Mark Pederson of OFFHOLLYWOOD has been busy putting his RED Epic # 007 – Bond – to work this week and just posted some Epic footage and R3D stills last night for salivating readers of REDuser.net .

Remember Mark Pederson of OFFHOLLYOOD? He’s the one who got the first RED Epic (#006) shipped to him a couple weeks ago. Well, that camera ended up getting stolen while Pederson was on vacation, but he had the foresight to also order Epic #007 (Codename: Bond).

Once back from vacation, and after obtaining his new new Epic, Pederson started putting the camera through its paces to learn it and its workflow. On the forums, he said he let the OFFHOLLYWOOD staff and DIT’s do a small shoot to get a sampling of footage. They, of course, chose to shoot some models in their underwear having a pillow fight, which is a bit more intriguing to me than Jannard’s lion Felix.

Pederson said the shoot was “nothing fancy” and feature only a couple of tungsten lights to get enough exposure, or, as he said, “indie gorilla style.” It didn’t seem to matter much, take a look at some of the footage that was shot of one of the models throwing feathers at 96fps.

Keep in mind, please, that I used the new REDCINE-X to export this clip into a 1080 HD H.264 Quicktime, but Mac OS X still has gamma issues. That means the way the clip is handling color is not the same as the R3D files made it appear. For a good reference, here are some stills from the camera that give a better idea of the way the camera handled its colors.

(Click on the images to enlarge)

All of the stills, save for the top one, were delivered as single frame R3D files. The top, obviously, was a rip from the video. The still TIFF files took up a whopping amount of space, however — 78.6 MB to be exact! I had to compress them even more to upload them here and it gave me even more reason to believe that Epic is going to need some serious data management.

Now that you’ve seen the goods, I should hand it over to Pederson to explain the technical details surrounding his shoot:

We shot about 2 hours of footage at 5K 2:1 – 3:1 compression on the 23.98fps shots to 12:1 compression at 96fps – with a some 6:1 and 8:1 compressions at frame rates in between. Master Primes, shooting T1.3-T2.8 mostly. ARRI WCU-3 wireless focus. We downloaded SSDs directly to our DI system while we were shooting since we filmed in the lounge area at OFFHOLLYWOOD – so we were screening footage in the theatre while we were shooting. Pretty sure I’ve posted this already – but EPIC footage is simply stunning when projected on a screen – the additional detail resulting from the resolution is obvious. We are getting 24fps playback with full debayer at 5K with an alpha build of Assimilate’s Scratch running on our dual Red Rocket system (JMR hardware). Camera continues to perform rock solid. Not one single glitch or “moment” during this shoot. We were changing shutter, frame rates and compression constantly – and instantly – via REDmote and touchscreen. Jarred also informed me that the next firmware build I’ll be getting (any moment) has further optimized black calibration – which will lower the noise floor – specifically on higher frame rates, etc. – so – please keep in mind that these are just test shoots.

Like I said, Pederson has some serious gear to be putting this camera through its paces. I would love to see some of his footage projected in a theater, but I guess I’ll have to wait until Ridley Scott delivers his sci-fi film for that experience.

If you’re interested in keeping tabs on Pederson, the OFFHOLLYWOOD team and their #007 “Bond” RED Epic, there is a thread over at the REDuser forums dedicated to letting Pederson review the camera and post files. To download the R3D files and clip for yourself of the pillow fight, head on over to this website, but be aware that you’ll need a new, Epic enabled version of REDCINE-X to toy around with them.

P.S. This is all footage belonging to Pederson, I don’t own any of it. I simply put it up here to make it available to those who don’t have the ability to read R3D files. Props to Mark and his team for an awesome job!