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Jim Jannard's Last Post


Keith Walters

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http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?104367-My-Final-Post&p=1245087&viewfull=1#post1245087

 

Yep, after about 8 years he's finally hanging up his forum gloves.

 

He was so close too; two more K and a badly-needed overhaul of the dyes in the Dragon CFA, and he really would have had something close to being better than 35mm film.

 

There's no denying that cameras with much less resolution and possibly less dynamic range are beating Red cameras to the punch far more often than not. Even stills cameras with 8-bit MPEG4 output are sometimes pulling the rug out from under them.

 

I don't know what it tells you, but it tells me that expecting common sense from Hollywood is like expecting to grow watermelons in Alaska. (Well, profitably anyway).

 

 

 

 

 

 

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To get everyone to feel sorry for him. It's like people with these melodramatic facebook posts fishing for attention.

 

 

I did it before when I left an organization that I was apart of in college that was running itself into the ground.

And then I grew up.

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Jim Jannard is a great man who accomplished an amazing thing. I will always be grateful to him and his team. I know there are those who do not agree, and I welcome the opinions of anyone who have similar accomplishments.

 

Otherwise it's just "arm chair quarterbacking".

 

Jay

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> Jim Jannard is a great man who accomplished an amazing thing.

 

Some would disagree.

 

What about the guy who created the Genesis? The Alexa? Blackmagic? iPhone? Sliced bread?

They all just did things. Let's not put people up on crazy pedestals. He's just posting to try and build up his pedestal even higher. It's a tool.

This is why I can't stand Reds.

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I think Jim Jannard and Red was the shot in the arm that the industry needed in the mid 2000's to break us away from the legacy of 1990's Sony betacam technology (which in itself was also a major achievement). He made into reality what most of us thought the digital cinema industry should be going -- 35mm single-sensors, resolution higher than HD, file-based recording, raw or log recording -- and he did it with a camera that was smaller and lighter and more affordable than the nearest technologies of the day (Genesis, Dalsa Origin, Arri D20.)

 

Sure, there were some problems and compromises, if anything, it was the lack of compromises that doomed something like the Dalsa Origin -- uncompressed 4K raw just wasn't practical in 2006, it's barely practical in 2013! And yes, we had to put up with marketing hype, but I never hold marketing against a company trying to sell you something, that's just how things work in a consumer world.

 

Of course Red did not work in a vacuum and invent everything for the first time, every element of the Red One was out there already in some form (which is why it was possible to create the Red One in a year and a half rather than five years as would be typical) -- single 4K 35mm bayer-filtered sensors, compressed raw recording, etc. -- but Red put it all together along with RedCine to make it an end-to-end system that people on a budget could buy into and start posting in 4K immediately, there wasn't the whole problem of releasing a camera like the Viper without a support system to handle its log recordings, or making a camera like the Origin that needed mini-fridge-sized data recorders to handle 4K on the set and a post house to process the files.

 

The main point was that it was affordable, as proved by the number of people who bought the cameras and within two years, a large percentage of independent movies at the Sundance Film Festival had been shot on Red Ones, and many production companies making things like music videos had switched over. So, yes, it was a major accomplishment and it altered the film industry.

 

The disadvantage for Red now is that the competition naturally is catching up and creating compelling competing products, at the low end and at the high end. But that was inevitable.

 

Red is a "loud" company, in some ways it has to be, being smaller than Sony, and while I sometimes wish they were a bit less brash, I worry if that's a form of class prejudice, we tend to reward the old-school companies for being old-school and conservative in style and taste, it's like old money versus new money.

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I get a database error message on that link... Is it dead/gone/wrong? Maybe the server has been engineered to poop their pants with the 'traffic'? ;)

No, it looks like the whole site is down.

Anyway, knowing ther past history with disappearing posts, I took a screen grab just in case :rolleyes:

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No, it looks like the whole site is down.

Anyway, knowing ther past history with disappearing posts, I took a screen grab just in case :rolleyes:

 

Please share it with the rest of us then.

 

DISCLAIMER: Having not seen the post in question, the following rant may be out of context. :rolleyes:

 

Honestly, I just got sick of Jannard's whingy attitude, always playing the underdog card. The rebel attitude was fine when they wanted to make a splash and grow rapidly. However, at this point in the game they should have matured, been more professional and treat forum users more courteously. You get banned for innocous comments nowadays.

 

If Jannard is really tired of how things are playing out in the REDuser community, he should look in the mirror for the person to blame.

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Please share it with the rest of us then.

 

DISCLAIMER: Having not seen the post in question, the following rant may be out of context. :rolleyes:

 

Honestly, I just got sick of Jannard's whingy attitude, always playing the underdog card. The rebel attitude was fine when they wanted to make a splash and grow rapidly. However, at this point in the game they should have matured, been more professional and treat forum users more courteously. You get banned for innocous comments nowadays.

