This last weekend was the opening of KNOWING, a sci-fi thriller by director Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City). It's awful, don't bother to see it unless you want to check out the cinematography, which isn't necessarily that great either. The money shot (and trust me, it's the only one) involves a 2 minute take where a plane crashes next to a highway and our hero runs into the wreckage as people stumble about in flames, a moderately convincing amalgamation of CGI and stuntmen, in service of a story that would make a cat laugh. The reason I'm bothering to write about it is that the entire movie was shot with a new digital camera called the Red One, an amazing gizmo developed by a California startup helmed by Jim Jannard, the founder of Oakley sunglasses company who has become a CEO-guru figure like Steve Jobs to the party faithful.
We've seen other digital and analog studio films in theaters before, notably COLLATERAL and MIAMI VICe by Michael Mann, and parts of the later STAR WARS films, but these were all shot on very expensive HD cameras made by Sony and other large corporations with deep pockets. KNOWING is arguably the first mainstream studio film to come to the multiplex via a pro-sumer camera such as the Red One.
With a base price of a mere $17,000, the Red One camera itself is basically a sensor like the heart of a DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera married to a small shoebox-sized computer that shoots with motion picture lenses (or still camera lenses) and then compresses the data into a form that can fit onto 8Gb flash-based memory cards. The selling point is that it does this in a manner that looks remarkably like film, and in a higher resolution than HD cameras costing many times more. ( So called "full High Definition" cameras have a picture that has 1080 lines of horizontal resolution; combined with the width at a ratio of 16:9, makes for a horizontal resolution of 1920 pixels. This creates a frame resolution of 1920×1080, or 2,073,600 pixels in total. This is so called 2K resolution, and the Red One is 4K, and growing.) It's not strictly video, either - the camera records RAW data in a way that can be manipulated greatly in post. Again, it's technical but settings like white balance, chroma and luminance can be decided later, which is quite a nice trick, and allows users to manipulate the image with consumer level software like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and After Effects.
With a base price of a mere $17,000, the Red One camera itself is basically a sensor like the heart of a DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera married to a small shoebox-sized computer that shoots with motion picture lenses (or still camera lenses) and then compresses the data into a form that can fit onto 8Gb flash-based memory cards. The selling point is that it does this in a manner that looks remarkably like film, and in a higher resolution than HD cameras costing many times more. ( So called "full High Definition" cameras have a picture that has 1080 lines of horizontal resolution; combined with the width at a ratio of 16:9, makes for a horizontal resolution of 1920 pixels. This creates a frame resolution of 1920×1080, or 2,073,600 pixels in total. This is so called 2K resolution, and the Red One is 4K, and growing.) It's not strictly video, either - the camera records RAW data in a way that can be manipulated greatly in post. Again, it's technical but settings like white balance, chroma and luminance can be decided later, which is quite a nice trick, and allows users to manipulate the image with consumer level software like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and After Effects.
It was first sold in 2007, but not before introducing the product a year earlier via a user-friendly internet site, which they maintain for the purpose of receiving feedback from users and spreading the gospel of all things Red. The first customers were investors of a sort, putting down large deposits before the camera was even finished being built. Many people thought they were selling a product that couldn't live up to the extravagant claims of 4K resolution (and delivering a film look, from lots more tech here I'm leaving out), but when the camera debuted the critics had to admit they really had something. It's no vaporware, that much is for certain. What it is for certain is currently being worked out, with KNOWING being the first big budget Hollywood (actually, Australia doubles for Boston here) film "shot on Red." Others are following, and several top rated TV shows such as "ER" have made the switch already.
In summation, there is a window that has been opened here - but for whom, and how long it will last?
Previously, Steven Soderberg chose it to shoot CHE with, (he shoots his own films) and it seems to have served his purposes well. He wanted a handheld-in-the-jungle look and he got it with a camera that looked better than 16mm ever could have in many ways. Speaking strictly of the look of the film, part one aka The Argentine is shot with anamorphic lenses and presented in a cinemascope aspect ratio which serves the heroic portion of the tale well, and with a subtly original combination of looks - documentary meets cinemascope, circa 1958.
