Red Digital Cinema
American camera manufacturer
Red Digital Cinema is an American camera manufacturer specializing in digital cinematography headquartered in Foothill Ranch, California. The company became a subsidiary of Nikon in 2024.
Red has studios in Hollywood, Los Angeles, and has offices in London and Beijing, as well as a retail store in Hollywood. Additionally, Red has various authorized resellers and service centers worldwide. The company was founded by Jim Jannard in 2005 out of a side interest in digital photography. Jannard is the founder of eyewear company Oakley which shares a similar industrial design language.
History
Red Digital Cinema was founded by Jim Jannard, who previously founded Oakley, Inc.. As a self-described "camera fanatic" owning over 1,000 models, Jannard started the company with the intent to deliver a (relatively) affordable 4K digital cinema camera. Jannard dates the idea to a time when he bought a Sony HDR-FX1 video camera and learned that the files had to be converted with software from Lumiere HD and were not viewable on Mac OS. Lumiere HD's owner Frederic Lumiere collaborated with Jannard on developing an alternative and introduced him to Ted Schilowitz who became Red's first employee.
The early team members engaged in undisclosed research on how to make a digital camera feasible for Hollywood productions.
The public source identifies “Red Digital Cinema” as american camera manufacturer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Digital, Cinema and American.
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This entry incorporates text from “Red Digital Cinema” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.