The new Canon

[Freya Black]

You can have the "look" you're applying to the film shown on the set using LUT (lookup tables). It doesn't affect the master itself or grade it, but it previews the proposed final look.

 

Ah! Thankyou Brian, that makes sense! :)

Just sometimes people review cameras and talk about things and you wonder what it is they are really trying to describe like as I say "is that a giraffe or a tiger?"

So can the Scarlet/Red/Epic do that because then it wouldn't seem quite as crazy to be trying to use the HDMI/SDI output for hand offs?

 

love

 

Freya

[Phil Rhodes]

Surely if you are recording the hdmi/ SDI whatever to a pro-res recorder, you are just going to get a camera preview type output that's not very gradeable but looks nasty

Well quite.

From what I understood you can't put external recorders on Red stuff because getting at the final picture requires a lot of postprocessing (which is why the cameras are, well, what they are). If this is not true on Scarlet or Epic, fine.

P

[Robert Houllahan]

Mind you, it's footage isn't without merit:

 

 

Can't say that I thought that was the best looking video I ever saw, it seemed ok but nothing all that special from the digital camera world. better than a 7D or whatever but after using all the DSLR's for video I think they are all pretty much rubbish anyway... IMO... looks similar tot he F3 but a bit less clippy.

 

 

Nothing that wants to make me throw my Aaton or Arri 35mm away...

 

 

-Rob-

[Justin W. King]

I think that's unlikely, I'm sure it will use the same sensors as the epic but the camera will just run a bit slower electronically.

Not sure how some of these rumours get started!

I am sure the sensor is still good enough for the task at hand, since the Scarlet processors are not as strong either and the feature set is not as rich...

I was refering to these articles.

 

The Scarlet X camera from RED, at last

The news of Scarlet itself was quite simple yet quite significant, and an interesting counterpoint to Canon. The concept for Scarlet announced three years ago envisaged a video-sized chip (2/3-in) providing a 3K picture for 2K deliverables after processing. All that has gone away. What the world wants, argues RED, is an EPIC (RED's flagship 5K cinema camera) for less money. So that's what's happening. Jim Jannard explained that the ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) in the Epic are expensive and advanced and many of them fail to reach the high performance required for the Epic's stellar spec's. These are of course rejected and just sit on a shelf. By matching these chips with less complex electronics and accepting the lower data rates and capabilities, RED's per unit costs drop dramatically and a baby Epic can be manufactured at a reasonable cost. So that's what Scarlet X is.

 

And also this article

 

Canon’s New Digital Cinema Camera

Underneath the surface, however, there are major differences. Each camera records to a 50mbps 4:2:2 codec, but Canon uses the widely accepted MPEG2 MXF format, and RED uses its own efficient yet proprietary wavelet-based REDCODE. The C300’s gargantuan Super35 sensor outputs only 1080p, while the Scarlet’s 4k image is picked up on a smaller chip, apparently grabbed from rejected Epic sensors.

 

Theres a picture of it here, it's supposed to be a similar size/shape to the epic:

 

http://www.red.com/products/scarlet#product-tech-specs

 

love

 

Freya

I'm sorry that was a typo, What I really meant to say was I still have not seen footage from the Scarlet. And I don't mean footage from the Epic.

I understand the Sensor reference was on REDUser, where the higher grade sensors would be used on the Epic, while the others would be on the Scarlet. I'd assume the difference would be hard to spot, but it maximizes the use of the sensors manufactured.

I agree, I imagine it will be hard to spot, but we won't know for sure what the differences will be until we see it ourselves.

 

Can't say that I thought that was the best looking video I ever saw, it seemed ok but nothing all that special from the digital camera world. better than a 7D or whatever but after using all the DSLR's for video I think they are all pretty much rubbish anyway... IMO... looks similar tot he F3 but a bit less clippy.

