After two years of anticipation, the first batch of Red Cameras was shipped to the first 100 early adopters willing to gamble a US$1000 deposit on a dream. And for the most part, they were gambling on technology that was predominantly still a gleam in the eye of its beholder, Jim Jannard.

In the beginning, the eyes and heart of the Red Camera project was essentially its 4K (4520 x 2540 pixel) Mysterium cmos sensor, but the rest - including resolutions from 4K to HD, frame rates from 1 fps to 80 fps, a dynamic range of six-plus f-stops, color viewfinders, high speed flash cards and dockable hard drives, four-channel audio, lenses, and all the rest - were still an inventory of engineering targets rather than actual hardware or software. This is partly what made the Red Camera so alluring: its promise of delivering a filmmaker's wish list of acquisition features, all crammed into one compact camera chassis. Equally remarkable was the pledge to accomplish this in less than two years, despite starting without a working prototype or manufacturing facilities.

Despite the long odds, last September Red Digital Cinema shipped cameras to the first 100 people (of several thousand) who pre-ordered. Dino Georgopoulos, an la-based indie producer, got Red Camera number 31, which has launched a string of 4K projects for him, including many tv spots. The spots were shot in 4K and slow-motion 2K, but had to be edited on a pre-HD Avid. "We had to down-convert from 4K to HDCam, and then to DigiBeta in order to edit on an older Avid," he says. "Despite multiple down-conversions, it looked fabulous, after editing and color correcting."

Fortunately for Georgopoulos, many of his subsequent Red projects were edited in Final Cut Pro, which supports the camera. In fact, Apple partnered with Red Digital Cinema from the outset so that there would be a viable workflow pathway from 4K acquisition to output. As a result, loading footage into Final Cut Pro is much easier than with an Avid. "Red Code is wrapped with QuickTime," explains Georgopoulos, "so you can play and output lower-res proxies of 4K Red Code. These can be 2K, 1K or half-K proxies of the 4K footage which are then edited in Final Cut Pro 6." This greatly reduces the amount of storage required to edit 4K projects in an NLE, even when compressed as Red Code. "Still, you need the latest edition of Final Cut Pro (6.02) and the fastest Intel Mac possible - ideally, with quad processors - for decent speed. Many indies can't meet the specs without upgrading their whole system. That's partly why I have to do so many demos for every Red job I get."

Across the continent in Toronto, DP D. Gregor Hagey has shot three projects to date with Red number 98, one of them also edited on an Avid. "We had to manually conform all the shots after editing offline because the Avid couldn't read the timecode in QuickTime files imported from Red. Luckily, it was a short project, but I won't edit Red projects on an Avid again, not until they add support for Red Code," he adds. His other two Red projects are being edited in Final Cut with comparative ease. "With Red Cine for outputting from Final Cut, editing is smoother. Red Cine reads the raw files and timecode and can export both as DPX or Pro Res HD files."