I’ve written a lengthy, ranty stream-of-consciousness article over at PVC that outlines my recent experiences while 1st AC’ing a few Red One projects. There are already volumes of information written on how amazing the Red camera is, so I’ve taken a few minutes to highlight the areas that I think need work. This is not to diminish what Red has accomplished, but more to inject a little bit of the reality of working with a Red on a production set with a tight time and money budget. Here’s an excerpt:

“On a recent shoot with a lot of interviews, we needed to capture reference audio to the Red. It worked fine, except that on playback most clips would fail to play, freezing with an audio error on screen. The workaround was to exit playback, and try to play the clip again. Sometimes we would do that as many as 8-10 times before the clip would finally play without error. We learned very quickly to disable audio capture when it wasn’t entirely necessary, so we could actually play back the footage for the director. This camera had not yet been sent in for the audio board upgrade, so I don’t know if that was related. But I do know that it was a very irritating, very time-consuming issue that sapped my confidence and slowed down our already compressed shooting schedule. These sort of simple details need to work every day, all day. Oh, and while we are on the subject of playback…can we have playback thumbnails already?”

Read the entire article over at FreshDV’s Channel at PVC. Subscribe to our PVC feed while you are there.