Color wise, The Argentine looks like a page from National Geographic - that Kodachrome reversal look, which actually was a smart way to mask one of the Red One's weak points compared to film, a shorter "dynamic range," which translates as the ability to record the brightest highlights and the deepest shadows in a single scene. Future versions of the camera may deliver the goods, but currently the first generation Red sensor has (in lab conditions) a dynamic range near 11 f -stops, (or doubling of light) which seems to translate to about 8 or 9 in real world conditions, where complex scenes eat up computer speed, and reduce performance. Modern film stocks can have 11 to 13 and deliver in the field.
KNOWING looks "pretty good," in the theaters (it darn sure doesn't look like video) and helped the film makers blend a lot of CGI (Computer Generated Imagery, also known as "shit blowing up real good") into their footage relatively easily. These days Visual Effects people often work at 4K resolution already, to ensure a lot of detail in the fake stuff, which helps sell it to our eyes. Transferred to film, and exhibited through a 35mm projector KNOWING has the look of a crisp Blue-Ray DVD, or something slightly less wonderful as film, but most people won't notice. Some of the shortcomings of the first Red cameras are visible to a trained eye - skin tones pick up "noise," or stray colors like a green or purple undertone, and highlights can be "clipped," or appear less subtle than film. Mostly it is the lesser dynamic range that makes day exteriors seem less natural. But in a blind side by side test with 35mm it can be hard to tell which is which, even for a trained eye.
here's a random/mundane music video day exterior "presented in HD on your monitor" clip on the net where you can see some of what I'm talking about - but of course the real judging needs to take place in a movie theater. This is 35mm intercut w Red footage -watch it first and then read the comments to tell which is which.
here's a random/mundane music video day exterior "presented in HD on your monitor" clip on the net where you can see some of what I'm talking about - but of course the real judging needs to take place in a movie theater. This is 35mm intercut w Red footage -watch it first and then read the comments to tell which is which.
Sadly, the director Proyas is correct in a recent interview when he remarked that audiences these days are used to lesser quality due to frequent TV, video game and YouTube viewing. Without the clearly superior 35mm to compare it to itt gets even harder to notice the flaws of Red's compression codec. Equipped with a time machine, you wouldn't give this thing to David Lean to reshoot LAWRENCE OF ARABIA with, less he do to you what those nasty Turks in Daraa did to O'Toole's character. But the Red doesn't claim to be "all that," at least not yet. It is only Round One but if film is Joe Frazier, he's just watched a kid named Cassius Clay join the Olympic team.
What this means for Indie cinema is the important question. Films that shot in the last two or three years on HD video would today have the option of being shot on Red. As far as I know, we haven't had a breakout indie shot on Red at Sundance or Toronto or Rotterdam, but it's just a matter of time. It's certainly a competitor to super16mm blown up to 35mm, and it beats the crap out of HD if your final presentation is going to be 35mm film.
The slim, although significant lesson from all of this has to do with the way the camera was developed - outside of the "big three" camera companies for consumer product - Sony, Nikon and Canon and without getting into bed with the biggest cinema camera makers, either - Panavision and Arriflex both have been developing their own digital systems, with roughly similar results but significantly higher purchase/rental costs and, discounting the Red's compression, less pixels to present when it comes time to go back to film. Red One was a surgical strike in some ways that might inflict some real damage to the status quo. The David vs Goliath aspects of this are explained well here, in a RedUser.com forum by one of the acolytes.
The slim, although significant lesson from all of this has to do with the way the camera was developed - outside of the "big three" camera companies for consumer product - Sony, Nikon and Canon and without getting into bed with the biggest cinema camera makers, either - Panavision and Arriflex both have been developing their own digital systems, with roughly similar results but significantly higher purchase/rental costs and, discounting the Red's compression, less pixels to present when it comes time to go back to film. Red One was a surgical strike in some ways that might inflict some real damage to the status quo. The David vs Goliath aspects of this are explained well here, in a RedUser.com forum by one of the acolytes.
In summation, there is a window that has been opened here - but for whom, and how long it will last?
(more on all this in Part two, stay tuned)
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