CLAi started using the RED camera system some two and a half years ago for just one reason – the quality of the images that it produced were simply stunning, totally blowing away the results we were getting from any of our other systems, and almost on par with the images that we achieved shooting on 35mm film. Of course, the reality of adopting this radical technology was as much of a headache as switching from Panasonic DVCPro50 to Sony HDCam half a decade earlier… the sheer size of the image files, and the complexity of getting to editable formats, ripped all of our existing computer systems to shreds. The cost of going RED is significantly higher than it first appears!

As a full service production company CLAi had the added challenge of not only having to work out how to shoot effectively with the beast, but of changing how we build schedules and budgets in pre-production, finding or training key crew members, working out what on earth would happen under different shooting conditions, and evolving ways of actually transcoding and color correcting masses of gigabytes of footage in a workflow through post production… while all the time developing bigger and faster systems to handle it all. Sometimes it seemed impossible, but we just couldn’t abandon those fabulous pictures!

Of course, RED is heavily driven by an amazing base of users – which is great news because there is very little by way of hard information available when you hit a roadblock on the learning curve. We try to help out this community by making some of our own footage available through our website under the “Free RED Clips” banner for other users (and curious potential users) to download and try out for themselves. Usually, we have three R3D files available for download, along with matching 4k ProRes files, which provide a way for our clients and supporters to see how everything works and to test out their own systems.

Now we are making it even easier to get hold of the goodies (which are still free). It is as easy as “friending” us on Facebook by clicking the link on the “Free RED Clips” page, and checking out our “Info” section where you will find the download links for everything…