THE RED ONE 4K CAMERA

I was privileged to be invited to the Director’s Guild of the Philippine’s (dgpi) Technical Workshop on Film held at The Block D- Cinema last May 9.

I saw many familiar faces in the film industry like Tony G. Reyes, president of DGPI; Joel Lamangan, an award- winning film director; Audrey Zubiri, wife of Senator Miguel Zubiri; Oli Laperal Jr., managing director of RSVP Film Production; Percy Fung, 3D film maker from Hong Kong; and many others!


I learned so much about film making, cameras, post production, etc. One of the exciting parts is watching 3D made music videos and clips which were also discussed by Mr. Percy Fung.
Of course the 3D presentations won’t be possible without the 3D shades =)
I felt a little dizzy with the computations and numbers lectured by Mr. Oli Laperal Jr. (but they do make sense… a lot)!

But I ultimately went back to my senses when they talked about the 4K RED camera. Whew, it’s cool! RSVP Film Production is the first one to own the Red camera here in South East Asia. They showed us their demo reels using the 4K cam and I was impressed big time! The colors are very detailed and the images are realistic. I totally recommend this for food advertisement, even the olives looked tasty to my eyes. The test shot on time warp is cute too (cute?haha).

To give you an idea on what the hell I am talking about, see there are 5 main standards of digital video cameras, ranging from the high end digital cinema cameras, to your ordinary everyday household DVcam. The 480p or SD (standard definition), most commonly 720x480 in NTSC regions, is what you get in a decent DV camera. The 720p on the other hand, is the 'low end' HD. 720 lines vertically, commonly 1280x720. The 1080 is the topmost HDTV format. 1080 lines vertically (HDTV, unlike the cinema formats, are measured by their heights not width). The maximum is 1920x1080 at 60frames per second progressive scan (I’m not really familiar with the term progressive scan though). Now the 2k is 4k's little brother. While 4k exceeds 35mm film quality, 2k is a little below. 2048 pixels wide, it's around a quarter of the quality of 4k. And 4k is the mother of all digital film formats. 4096 pixels wide visual heaven! I told you, they discussed a lot of numbers in the workshop, and yeah, they do makes sense right?

The Knowing (Nicolas Cage), Angels and Demons (Tom Hanks) are just some of the films, among about 400 other Hollywood films, that already used the Red camera. Baler (Jericho Rosales), the indi film Pintakasi (John Wayne Sace), and many other film and advertisements here in the Philippines also used the Red cam.
















RSVP film production also showed us a demo reel on animations which also got my attention. Working on the post production is like being the magician of the film, anything is possible! And i think having a fully digital workflow for the film will make editing,visualFX,color-grading and distribution a lot more painless and trouble free than having film rolls. Digital media can be a little pricy though. That Red One cam is woopin' expensive Jonah!haha!

Someday I would get to use that Red ‘hot’ camera. Someday I would get to present a demo reel (done by me only,haha) about how awesome my ad agency is (c’mon I’m dreaming here!). But my biggest dream is to have a seminar to students and inspire them to achieve greatness and coolness in the mediocre world of film and advertisement!

Wahahaha… dream on…. yeah… and wake me up later!