Red Despair
I’m still hoping that people will be able to divorce themselves from a “Genesis mindset” when they are shooting on the RED. I’ve noticed at shoots with the RED that some of the crew still seem fairly derisive of the RED; as if it is at best a video camera, or at worst, a toy. (To whit, I’d be surprised if they could pick the difference between RED and film on a graded finished product, but that’s a different matter). Others are obsessed with the technical perfection they need to attain in exposure, vectorscopes, waveforms and manuals being poured over like magic oracles. A RED “technician” sits leg-roped to a MacBook, performing magic… and… er… copying files.
I guess new technology can be a tense affair, but as RED says, think of it as a digital stills camera. It’s basically the same, only moving. Some cinematographers are uneasy about this, but I wonder how much has to do with the technical overload that seems to be dominating the web.
Web hype leads to erroneous statements such as, “You can’t do anything without a vectorscope, of course.” Yet cinematographers can shoot film without a vectorscope (aka “safety net”), they do have familiarity of the stock, and know whether they can push the negative in case of an emergency. Negative does have more latitude than any digital format (film is quite arguably, a superior image capture format). On the other hand, the RED is not really a “video camera” either.
With a monitor/viewfinder feed coming out of the RED, you’d have to be a pretty blind to unintentionally over or underexpose something. When it comes to variance between shots, assuming that there could be at most a stop or two (ignoring accidents), they are mostly correctable in a grade.
The RED software doesn’t have a vectorscope, although it does have a waveform monitor. It also has an infinitely more useful histogram—just like a digital stills camera.
The parallels should not be ignored. Use the tool for what it is, not as something which has gone before.
And don’t believe the hype.