 

If Jannard is really tired of how things are playing out in the REDuser community, he should look in the mirror for the person to blame.

It's workng again.

Actually, if you read the very last couple of posts he made, you might get a clue as to what precipitated this.

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I'm going to commit forum Hara-Kiri and see if you all talk about me in such a loving way as well.

 

R,

 

 

Ha ha, I think your exit speech would be a classic!

 

David has a very fair point though that we all forget, the Red was a game changer... it gave us things which other manufactures were not.

 

On the other hand, it feels to me it helped push cinematography into more technology obsessed climate.

 

Now you constantly have to read up on the new technologies to stay on top, some cinematographers just want to light and shoot stories! In fact how many even established cinematographers get passed over on jobs now because they haven't shot on a particular camera system before... I hear about it all the time! In interviews its often the first question, what do you shoot on.... well anything, the lighting and operating style are possibly as/more import than what sits between the lens and the battery - of course you can't say that!

 

The reliability factor is also majorly upsetting, loosing count how many times when there is a shot I've been drooling to do all day and then then some bug holds you up an hour and that shot gets the chop, or worse of all bugs hold you up early in the day and to cover all the necessary pages you have no time to light the remaining scenes properly.

 

I also really don't buy this Obsolescence Obsolete, they would have produced 4 different cameras in 6 years... That's not exactly sustainable let alone desirable.

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I find myself agreeing with most of what Andy's said, although I'm not sure their first camera was a "game changer".

 

They didn't release it when they said they would, they didn't release it with the feature set they said it would have, and frankly it wasn't all that good - I resisted saying it was a bad camera for a long time (in fact their first demo footage made it look as if it had very low noise, which I got wrong at the time), but it eventually became very clear that the first Red camera really was terribly noisy and lacking in dynamic range.

 

And yes, it became possible because of advances in electronics. The thing about that is that most of us could have told them that if they tried to take a 4K-wide Bayer sensor with 2005 technology and make a camera out of it that went at 120 frames per second, it would have been rather noisy and lacking in dynamic range. And let's not forget that Red were the people who - unfortunately - made it OK for cinema cameras to have rolling shutters. I can't support them for having done that.

 

Only with the sensor upgrade did they actually begin to approach what they'd originally promised in a device that wasn't wracked with compromise. None of this is good. None of it is progress. None of it helps. Any of what Red did which was of any value, Silicon Imaging had done before. Otherwise, it shouldn't have been tried because it wasn't a very good idea, and I think that's been shown since.

 

And if I was willing to start a company and promote it on that sort of basis, I'm sure I'd have a lot of money, too. Unfortunately for the state of my bank balance, I'm better than that.

 

P

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I think it was the compromises that made the whole thing practical and possible -- perfect is the enemy of good as they say. Dalsa was using uncompressed 4K, a mechanical shutter and optical viewfinder, and produced great images, but it wasn't practical nor affordable. Silicon Imaging was a great idea but eventually most people were not going to be satisfied with a 2MP 16mm sensor compared to a 9MP 35mm sensor.

 

A lot of independent filmmakers got to shoot on a 35mm single-sensor camera, even got to own one, and were able to process 4K files at home if they wanted to -- I think that counts as progress. Progress isn't always pretty and it doesn't mean the same thing as flawless or perfect or even better. But the direction that Red took us was the one that most of us agreed we needed to go for digital cinema: 35mm single-sensor digital cameras that recorded raw or log files, ideally onboard, at resolutions that were better than 1080P. Yes, noise and dynamic range were a key weakness, rolling shutter artifacts can always be a problem, though for most of my work, it's only an occasional problem. Again, I think ultimately Red took the right approach -- get it out there, flaws and all, and get the ball rolling to push the industry away from tape-based HD solutions, away from 1990's camcorder mentalities, away from Rec.709 gamma and color space. There were other companies and people doing similar things, or partial things, but Red had the money to make it a complete package. Like I said, perfect is the enemy of good, and I don't think waiting to release a "perfect" camera would have been successful, there really is no way to avoid a transitionary period -- for one thing, the industry sometimes doesn't even know what it needs until they use something, you can't predict everything in advance and then deliver it whole, perfect, and complete.

 

Sure, as a purist and cinema-lover, it would have been great if the entire decade of the 2000's remained free of digital cameras, D.I.'s, etc. and then in 2010, it was all delivered to us at its current state of development, fixed of all of its problems. But that's not how technology works.

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Hi David:

 

My experience through the 2000's was that Panavision and the Genesis camera was the real advance guard in the world of digital cinema. The Genesis was in use actually making movies over two full years before the Red One arrived in small quantities and with very limited functionality. Then more than 1 1/2 years after the Red One arrived I had my first taste of digital cinema production working on "Zombieland" using a Genesis camera. In our case we used the SSR-1 recorder on board for much of the work and it was pretty similar to working with a Millenium XL camera with 500' mags. Not as elegant as film but very solid and reliable.

