RED Digital Cinema opened the doors of their brand new RED Studios facility in Hollywood exclusively for the Los Angeles chapter of Digital Cinema Society members on February 13, 2010.

Jim Jannard the founder of RED Digital Cinema welcomed the visitors to new studios and took the stage for the first hour to introduce the new RED developments like .RLK and .RMD files and bust some old RED myths.

Jannard demonstrated the footage shot with the new Mysterium X sensor on a Sony SRX-T420 projector. The stunning 4k projection was almost completely noise free in the shadows. According to Jannard the Mysterium X sensor delivers two extra stops over the Mysterium sensor used in legacy RED ONE cameras.

The RED reel was played back from soon-to-be-renamed RED RAY at 15Mbit/s. The picture was surprisingly free of artifacts even at this very low bitrate (Blu-ray bitrate is 36MBit/s).

The 4k projector was also instrumental in seeing the side-by-side resolution comparison of Canon 5D, Sony F35 and RED ONE with an MX sensor. A three-way split of a zone plate shot showed that even when delivering 1080 sized masters a 4k acquisition and post workflow maintain a picture free of Moire pattern. The resolving power of RED ONE was significantly better than that of the two other camera models used in the test.

Jannard also introduced the new RED metadata format. The third party application friendly .RMD files will reside alongside .R3D files in the RED ONE generated directories. The .RMD files will contain non-photography specific information currently not stored in the RED metadata such as circled takes. The files similar in format to .XML files will be easily read and generated by various production and post production software.

Michael Cioni of Light Iron took over from Jannard and demonstrated the new features of REDCINE-X. Although the free software application is still under development it already promises to be a worthy replacement for the indispensable RED Alert, RED Rushes, and Redcine.

When equipped with a RED ROCKET board REDCINE-X is capable of real time SDI playback from the RED .R3D files. Other new features include lift/gamma/gain control, editable timeline, simple conform through EDL scripting support, broadcast wave file autosync, support for Tangent Wave and Euphonix tactile surfaces and more.

A very interesting feature of REDCINE-X is the ability to generate and save a “look” which is basically a specific color and gamma setting. The look file can be loaded in a RED ONE camera.

Cioni quickly created a hi-con black and white look and exported it from REDCINE-X as an .RLK file. As soon as he loaded the look file in the RED ONE the camera’s video output provided an instant hi-con black and white picture.

REDCINE-X also supports the new REDGamma curve. This new setting provides a visual feedback similar to Rec709 with visually pleasing distribution of values but it also maintains the full dynamic range of the legacy REDlog gamma.

Outside of part of the stage with the projection screen the visitors were invited to view additional demo pods.

Assimilate showed a Scratch system with two RED ROCKET boards capable of real time stereoscopic playback from .R3D files. The new Scratch is capable of using multiple RED ROCKET boards for unprecedented hardware acceleration.

Hollywood-DI demonstrated their Apple Color workflow.

At a dark corner of the sound stage RED set up a small scene lit with candles only and provided two Mysterium X RED ONE cameras for the attending cinematographers to try out.

Jim Jannard along with a small group of RED engineers took questions from the audience for the entire last hour of the morning.