RED One Camera Assembly

(2)   RED Camera Manual User Help Guide  >  RED One Camera Assembly

I'm not going to focus too heavily on this chapter.  I will point out a few "gotchas" from the field which are basically common sense.  The building of the One can be done by either the 1st and 2nd ACs or by a Digital Imaging Tech - D.I.T.  With a little practice the camera can be completely assembed and mounted with matte box on sticks in less than a half hour.

Power

Connect the power cable from the Battery Plate, RED-CHARGER or AC Power Adaptor to the
DC input on the rear of the camera body. 

LCD and EVF

Cables

Mostly common sense - I'll reiterate that the cables for the  LCD and EVF are interchangeable - but the plugs on the side of the camera are not.  Do not plug the EVF in to the Monitor port or vice versa - even though the cable will fit.

Drive or Flash Card

Put your drive or flash card on and connect it.  Remember that there are 2 flash card slots - you want the one on the back, the other is for meta-data and camera settings.

Lens

Note that on Build 18 and above there will be support for S4/i compatible lenses.  These lenses send meta-data to the camera like zoom, iris, shutter.  As of this writing, the new PL S4/i mounts were available for Build 17, but the codec and rest of the boards are not processing the information.  The feature will go live with Build 18.

Matte Box, Motors, and other Auxialiary Power

Don't pull the power from the aux power on the camera if you can help it.  Use a pigtail off the battery or some other power source  to power any other devices like a MicroForce controller.

Battery

When you add the battery, remember that it can be used to balance the weight of the lens.  Adjust the rods if necessary.

Power Up

There's some important things in the last three paragraphs worth focusing on here:

Firmware

Press the On/Off switch to power the camera. The rear status display will illuminate, and after approximately 60 seconds it will display the camera PIN, firmware build and firmware version.

While not necessary for proper operation of the camera, its worth noting that this is where you can get this info from. - namely startup of the camera.  It is necessary if you need to upgrade your firmware or match builds. 

So what is firmware and why are there so many versions?  Firmware is very handy stuff.  It is actually programming code - like Software - that gets encoded on to a chip in the camera - like Hardware.  The cool thing about it is that this chip can be upgraded with new code - so you get all the flexibility of software but all the speed of a chip.  You may be asking why this isn't used more - and the answer has to do with the amount that can be stored - its much smaller than a standard processor or piece of ram.  Not usefull for a big program, but dang handy for things like cell phones or digital cameras.

Metadata

The P.I.N is a unique product identification number in the format ABC_123_XYZ. This code is included in the metadata recorded with each image. The PIN provides RED with tracking data for customer service and assistance in authenticating legal ownership of the camera.

Metadata is an additional stream of information that is stored with the captured footage.  It can contain anything from the date and time or other timecode information, to in-camera color settings, to lens information from the S4/i. We'll certainly get in to the discussion of metadata more later.

Status Light

When the camera is ready for use, the lower LED to the right of the status display turns green.

Time to re-itterate: those two things to the right next to the lcd panel on the back of the camera body are just lights.  They look like they should be some kind of button.  They are not.

Chapter Summary

As promised - pretty straight forward, and mostly common sense.