New RED Helium 8K Sensor and Michael Bay’s Custom Camera

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by Richard LackeyJuly 8^th, 2016

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Image courtesy of Red Digital Cinema

The mist is lifting on a brand new RED Helium 8K Sensor, this time in a super 35mm format.

RED Digital Cinema’s CEO, Jarred Land and Chief Design Officer, Matthew Tremblay have released some pictures on social media of their latest creation for none other than Michael Bay.

Back in May, RED shared details of a custom housed Dragon sensored beast of a camera, the Xenomorph, built for David Fincher.

This time Michael Bay gets the royal RED treatment with an out-of-this world camera for Transformers: The Last Knight.

Image courtesy of Matthew Tremblay, Jarred Land and RED Digital Cinema.

New Super 35mm RED Helium 8K Sensor

This time it’s not “just” a custom bodied Dragon. Michael Bay gets a new sensor too in the form of an 8K super 35mm sensor known by the moniker “Helium”. What makes this sensor different from the 8K VistaVision sensor, is its size. To squeeze 8K into a smaller super 35mm chip necessitates new (smaller, denser) pixels. I’ve been told that smaller does not mean any compromise in imaging performance, quite the opposite, these are “better” pixels.

It goes without saying that RED have a lot of secrets, and despite nudging the right people for more information, this is all I’ve got so far.

If you aren’t following Jarred and Matt on Instagram and Facebook, you’re missing out some cool updates. What is clear is these guys have way too much fun building cameras.

UPDATE:

Jarred has confirmed in a recent Reduser post that “Helium” is in fact an entirely new 3.65 micron sensor line, the first of which will be the 8K super 35mm sensor, which will also soon be available for Weapon sensor upgrades.

Oh, and it looks like there will be a new Epic-W, which will also be Helium equipped.

All images courtesy of Matthew Tremblay, Jarred Land and RED Digital Cinema.

Image courtesy of Matthew Tremblay, Jarred Land and RED Digital Cinema.

Image courtesy of Matthew Tremblay, Jarred Land and RED Digital Cinema.

Image courtesy of Matthew Tremblay, Jarred Land and RED Digital Cinema.

Image courtesy of Matthew Tremblay, Jarred Land and RED Digital Cinema.