ProVideo Coalition.com: Camera Log by Adam Wilt | Founder | Pro Cameras, HDV Camera, HD Camera, Sony, Panasonic, JVC, RED, Video Camera Reviews

Today most of the items on our RED ONE order changed status from “Backorder” to “Completed”, so it seems like a good time to discuss kitting out the cameras for real-world use.

We wandered over to Chater Camera in Berkeley to poke and prod at their RED ONEs and accessories, and talk to the ever-helpful Jay Farrington about what he would recommend. Last week at the Digital Cinema Society meeting in San Francisco, we saw how Leigh Blicher has equipped the Videofax RED ONE. Then, this past Saturday, I attended DCS’s “Accessorizing your Digital Cinema Camera” meeting at PlasterCITY Digital Post in Los Angeles. From these events and from discussions with other folks, we’re coming to something resembling decisions…

First: how do you affix the darned thing to a tripod? The RED site gives few clues as to what the basic body has in the way of attachment points, so we flipped a ONE over to look at it.

The raw underside of a RED ONE.

Behold: two 3/8-inch and four 1/4-inch sockets. The bare body can be bolted to a tripod plate as-is (though you wouldn’t have any place to attach support rods if you did so, as the bare camera doesn’t provide for them).

The holes the side-mounted socket-cap bolts are stuck into attach RED’s own mounting paraphernalia:

RED shoulder dovetail, bottom plate, and cheese plate.

The bottom plate bolts to the sides of the camera and provides attachments for 19mm studio rods (which can be used to mount matte boxes, follow-focus mechanisms, and focus/zoom/iris motors ahead of the camera, and batteries and drives behind it). Either the shoulder dovetail or the cheese plate can be bolted into the bottom plate; the former allows a somewhat spartan shoulder support and a slightly wobbly tripod mount, while the latter allows firm tripod mounting (RED themselves suggest this division of labor).

Unfortunately it’s a bit of a production to switch between tripod and handheld configurations this way, and no one we’ve spoken to recommends this rig. Instead, they prefer the Element Technica Arri-style bridge plate (a.k.a. base plate), sold directly through the RED Store.

E.T. Arri bridge plate holding up a RED ONE.

E.T. makes this plate in both 19mm and 15mm studio rod configurations. (There are three different common standards for support rods [not counting Panavision’s]: 15mm lightweight, 15mm studio, and 19mm studio. I’ll simply refer you to Brook Willard’s excellent writeup for details, but in general, the US West Coast tends to be 15mm studio, while the East Coast and Europe tends to be 19mm. As we’re self-equipping most of the time [not renting], and as RED’s choice of 19mm kit is causing more 19mm stuff to be available even on the West Coast [where we are], we’ve opted for 19mm, just for the added robustness, so two E.T. 19mm bridge plates are in our RED order.)

The bridge plate clips directly onto a “dovetail” plate using a quick-release lever:

E.T. Arri bridge plate’s locking lever (on E.T. Arri Dovetail 2060).

The lever sticks out sideways hanging in the breeze, ready to slice open an unwary chin, snag on a sleeve, or get bumped open and dump the camera, but Jay Farrington tells us that it’s the same sort of lever as any other bridge plate has, so who am I to say it won’t be fine? [1]

The dovetail itself is a long, milled tripod plate. A fat, V-shaped channel on the top is clamped in the bridge plate and the whole thing forms a rigid mount. Dovetails are available to fit directly into a variety of O’Connor and Sachtler and similar fluid heads, and come in various lengths to allow different camera positions as well as the attachment of long lens supports.

As to fluid heads, the same two models keep coming up in discussion: the O’Connor 2060, and the Sachtler Cine30 (we’re usually going to be using primes and—if it’s ever deliverable and it turns out to be any good—the RED 18-85mm zoom; if we expected to use a heavier lens like the Optimo 24-290, then a heavier head would be called for). Both heads take the same size dovetail. Maybe we’ll get one O’Connor and one Sachtler? More experimentation is called for on this point.