Around the back of RED's military-themed NAB booth, a 4K screening room was showcasing a film produced specifically for the tradeshow. The RED folks had decided a scant ten days before NAB that they wanted to create a dramatic short to show off their new 5K EPIC camera, and so they wrote, directed, shot, and edited this 9-minute film, entitled "Tattoo," on an accelerated schedule. Today they posted the short in full; here it is.
Presumably for quality considerations, RED has posted the short as a downloadable x.264 movie instead of as an embeddable video. I don't want to upload it against anyone's wishes, so instead of watching it here, click on the following image to download the x.264 zip (x.264 is a variant of h.264; if the video does not play correctly on your computer, try VLC).
UPDATED: The above link is for a 1K-resolution version; they've since also posted a 2K download.
What did you think? There's no shortage of resolution and dynamic range, and this low-resolution compressed web file actually has more saturated colors than I remember in the 4K theater (where I watched the short twice, along with a semi-secret end-of-day screening of a terrific short co-produced with Avid). It's hard to find fault with the EPIC, as you'd expect -- it's easier to evaluate DSLR footage with "oh, look, aliasing!" than it is to evaluate a full-featured, mature cinema camera. Things simply look as you'd expect them to: good.
The ending may not make a whole lot of sense if you don't know that at the show RED also "announced" their next generation sensor, named RED Dragon (thus the namesake tattoo at the film's conclusion). Unfortunately there was no official announcement, just a mention that they are, in fact, working on the sensor. Which is not really an announcement; more on this soon.
Digital Acquisition Supervisor Michael Cioni also wrote an in-depth entry about the accelerated post-process.
Link: TATTOO (REDUSER)
