NEW Camera Alert! RED RAVEN Testing and Footage

Ever since becoming a filmmaker I’ve always dreamed of owning a RED camera. They came out just before I went into film school, and I actually based my decision of what school to go to partially on the fact that they had one of these cameras I could play with.

RED cameras are digital cinema cameras, and the list of movies shot on them would be full of names like The Hobbit, Guardians of the Galaxy (and pretty much all the Marvel films), Tree of Life, Gatsby, Star Wars (the more recent ones).

They’re renowned in the filmmaking world because of their modularity (you can swap out all the parts like legos), their amazing color science (the way the footage looks), as well as the dynamic range (how they capture light). Not to mention the insane frame rates and resolution. With a RED camera, you can pull high definition images straight from the footage because it’s so high resolution.

I’ve always loved RED because of their ecosystem. Once you’ve invested in a RED product, they make it easy to upgrade cameras at a fraction of the cost. RED cameras can cost upwards of $50,000 but you can get a fully rigged lower end model for about $20,000, then trade in for a higher end model at a fraction of the cost later on. This means, you buy most accessories once, and when you feel like getting a whole new camera, you can just upgrade the “brain” of the RED to the latest version and you’re all set. This was a significant gear investment for us, but as we’re taking on more commercial video work it made sense to make the jump.

Here are two tests I did with the camera during the first few weeks of shooting with it. The first is a low-light test during a local Northern, CA commercial shoot, and the second is a high speed (slow motion) test during a YouTube video production I did in collaboration with Mark Rober down in the Bay Area. You can see his whole video here (it’s amazing)! I helped with all the slow motion “specialty” shots.