I think that was what they were going for in relation to the F3. I think Mobius does very little to show off the one feature that the camera has over most or all of the cameras, (even the Alexa according to Laforet) which is it's low light performance. Even though it has two stops less latitude than the Alexa, it has really great Low Light performance, down to 20,000 iso. Some people saw the grainy images in Sword, and complained that it had horrible low light capabilities, but they might not have realized that it was shot at 20,0000 iso, look at the behind the scenes of Sword to see the details. I believe that it is a look that can be used to tell a story. But the thing that is really amazing about the low light performance is the "XXIT" short film, when he talks about shooting green screen with 16,000 (sixteen thousand) iso, without artifacts. When I first heard on I didn't catch on and thought they sai 1600 iso, and thought so what, then I realized they said sixteen thousand iso. Looking at all of the behind the scenes is very informative.

All the information is on Canon's website Canon Cinema Eos. Vincent wrote in his blog, the following:

 

We shot the entire film at 850 ISO to get the maximum dynamic range. The image is incredibly clean. Once we pull up the shadows the blacks have a pleasing granular structure to them. More to come on that in the next few days. I did do some tests at 3200 ISO and 6400 ISO and was amazed by what I saw. One of the films Canon is showing today had a few scenes shot at 20,000 ISO – and the footage holds up on a 60 foot screen (with obvious grain/noise.)

 

I don't think this is enough for me to want to buy the camera either, but it is good enough for me to test, and consider renting if I want to do some low, low, low light shooting for a film in the future. I just have to hope I don't need to do any slowmotion, or they come up with an upgrade.

[Freya Black]

I think this is a case of "send 3 and 4 pence, we're going to a dance!"

 

Jim Jannard explained that the ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) in the Epic are expensive and advanced and many of them fail to reach the high performance required for the Epic's stellar spec's. These are of course rejected and just sit on a shelf. By matching these chips with less complex electronics and accepting the lower data rates and capabilities, RED's per unit costs drop dramatically and a baby Epic can be manufactured at a reasonable cost. So that's what Scarlet X is.

 

Hmmm, this is someone paraphrasing what Jim has said. If we are polite we can refer to this as a secondary source. There is of course a more commonly used term for second hand information from a third party. ;)

 

I don't know for certain but I suspect the writer was thinking of the following statement which is a cut and paste from an actual statement from Jim Jannard:

 

How can you offer Scarlet-X at this price when EPIC is so much more?

Data rates and processing power. ASICs that weren't fast enough for EPIC… just became a gold mine for Scarlet.This, and board component reduction, allows us to lower the data rate throughput and significantly reduce our costs over volume.

 

This is of course a very different thing altogether. I suspect the writer didn't really understand what Jim was saying so he kinda improvised and made stuff up. It helps if you understand what an ASIC is. Now I don't have a great understanding of these things but the understanding that I do have is that ASICs are little chips that sit on yr circuit board but they are not like the other chips that are on your board, they have been specially designed. It's a bit like in the shops where you can go to a major shop where there are loads of clothes that are kind of identical and anyone can buy them, or you can go to a designer and have a special outfit made up just for you that will fit you just right! The ASICS are chips that RED would have to have designed as opposed to just ordinary chips you can buy anywhere.

 

There isn't a box full of dodgy parts sitting on a shelf somewhere that weren't good enough to use in the EPIC because modern electronics doesn't work that way. It tends to be put on the boards by machines that do all the soldering etc. It could be that there are sockets for the chips to go into instead, but often there isn't.

 

My guess is that RED designed some ASICS for the EPIC and tried out the design, but it wasn't really fast enough to do what EPIC needed to do, so they then designed some new ASICS that were more expensive to make but could cope with the speed of data the EPIC was going to have going through it. There was nothing wrong with the earlier design and in fact it was loads cheaper to make but it couldn't cope with the amount of data needed for epic. However if there was less data kicking around they could use the cheaper ASICS in scarlet. Theres nothing wrong with the scarlet ASICS, they aren't "faulty" or anything, they are just different chips that aren't able to go as fast.

