Jim Jannard takes a bow

News

by Tim FokAugust 19^th, 2013

With the Dragon sensor upgrade now complete, Jim Jannard has announced he’ll be stepping down as the face and spokesman of RED Cinema.

Words from Jim:

“With the release of the Dragon sensor… I have finished my mission. I am done posting. I will no longer be the face of RED. Mercifully, Jarred will take my place and he is worthy times forever. Jarred is me… only 30 years younger.
I have done my best. I saw a fatal flaw in the camera industry. We did our best to address it.
I will now sink into the background, I hope with my reputation intact. I will work on the future of digital cinema… behind the scenes.”

More from Jim can be found on the REDUser forum. Whilst Jim’s words are no doubt sincere, time will tell whether his words remain true and he resists the urge to surface once again.

In other RED news, here is some more DRAGON test footage by DP Evin Grant:

Evin’s thoughts:

“My feeling is there is more DR visible here than the stated spec, but it’s hard to quantify. You’ll also notice I was very good about avoiding any hard clips. Even the fire ball shots hold color. Another thing is I’m really in love with the grain-like noise when the sensor is pushed to ISO 3200+ it’s really organic and gives the truly high ISO material a beautiful pushed film quality. It also handles mixed and discontinuous lighting like nothing I’ve seen. The shot of the girl dancing at 6400 ISO is shot under just an LED street lamp and plays much brighter than my eyes were seeing.

As far as skin tone the sensor picks up all the subtle colors and variances in the flesh and make-up, this is the trade off for so much info and detail and if you really want smooth skin rendering you’ll need to have a great make-up artist and really understand filtration. The only diffusion filter I used on some shots was a Schneider 1/16 HD classic soft just to take the edge off.”

This is another test of many more to come as the DRAGON upgrades trickle out to RED users. What are your thoughts on the image?