The RED One Digital Cinema camera reflects an entirely new paradigm in Digital Cine cameras. The RED One is essentially a high end Digital SLR (DSLR) still camera that can shoot at 24 or 30 frames per second. The RED One is a modular camera, and the basic camera body does not have a built-in viewfinder, lens, or any method of recording the image data produced.

The main advantage of the RED One is that it is far from being a video camera. It is not based on any TV/Broadcast technology, and has nothing to do with video, other than the ability to format a proxy image as 720p HD so it can be viewed on standard SDI or HDMI monitors while shooting.

The RED One captures the images as the raw data from the CMOS (Mysterium) sensor, using very efficient wavelet compression. This reduces the otherwise enormous data coming from the 4K sensor to a manageable data rate. When recording to Compact Flash media (the de-facto standard for RED users), about 4 minutes of 4K/24 fps data can be recorded to one 8GB CF card.

Many of our existing customers have purchased RED One cameras, and we are gearing up to provide support for these cameras. At the moment, we can provide very accurate adjustment of the flange focal distance (back focus) on the RED One adjustable PL mount, as well as changing out entire lens mounts (BNCR, Birger Canon, Nikon, etc.

In the photo below, a RED One camera is being checked on our Möeller-Wedel Autocollimator. It is mounted to the Optical Test Bench. The white box below the autocollimator is the fiber optic light source.

A Zeiss f1.2 Super Speed lens is used as a test lens.The eyepiece on the collimator is covered with a lens cap so the collimator target can be easily seen on the RED LCD. The autocollimator can show a highly magnified image of the test target superimposed on the Mysterium sensor pixel grid (you can actually see the pixels).This method of adjustment produces very accurate results. Much better that can be achieved by just focusing off a test chart. The LCD verifies the accuracy of the adjustment.

NOTE: In the photo, a Zeiss Planar 1.2/85mm lens is shown, so the target image can be more easily seen on the LCD. For the most accurate adjustment, the Distagon 1.2/18mm is used.

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