There may have been disbelievers in the audience at RED's first public
showing of footage shot with its new Mysterium Sensor, here in IBC's
main D-Cinema Auditorium, but the dynamic range of the 4K footage we
all saw on screen didn't lie. The blacks were beautifully deep and the
range of tone and textures were lovely to watch. The company has been
steadily working on (and everyone has been wildly speculating about)
the sensor for the past eight months. "We hooked it up, turned it on
and recorded the images you are about to see in our small garage in our
small start-up, and it's exactly what we envisioned," Ted Schilowitz
told the crowd.
The content was fittingly cheesy for a company that wears its newbie
status proudly. Staffers, friends and models alternately blew bubblegum
bubbles and lit and puffed on giant stogies; there was also the
obligatory product shots of sunglasses and a silver Porsche. But the
real show was in the detail in each trail of smoke and the blues and
oranges in the lighter flames. Schilowitz fed us the numbers that
explained why it looked so good. "Our dynamic range, at 66 dB, is off
the charts," he said, "and we're just getting started there." The
images were captured uncompressed to a custom-built PC and disk array
in 12-bit linear RAW. Each frame was then batch processed to convert to
4K RGB, color corrected and conformed by RED's own REDCINE, and also
Assimilate Scratch. The finished images were encoded to a DCI 4K JPEG
2000 file for playback on the QuVis projector.
New
add-ons coming from RED, beside the $4,995 prime lens announced
earlier, include the RED Rail shoulder mount system and a new 18 - 85
mm zoom lens, which will retail for $10,000. They aren't ready to take
orders on the zoom yet, but Schilowitz said to check back at
www.red.com for news on that soon.
Schilowitz also announced that the original $17,500 price is holding
firm, good news for the 25 or so RED advance reservation holders
sprinkled among the press. The look of this system keep changing, but
so far, the price, for all that you'll get, is still something to talk
about.
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