 

If you look at it logically you can see that if it was true there was a box of rejected parts on a shelf somewhere, and all the scarlets were made from them, then what happens when the box of parts runs out? Even if you assume there are going to be new parts because EPIC parts are going to be failing some kind of magic test all the time, then you would have to assume that there will be a lot more EPICS being made than scarlets and I would have expected the reverse to be true! Otherwise when you run out of dodgy parts you either have to put in the much more expensive EPIC chips and bang goes your cost savings, or you stop making scarlets.

 

Theres another clue in what Jim says too! He mentions "significantly reduce our costs over volume" which implies that he is expecting to be ordering loads of new chips in larger quantities. Not ones sitting on a shelf somewhere but new ones. Whats more cheaper chips and more of the camera on each chip than is the case with the EPIC.

 

So I can't be 100% sure but I'm guessing that the whole failed parts thing, is made up.

 

love

 

Freya

[Freya Black]

The sensor thing:

 

"The C300’s gargantuan Super35 sensor outputs only 1080p, while the Scarlet’s 4k image is picked up on a smaller chip, apparently grabbed from rejected Epic sensors."

 

I suspect this is just made up based on "word of mouth" information. The word "apparently" seems to even suggest the writer might be questioning it's truth.

 

Probably someone heard from someone that the scarlet was being made up from a box of old parts that had been sitting on a shelf somewhere after being rejected from the epic factory line. They told someone else this explaining "this is why the scarlet can't do the high resolutions the EPIC can". When we think of resolution we tend to think automatically of the sensor and the limitations there (I make that mistake earlier in this thread!) so obviously the person hearing this thinks that the box of rejected parts is a box full of sensors that just can't quite cope with the whole EPIC thing and so have been relegated to the magical scarlet box. They then tell the author of the article who thinks it sounds a bit odd but he has heard it from 3 different people and they all seem convinced. He still seems surprised tho because it sounds very unlikely but then if everyone seems to be saying it...

 

Theres an old saying "If a thousand people say a foolish thing, it is still, a foolish thing"

 

Seems to be an especially good phrase to keep in mind when people are discussing Red cameras.

 

love

 

Freya

[Robert Houllahan]

I would suspect that Freya is right in her assessment and that the Scarlet is not just "a box of reject Epic parts" which I think is a disingenuous statement any way you look at it.

 

When Intel creates a new CPU and it goes into production there are typically a wide range of CPU speeds which are available to purchase, the reason there is not just one CPU speed is as follows:

 

CPU's (and computer chips in general) go through a clocking and thermal test to grade them, so you may have a master wafer which has a hundred CPU's on it and then it is cut into individual parts and assembled into the cases for the chips. A test is run on the final parts which increasingly steps up the CPU running frequency and monitors the temperature of the part. Some parts will be able to clock to higher frequency without overheating and others will overheat at lower frequency. So the CPU's are "set" to the frequency they can normally be run at and sold according to the spec, with the faster CPU's being more money. At the end user level you could overclock the less expensive CPU as long as you dissipate the heat, i.e. with a water cooling system instead of a conventional heat-sink.

 

Back to the Scarlet.. It may very well have a sensor which is identical to the Epic but which could not hit the high clock speeds needed for the Epic. That does not make it "junk" it just makes it capable of producing less data at it's thermal range. Furthermore having less data coming off the sensor probably means a less sophisticated set of processors to compress that into their redcode wrapper, so it's probably less chips for the Scarlet and not just "slower" chips on the same board layout.

 

It seems like a fairly straightforward product from the Red guys and it probably cleans up their investment in sensors at a reasonable price point.

 

-Rob-

[Freya Black]

 

When Intel creates a new CPU and it goes into production there are typically a wide range of CPU speeds which are available to purchase, the reason there is not just one CPU speed is as follows:

 

...

-Rob-

 

Well the real reason there are different CPU speeds is to sell to different markets. Sometimes the chips aren't ones that have failed to make the grade because there aren't enough of those and it would limit what they could sell at what price point. This is why companies like intel have tried hard to lock the chips to a certain speed because sometimes the chips are identical and just being sold at different prices.

 

It could be that they are running thermal tests on the ASICS but I think it's unlikely. ASICS are cheap low value products and I'm not convinced it would be worth trying to extract the failed ones for further use but hey maybe?

