You probably remember the first movie you saw in a theater. Maybe you recall only a few moments that made an impression, or perhaps you can recite every line of dialogue. I was 5 years old, and the movie was Star Wars. Many people were blown away by the opening scene, where the giant spaceship rumbles overhead, but I remember seeing Luke Skywalker on his desert home planet for the first time. I was living in El Paso, deep in the hot desert badlands of West Texas and really the middle of nowhere. My reaction was, “Hey, this planet looks just like home. I could be Luke’s next-door neighbor. I could be up there on that screen.” Chances are, if you’re interested in the RED camera, you’ve probably dreamed of being up there on the big screen, too, somehow.
Until a couple of years ago, if you wanted to make a movie for theaters, you had two choices, both fraught with compromise. Either you could try to get a big-budget studio interested in financing your project or you could shoot it on your own. If you went the studio route, you were likely to be compromised creatively, because even the most benevolent film studio in the world cares more about demographics and marketing than about your story. Let’s face it, it’s called show business, and movie studios must produce hit movies to remain in business.
If you tried to make a movie on your own, your compromise was more on a technical level. Sure, you could make any story you wanted to, but unless you were fabulously wealthy, you’d likely be shooting with something less than a 35mm film camera and would wind up with a final product that wasn’t going to look so great up on that big movie theater screen.
With the advent of the RED ONE digital motion-picture camera, you’re finally able to avoid those two compromises. It gives you the same visual quality as a professional film camera, but is much more affordable and requires none of the attendant expenses of buying film stock, processing, transferring, negative cutting, answer printing, and so on. In other words, you can now shoot a project without many technical or creative compromises and fulfill that dream of finally putting your story up on the big screen.
This book is intended for anyone with a direct or even peripheral interest in the RED camera. “Yeah, but I’m not just anyone,” you may say. Let’s get into the specifics of who this book is really designed for.
You’ve just gotten your delivery from the good folks in Orange County (that would be the RED folks), and you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by all that gear. Take a deep breath, leave the camera in its box for a little while longer, and grab a cup of coffee. Spend a few hours flipping through this book, and I can absolutely promise you’ll save yourself untold time and money. If you read this book from cover to cover, you’ll leapfrog over weeks and months of the learning time you would have spent figuring out all this stuff on your own.
Let’s say you’ve had the camera for a few months or a year and are getting pretty good results with it already, but now you’d like to take things to the next level. Maybe you have a modest camera package and are trying to decide what’s the wisest equipment to purchase next. Perhaps there’s always been one aspect of using the camera you just can’t seem to get right, or maybe you want to improve your postproduction efficiency. This book can help you with all of those concerns, and then some.
A hard drive has just landed on your desk with raw footage from a RED shoot, and you’re wondering where to start. You’re an Avid, Apple Final Cut Pro, or Adobe Premiere Pro editor, and you’re expected to have the project edited and output to DVD or Blu-ray by Friday. This book can help you. Or maybe you’re a visual effects artist, and you’re a little confused about the file requirements of integrating your animation into a 4K RED background plate. Bingo—you should delve right into the later chapters of this book, which cover postproduction techniques for a wide variety of editing and finishing applications. If you have a little extra time, the production chapters can also shed some light onto that age-old postproduction question, “Why did they shoot it like that?!”
If you’re planning to rent the RED for an upcoming shoot or if you already rented one and have started scratching your head, this book is also for you. The RED comes with a detailed instruction manual, but the manual functions as a reference guide, dealing more with the camera’s operations than with overall workflow. This book is not a substitute for reading the manual, but it can be used to get you up to speed on what you need to know to use the camera quickly.
So, you’ve gotten your hands on one of the newer cameras from RED that were still being developed when I was writing this book. Lucky you! Even though I could only make educated guesses about some details, the RED ONE shares a lot of DNA with Scarlet and EPIC (especially EPIC). The RED ONE offers similar frame resolutions, postproduction methodology, and general production approaches with the newer models. So, wherever you read “RED ONE,” just substitute “Scarlet” or “EPIC” in your head, and you’ll still get a lot out of this book.
Maybe you can’t really afford to buy or even rent a RED ONE (or a soon-to-release Scarlet or EPIC) camera right now. Or perhaps you’re in a totally unrelated line of work, but you’re still passionately interested in the camera on a technical or creative level. In this book, you’ll learn how the RED operates and get a firsthand tour through every step of production and post-production. And just maybe you’ll get inspired enough to realize that your dream isn’t as far out of reach as you thought, and you’ll move from being merely enthusiastic to being in production.
RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera is organized into two basic sections: production and postproduction (after a quick chapter on some history of the camera). I recommend reading as much of this book from start to finish as you can. Some of the later postproduction chapters may not directly apply to you. For example, if you’re an Avid editor, you can probably skip the Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro chapters (unless you want to see how the other half lives).
The book covers the whole process from start to finish in order, beginning with what the camera is and how to put together a package and then following through with production techniques and on-set data management strategies. In the postproduction section, you’ll learn how to bring RED footage into your editing software, how to edit, and how to color-correct footage. Then we’ll look at exporting completed projects for film, HD, the Web, and more. The book concludes with a look into how you can use the RED in your business and in future projects.
You can also use this book like a film school in a box. I went to film school at the University of Southern California (USC, alma mater of folks such as George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, and Ron Howard), and I’ve attempted to bring into this book some of what I learned at USC whenever it’s appropriate to the RED discussion. I’m a firm believer in learning from the experience of others, and that’s why you’ll find POV (Point-of-view) interviews with some of the top professionals in the industry at the ends of most chapters. Some of those POVs directly relate to the chapters they follow, others are there for general insight.
I recommend keeping the book with your camera or next to your system if you’re working in postproduction. You can easily flip through the index and use this book as a handy quickreference guide. The complete camera menu map in the appendix at the back of the book is reason alone to pack it with your camera. (The book is also very lightweight compared to most of the other gear you’ll need, so no excuses for not sticking it into your camera case!)
You’re going to read the term workflow over and over again in this book. So, what exactly is a workflow, and why is it so important? In broad terms, a workflow is a sequence of processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion.
In this case, the initiation occurs as you hit the record trigger on your RED ONE, and the completion happens when a theater audience applauds at the end of your movie (or appreciates it via DVD or downloaded webisode—you get the idea). Between initiation and completion lie a lot of technical skills, equipment requirements, and production and postproduction concepts. The RED workflow is an A to Z process that you’ll explore and master over the course of this book. It’s a lot to take in, but I’ve done my very best to make everything easy to understand and enjoyable.
The great thing about RED is that the company is always working on new developments. It would be impossible to keep this book up-to-date on all fronts; therefore, you’ll also find it useful to visit the companion Web site (www.peachpit.com/red), which contains helpful links, updated information, and documents you can use as part of your productions. Throughout the book you’ll find pointers to the Web site for further updates.