Red One Ultimate Panasonic P2HD SONY XDCAM HD Panasonic DVCPRO HD SONY HD CAM
Menus A-Z

Here are some maps of useful keystrokes to items in the red one menu:

Useful Links
Operating Tips

  • Setup

    When building the Red One camera, care must be taken to make sure that everything is physically secure, calibrated and set up. The camera's modular design means that it takes time to construct, so don't expect to turn up, point and shoot.

  • Storage Media

    It is inadvisable to fill the Red One hard drives for several reasons. Drives can corrupt and the more data that is stored on the drives in one hit, the more is potentially lost. Regular downloading of the Red R3D files will keep your DIT or data wrangler more efficiently occupied than if you hand them huge amounts of data in one hit. It also means that they can more regularly check files and pick up problems earlier in your shoot. On average, ten to twenty minutes of footage should be the most stored if possible.

    Always 'unmount' the Red One's hard drives before pulling out the cable connecting them to the camera. The quickest way is to Press the Undo and Exit buttons together.

    The Red One CF cards are your reliable alternative to hard drives if there is any likelihood of movement causing the drives to skip and lose data or drop frames. Currently Red manufactures 16Gb CF cards that will hold about eight minutes of 4K Red footage.

  • Lighting

    When shooting tungsten, the preset Tungsten position in the menu will produce increased noise in the blacks, compared to the preset Daylight setting. It is therefore preferable to shoot with Daylight lighting or some blue colour correction filtration if front of the lens.

  • Exposing

    The Red One has approximately 11 stops of dynamic range, but you need to understand how to control it. If you're not using a light meter, your main tool is the histogram.

    Red One histogram: The RGB histogram is displayed at the bottom of the monitor screen. Waveforms fed from the downconverted HDSDI output of the camera, displaying the image with your chosen 'Look', are not an accurate representation of the image that is recorded.

    The logic behind the Red One's histogram is simple - you want to expose as much as you can (expanding to the right of the histogram) but without pushing the exposure too far and electronically clipping it (thereby losing image detail and data).

    From the Red One operation manual: "A Clip Meter (like a traffic light - but red, blue and green) compliments the maximum (clip). Don't worry if the image doesn't seem exactly right. The histogram won't lie to you. Neither will the traffic lights. Later on, in Red-Cine, you can always push the levels of the dark and mid tones, but it is impossible to pull down lost data from overexposed highlights."

    Red One false-colour mode: False-colour mode is very useful for those situations where most your image is actually properly exposed but the histogram keeps displaying that it is clipping. The culprit will usually be a reflection of some sort - be it a wave on a lake or beach, someone's glasses, car windscreens on a busy road etc.

    From the Red One operation manual: "In False Color the color component of the image is replaced by an overlay of colored bandsrepresent underexposed areas. Initially, reading the multi-coloured display is alien, but basically, grey is acceptable, blue is still OK, however any red is clipping. The hotter the colour, the more you are overexposing your image, but you will be aware of this from your histogram, and the traffic lights will be glowing red, green and blue."

    Taking the example of a busy street scene, with ambient reflections on cars, windows and people's glasses. It will be hard to get rid many of these reflections even if a polarizer is used. Now when you try to expose using your histogram it seems that no matter how you adjust your aperture your histogram is warning you that the image is overexposed.

    Now turn on false-colour mode. It will be clear that the things that are clipping are those unavoidable reflections. The reality is that these reflections are pure white and you will never be able to expose for them anyway. Now just verify that the rest of the image is correctly exposed and your end result will be correct.

    Neutral Density Filters and Infra Red

    Unlike some other HD cameras on the market, the Red One 4k HD digital camera has no infra-red filter built in. Under normal circumstances, this isn't a problem. Daylight and even tungsten lighting gives off infra red light, as well as visible light. Ordinarily, the infra red is in a proportionately low quantity compared to the visible light, so such a small amount has no effect on the visible picture.

    However, if you use Neutral Density filters (NDs above approx 0.6) then you are stopping down the amount of visible light reaching the camera's sensor, but you aren't reducing the amount of infra red. Therefore, proportionately there is more IR affecting the picture. The more NDs that you add the worse the problem gets. It will mostly affect the blacks, giving colour shifts, which will take time and money to correct in post-production grading.

    Some hire companies will supply you with a dichroic infra-red filter (or some no IR filtration at all) which will cut out all of the spectrum above the visible light. This will work fine most of the time, but if you shoot with a wide lens (wider than 24mm), then the light at the edges of the filter is travelling through the dichroic coating at the wrong angle, rendering it ineffective and you will see the same colour shifts in the blacks, so this filter has limited application, and is not suitable for use with wider lenses.

    Shoot HD believes that the proper solution isn't to use such a dichroic filter, so instead we supply two sets of IR filtration, which means that you're not restricted from shooting on wide lenses. Our solution is to provide a Tiffen Hotmirror which will cut out the top end of the IR spectrum only, plus a set of R NDs which cut out the lower IR frequencies. This is a more expensive, but more flexible and comprehensive solution, leading to perfect colour reproduction when using ND filters.