Above: REDCINE-X EPIC .r3d screenshot
I've posted before about the RED EPIC 5K digital cinema camera. The "nuclear reactor in a matchbox" according to Jim Jannard of RED. In addition to being a 5K digital cinema camera that fits in your hand, it also marks RED's first DMSC - digital motion and stills camera - meaning it takes stills too! The EPIC cameras out in the wild currently have an alpha build of the firmware where only motion is enabled. However, it is still possible to extract RAW stills from the .r3d motion stream without the still mode enabled. The camera industry is currently abuzz with talks about the future of cameras being still/motion hybrids. Only time will tell if that holds true, but I'm certainly not opposed to it. Jarred Land of RED has been kind enough to post some RED EPIC .r3d motion and still files throughout reduser.net for us to play with. I decided to play with a few and posted the results below. Hard to tell how these would stack up with a still camera in the same situation, but the results are pretty neat, especially since these were extracted from a motion stream. A lot of photographers are used to playing around with RAW stills, but playing around with RAW motion files is a whole new beast and a frankly, a whole lot of fun! Limited run EPIC-M cameras are currently being shipped to special existing RED customers and other existing RED customers should get their EPIC-X cameras this summer. It will be interesting to see some A/B tests with EPIC and other still cameras, esp medium format ones....
Below: my attempts at "grading" some .r3d files (photos below courtesy of Jarred Land, RED Digital Cinema. Original source here)
