A moment of clarity

Today was the final day of a 7 day immersive training on the RED One Digital Camera.
The class was attended by directors, RED rental house owners, DP's, and editors from London, Canada, Hong Kong, Dubai, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Italy, India, and the US, including 3 from New York.

The general take on RED (public view), is you can pick it up like a video camera, and shoot away, that's not true. This is not your momma's video camera. REDucation is the cure for misinformation, and misguided use of shooting on RED. REDucation went through all phases of RED, shooting, testing it's limits and capabilities, and the editing process.

Ted Schilowitz of RED was co-instructor along with Michael Cioni of LightIron Digital. Michael has edited over 200 RED projects, and knows more than anyone to date on how best to shoot RED.

Even though I've been involved with digital these past 11 years, I had to adopt a new set of skills to work with RED. If you don't shoot RED properly, or ingest the footage into the workflow in the right manner, you will not realize good results. I say this because a lot of still rental houses and still capture boutiques are now positioned to offer RED, without knowing how to work with it. Most of these studios and digital rental services have popped up in the past two months, because RED has become popular. The infrastructure in most cases is not there, and you end up with firms with little to no knowledge or real time experience, peddling RED to their client base. This scenario will backfire, causing clients to botch jobs, or at the very least spend excess money to try and correct mistakes made on set.

With most all usual suspects now providing RED service, not one attended REDucation. It takes time to fully know this camera, lots of testing and handling the data.

I've attended every RED event and function since moving to Los Angeles (including RED Boot Camps), to date, no one from the still photo industry has ever attended. How can you master something, if you don't study, and seek knowledge.

To the credit of those that attended REDucation, my hat is off to you. Some traveled over 10,000 miles to enhance their skill set, to better understand a new tool, and how best to work with it.

My 2 cents.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

Von

p.s. the photo above is a still frame from the RED!!!