 

As to the sensor itself, AFAIK, this is just exactly the same sensor as on the EPIC. It could be they are ones that can't handle the higher frame rates but then they seem to be able to handle up to 120fps when windowed so I think thats unlikely and in any case we don't really have any real info direct from red to imply anything about the sensors beyond their being the same sensors as on the epic.

 

I think we are now heading into that strange territory that comes about after some bizzare rumour has circulated. Rather than let it go and accept that it was probably just completely made up nonsense, people instead end up trying to justify it in some way, perhaps because people have already invested in the idea, perhaps because it seems so strange that so many people could be talking complete nonsense so openly without there being any substance to it. However when you hold it up to occams razor, isn't it a far simpler explanation that it was just made up, perhaps as a result of a misunderstanding of something that someone said.

 

It's like that Kodak bankruptcy rumour, what evidence was there really that Kodak was going to go bankrupt. It's true that it's a badly run company but really what solid evidence was there that it was really going to happen, and even if it did surely it would just go into Chapter 11 and be restructured. Or the last film camera in the world has been manufactured and there will never be another one made ever (how can we even know that?!) which has also turned out to be very much untrue.

 

We have no reason to suspect that the ASICS are not just brand new ASICS that were actually designed to work with less throughput and were thus cheaper. If they were the same chips then surely RED could just use EPIC boards and just clock them slower, but my understanding is that the boards are significantly electronically different. Jim even mentions using less components on the scarlet boards than for epic.

 

The truth is we have no evidence to support the "box of rejected parts" theory and every reason to believe it might just be a rumour. I think it's a much simpler answer to accept it is made up nonsense than to attempt to rationalise it.

 

love

 

Freya

[Robert Houllahan]

 

 

The truth is we have no evidence to support the "box of rejected parts" theory and every reason to believe it might just be a rumour. I think it's a much simpler answer to accept it is made up nonsense than to attempt to rationalise it.

 

love

 

Freya

 

 

That was basically what I was trying to debunk with my last post, the Scarlet seems like a interesting digital camera for the price/performance place it is at and calling it a box of reject parts gets into some kind of negative emotional territory which I don't this is deserved. I am sure it will be available at the rental shop relatively soon and images will be forthcoming. I think it should be evaluated on it's merits as a camera and not by speculation about it's internal parts.

 

-Rob-

[Freya Black]

That was basically what I was trying to debunk with my last post, the Scarlet seems like a interesting digital camera for the price/performance place it is at and calling it a box of reject parts gets into some kind of negative emotional territory which I don't this is deserved. I am sure it will be available at the rental shop relatively soon and images will be forthcoming. I think it should be evaluated on it's merits as a camera and not by speculation about it's internal parts.

 

-Rob-

 

When I mentioned the "box of rejected parts", I don't mean the scarlet itself but the idea that there is a shelf somewhere with a box sitting on it that is full of "Rejected Epic chips" and someone thought "hey I know, lets use these old chips in this box and make a new camera" because that's what that quoted article sounds like!

 

Far more likely that it is R&D that is being recycled rather than actual physical hardware.

 

love

 

Freya

[John Sprung]

I don't get the Canon C300 -- the jump from a Canon 5D to a C300 gets you 1080P 8-bit 4:2:2... for only $20,000? It would make more sense if the C300 sold for $10,000, not $20,000. At $20,000, you'd expect at least 10-bit 4:4:4 1080P Log if not 4K RAW to be exciting as a product. Six years ago, that price would have made sense.

 

And 8-bit Canon Log doesn't sound like a good idea from a potential banding issue.

 

Yeah, I don't get it either. One guess/suspicion is that they wanted to get something out the door ASAP, and there'll be an upgraded model soon. The numbers certainly are underwhelming, except for the price. But the pictures are really adequate even on the big screen at Paramount. Richard's movie looks like an honest to god movie, I want to see it when it's released. Maybe all that proves is that it's story and performance, even more than the pictures, which matter even more than the numbers....

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.