) Everyone knew this day was something special. Jannard came Red #6 shooting a time-lapse Manhattan sunset, not 24 hours after Offhollywood walked out of Red’s Orange County, Calif. facility with the first and only Reds on the East Coast. out and talked about how the Red One was the camera he’d always wanted for himself. (He’s a camera nut—his personal collection numbers over 1,000 models, which he used to shoot Oakley’s ads for two decades.) Usually, Jannard remarked, you buy a camera, learn its fea- DV goes on location to find out whether the camera lives up to the hype. 20 dv december 2007 www.dv.com http://www.dv.com
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