USER REVI EW | RED KOMODO
Red’s Komodo has many attributes, but its global shutter sensor with 6K capability is by far its biggest selling point NO WOBBLY LINES PR I CE £5995 / $5940
WORDS AND P I CTURES ADAM DUCKWORTH
here’s a lot of competition in the sub-ten grand cinema camera category nowadays. From full-
frame sensors to Raw recording, on-sensor phase detection to 8K and even 12K capture – this is where all the action is. Up until recently, Red has been absent from this great techno battle, preferring to focus on clients with bigger budgets. But even the biggest films aren’t going to risk a mega-money cinema cam as a crash camera, so Red has built a small yet perfectly formed cinema camera at a price the US firm has never been close to before: six thousand of your English pounds or US dollars. What was important was that the camera used the same legendary R3D Redcode workflow to fit in seamlessly with the bigger and pricier Red camera production pipelines, and that the dreaded rolling shutter issue was completely obliterated to allow for fast whip pans – essential for a crash cam. It also had to be small enough to be used in tight locations where bigger cameras won’t fit. The result is the 6K Red Komodo, which doesn’t skimp on spec, but actually has more high-tech engineering going on than pretty much any of the Red range, which focuses on pure image quality and a rugged, modular build. The big selling point of the Komodo is the global shutter, which completely eliminates all of the so- called ‘jello effect’ of rolling shutters that every other camera at this price point has. A standard rolling shutter reads out data from the sensor line by line, typically from top to bottom. So
sensitivity isn’t a problem either. Red managed to coax such good performance out of its sensor because it has always pioneered the use of Raw capture, which it does in a slightly different way to other cameras. Some cameras record full-fat Raw in an uncompressed 16-bit format, which leads to truly massive file sizes that are pretty much impossible to record internally. Other cameras record in compressed Raw internally, which is partially de-Bayered in-camera, with the remaining de-Bayering done in post. What the Red Komodo does is record compressed Raw in three different quality levels – low, medium or high – and all the de-Bayering is done in post. This means it’s much easier and quicker to capture in-camera, and allows the Komodo to record its R3D Raw files to a CFast card. The Komodo can also be set to record in various flavours of ProRes 422 for a faster workflow, but to do that means to miss out on the true strength of using Raw video files, which is the pure data right off the sensor. You can switch between Raw and ProRes, but the camera has to reboot each time you change. Working with the largest 6K files puts stress on your editing
if the camera is being moved in a fast pan, for example, vertical lines look obviously skewed. With a standard rolling shutter camera, there really is no cure for this, so filmmakers learn to avoid these situations when possible or spend significant time and money in post improving it. But as a global shutter reads out data from the whole sensor at once, these issues totally disappear, and everything looks perfectly normal. So that’s what Red has fitted to the Komodo – and it works perfectly, with no jello effect. In theory, global shutters can make action footage look a bit different to what we are used to, but everything looked completely normal to our eyes. One of the main reasons more camera companies don’t use global shutters is that they can reduce dynamic range and ultimate sensitivity of the sensor. Red’s new sensor is claimed to have over 16 stops of dynamic range, so this is certainly not an issue either. With ISO going from 250 to 12,800, with a sweet spot around ISO 800,
ABOVE The 6K Komodo is the smallest and most affordable Red camera ever, with a global shutter to eliminate ‘jello effect’
“A SMALL YET PERFECTLY FORMED CINEMA CAMERA”
26 DEF I N I T ION | JANUARY 202 1
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