Its RED, its good

Its a motion camera, a stills camera, to put it simply, its possibly the most brilliant piece of photographic/motion cinema equipment that has emerged in the last few years. The RED camera is a camera with personality.

The idea behind the camera was to simply create a high performance cine camera equivilant to the 35mm motion cameras that are currently being used to film movies. But in digital. Designed to be totally configurable in the sense that it essentially has a brain, which is the sensor, and then other add on modules like handles, interchangable lens mounts (switch between nikon and canon and RED) recording modes, battery options and even the way you view what you are about to shoot (viewfinder or a 4inch screen) even audio. Want to create a 3D camera? no problem, RED claim to be able to configure up to 1,048,576 different possibilities with the options of the camera. 

So how does it work. Essentially it is a motion picture so it records in a motion picture format and allows you to capture still frames from it with out comprimising the quality. Normally when you get a "frame grab" from a motion picture, it is blurred. This is because the speed its recorded at isn't fast enough for the freeze to actually happen. Now with the RED, get the best of both worlds and capture both a still shot with clear res and super high def motion picture.

Want to see how crisp this camera shoots at. check out one of Vincent Laforet's latest projects filming Hawaiian surfer Jamie O'Brien surfing his home break Backdoor. I highly recommend you watch this bigger on the SmugMug link, and really see the great quaility this is.

http://blog.vincentlaforet.com/category/jamieobrien/

Theres also video footage on there from the Canon 5D MkII. The helicopter footage and water footage. 

And here, a recent cover of Esquire magazine in which the cover was shot with the RED camera

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/video/megan-fox-images-0609?click=pp

By the way. The RED camera starts at $9,750.00 for the sensor alone, thats around $12,500.00 AUD. They go upwards of $53,000.00. And to think steven spielberg has one for his "personal" camera. wouldn't you love to have that handy....

Ben.