Overview
The RED One is truly a revolutionary product. Simple enough for an novice to use, RED has made the build and use of this camera so that only after a couple hours of tinkering anyone can have this professional camera up and capturing magnificent 4k images. For those who might not be familiar with the term 4k, it means 4000 lines of resolution, just over twice the resolution of Blu-ray. This means that projected onto a large theater size screen, the image will be similar to one shot on 35mm film.
The RED One competes with cameras like the Arriflex D-21, the Panavision Genesis, and Sony’s CineAlta F35. Although, it is about a quarter the cost of any of these cameras, making it more affordable at the extremely reasonable price of $17,000. Of course you’ll have to load it up with all the extras and spend another small fortune, but you can definitely get most jobs done for a total tab of around $35,000 (including a cheap set of Nikon primes). You could say that the One’s real peers are camera’s in its same price range like the Panasonic AG-HPX500.
The Camera works great and as the firstborn for RED, they are still ironing out a few of the kinks. But they have most of them sorted out, and there is a great online community willing to help with any problems.
The Workflow
This is where the RED One excels. They have made it so easy to take their propriety Redcode RAW footage and bring it into Final Cut to work with proxies a fraction of the actual files size. Although you need much processing power and ram to render things out in a timely fashion, RED has a few programs to help this process less painful. REDCine and REDCODE RAW are the color correcting programs that RED provides free of charge right on the support section of their website. They also support REDCODE RAW data integration with Adobe’s Premiere Pro instead of having to use the proxy files like in Final Cut Pro. Of course news of Final Cut Pro Studio 3 probably have something similar in the works.