I have teased this story for a few weeks, but now there is some time for me to take a deep breath and finally write it all down for you guys. The basic version is that we finally got our hands on a RED One and shot something with it. I will be writing several posts on the camera, the workflow, and a few tips and tricks we discovered and picked up along the way, as well as posting images and clips for you to see. Sorry for the wait!

A month or so ago, two new members joined the AV Club, bringing with them a project that they wanted our help in bringing to life. Gene Rowley and Joel Van Brunt are working on a TV show pitch, and they wanted our help in producing a trailer for it. I won’t go into the specifics of the show idea, as it has not yet been purchased, and is their pitch, not mine. I would do them a disservice by revealing too much. But I can say that at the center of the trailer was one hell of an ambitious request- a Vietnam war scene.

We knew pretty much instantly that we wanted to shoot it in some form of HD, be it the Panasonic HVX200, a high end “digital cinema” camera such as the Varicam, F900, Genesis, D20 etc., or ideally (in my eyes) a RED One. If we were going to put time and effort into something like this, we wanted the end product to be as good for everyone involved as possible, and DV is just starting to get a little tired in that department. The FD900/Genesis/etc. option was pretty much rejected instantly due to the fact that we would have to spend a ton of money on tape stock, deck rental, and buying a $1000.00+ HD video capture card just to work with the footage. All of those high end cameras are great, but there are a lot of expenses tied into using them that push them up and out of the reach of productions that don’t have some decent funding behind them. So we hunted down a RED One, knowing that the HVX200 would be a viable ‘safety’ option if we failed to find one.

The first stop on my hunt for a camera was miraculously my last stop- I hopped on AIM and asked an old friend, Michael Scott, if he knew anyone who owned one. He in fact did: himself! Mike had received his camera not even one week before I asked him; the kind of weird coincidence that makes you believe in fate and all of that. I gave him the run down on the project and he was on board immediately to rent us his rig and to come on set as a camera tech to help set up and keep the camera running.

Our experiences prepping, shooting, and doing post on this camera deserve quite a few compartmentalized posts, so I shall do that. The next post will be about the camera itself. There are a lot of tutorials out there on various aspects of the workflow, so rather than recreate them I will try to boil it all down into the sort of post that I would have found useful in prepping to shoot on a RED camera. So while I put that post together, enjoy some beautiful still frames (click them to see larger).