Cooke Optics Ltd., a premier manufacturer of precision lenses for the motion picture industry, announces that Red Digital Cinema has joined the growing list of companies who have incorporated support for the Cooke-developed /i Technology into their product lines. /i Technology enables film and digital cameras to automatically record key lens and camera data for every film frame shot and provide it to post-production teams digitally. The technology streamlines both production and post, saving significant time and costs and eliminating guesswork, while enabling greater creative freedom.
Seeing an opportunity to provide digital cinematographers with even more tools, Red Digital Cinema recently added /i Technology to the specification for forthcoming releases of its Red One 4k digital camera and Red lumina and prime lenses. Ted Schilowitz, Leader of the Rebellion at Red Digital Cinema, said, “With /i Cooke has brought advanced electronics to the age-old craft of creating world-class optics. They’re helping to advance the state of digital cinematography by taking the process of recording of critical lens information out of the manual realm and making it available immediately and perpetually — on set and downstream.”

Les Zellan, chairman of Cooke Optics, noted, "We’re of course encouraged by the growing support for /i and the impact it has on cinematographers, camera operators, and post-production teams ‘ and the quality of the final creative product. By adopting /i, companies like Red are helping streamline acquisition and automate data recording processes across the entire production and post chain.”

Red joins ARRI, Avid, Cinematography Electronics, CMotion, Preston Cinema Systems, The Pixel Farm, and Service Vision in supporting /i Technology. Cooke Optics has also incorporated the protocol into its own S4/i series of Prime lenses, providing cinematographers and camera operators with vital information on lens setting, focusing distance, aperture and depth-of-field, hyperfocal distance, serial number, owner data, lens type, focal length in both metric and footage measurements, and zoom position for zoom lenses. Cooke will showcase its S4/i Prime lenses at the April NAB conference, in the P+S Technik booth, C8828D.