RED Camera Build 18 version 3.6.0 Let's jump right in

It's always a good time to eat junk food while watching women who could probably benchpress you. 

Last week I had a multi camera infomercial job, but only one camera at a time. The first day with the HDX900 went well, no problems. Learned a few new things about the HDX900- you can turn down the black gamma to crush your blacks a little better than you can with the pedestal. Also, as you increase gain your contrast increases--counteract that by decreasing your gamma.

Rest of the job was RED Camera and this was my second time using the new build. Encountered a few inconsistencies. I was excited to use build 18 again. Because we had to go straight to tape on set I got to do a lot of color correction in camera. We started by upping the contrast and then began to use the different color gain channels to warm up the image. Ultimately we found that the white balance alone achieved the look we wanted and was a cleaner solution. Most of this job was shot at 120 frames per second, so we had to shoot 2K (2:1) at 120 frames we were pushing the edge of the light we had at our disposal. I was able use exposure and brightness controls to boost the exposure on darker skin tones without having to re-light. 

Had a few problems with the 2K. First I noticed that when I set the framerate to 120 and adjusted the shutter the image was excessively dark. Readjusted the framerate and got basically another stop of exposure back. This seemed to happen fairly consistently; if I adjusted my shutter first then framerate it did not seem to be a problem. Also found the 2K playback through the VTR system to be soft. Whereas the 4K through the same system was sharp. All of the final clips were sharp regardless of the softness of the playback. 

We also shot the rest of job at 4KHD allowing us to have properly HD scaled QT proxies. This along with in camera color grading helped to speed the export the on set export to tape. This HD mode is very handy, it is unfortunate that it does not carry over to 3K and 2K. There are quite a few new features in build 18, the few I like the best so far are the View RAW Histogram, the exportable user settings, user definable aspect ratio, and the ability to diable the EVF Wheel.