 

I know you would prefer a higher than HD resolution but honestly I have screened "Zombieland" more than once - both printed on film and projected digitally and I have found the experience quite good. I have never had a single person remark in any way that "Zombieland" looked inadequate (of course the stellar work by my friend and talented DP Michael Bonvillian had a lot to do with that!).

 

I think the reliability of the Genesis and the results on screen actually paved the way for other cameras such as the Red Epic and the Alexa camera on film sets. The early problems with the Red One I think may have actually slowed the shift to digital by some producers and studios. There was a degree of "don't experiment on MY show" out there, then.

 

As far as "game changer" my opinion is that the Red One was absolutely a revolutionary product but not because of resolution or method of recording - it was because of the very low price. I think a case could be made that the Red One opened up the low budget world in a big way to people who never would have been able to rent a Genesis with a set of Primo lenses. Then a year after the introduction of the Red One we saw the new Canon 5D Mk2 (2008) and it may have been an even bigger shake up in the indie world than the Red One. The 5D sure was not perfect - but for many it was good enough.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

Neal Norton

Camera Operator

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Oh sure, I'm not denying the historical importance of the Panavision Genesis camera in development of digital cinema -- I used it for three years on "United States of Tara" and it was used as recently as "Captain America" by Shelly Johnson, ASC.

 

Coupling a 35mm single-sensor to an HDCAM-SR deck that was half-built into the camera was a brilliant idea at the time, allowing the camera to immediately become practical to use. And the sensor was well-designed too, 12MP RGB-striped to get you full resolution 2MP RGB 1080P with decent dynamic range. For an era (the mid 2000's) where 1080P / 2K was a common standard in post houses, designing a camera to deliver the best possible 1080P signal made a lot of sense.

 

However, I think most of us even then thought that digital cinema should not end up being limited to 1080P / 2K no matter how practical it still is.

 

I shot a short film three years ago on the Sony F35 and it turned out pretty well, but it obviously is an expensive camera.

 

Everyone has learned a lot in the past seven years; we've seen how television has switched almost wholesale into 1080P production, we've seen the rise in a lot of intermediate resolutions and different recording codecs... my point is that the production landscape is a bit more complicated than we thought it was going to be in the mid 2000's when it seemed enough to look to a 35mm camera its film stock as the model for what a digital cinema camera should be. I don't think today that one camera will ever satisfy everyone or serve every need.

 

I also think that the elusive goal of matching the look of 35mm color negative has sort of been tangentally bypassed by digital cameras -- probably the Alexa image is about as close overall as anyone will ever get -- now we are drifting into a new digital aesthetic, like two space objects momentarily passing close before they drift away from each other. You see it in still photography, people don't buy a Canon 5D Mk.III because it makes images that look like a 35mm photo from ten years ago. Digital cinema cameras will continue to get more resolution, become more sensitive or less noisy, and have better dynamic range... but by building on their previous generations, a forward momentum in the digital look, not an attempt to match a film look. I don't think digital cinema will ever recreate 35mm film photography exactly and now it never will, it will keep moving along its own path.

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I did a bit of investigation on Cinematography.net about:

 

JJ: Somehow... I read on CML and other idiotic forums**, that I an a hypester, a scam artist. I just have to wonder what these guys are smoking. But I have to say... they have gotten to me. I don't need this. I don't deserve this. Life is short and I am tired. I can only hope that the incredibly stupid posts from people like Geoff Boyle and Art Adams (many other CML posters) do not in any way taint the work we have actually done.

 

I don't know what happened to my old cinematography.net account, but it allowed me to start a new one with the same email address I had before. I managed to spell my own name wrong, but the login works on email addresses so that shouldn't make any difference....

 

It's considerably improved over what it used to be, and you can now follow threads with relative ease. So if you've been put off by its incomprehensible posting system before, it's worth another go. Pretty entertaining, and there's no profanity filter :-)

 

There are some pretty high-powered people there, plus a lot of the usual suspects; prolific and verbose posters who wouldn't know their arses from a bag of aniseed rings, but who seem convinced they're major players :rolleyes:

 

Anyway it all started innocently enough with this post from the redoubtable Geoff Boyle:*

 

I've hesitated posting anything about the Dragon as it was vapourware but there are now comments coming out from people who have actually shot with it and they are hugely disturbing.
I know that I'm looking at images from one guy and from an early camera with beta software but. The images I've seen look great, but not the second coming which is what we were promised.
First reports say 20+ stops, then 16+ stops now the guy who has shot with it says one stop more highlight and 2 stops more shadow.
Err, Alexa was doing more than that 2 years ago.
I'll now wait for the flack.
Cheers
Geoff Boyle FBKS

and it got rather heated from then on,,,

 

* I'm not exactly sure what "redoubtable" means, but it sounds good :D

** He surely can't be talking about this forum, because nobody talks about him over here. Everyone's moved on....

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OMG!!! This stuff is HUGELY disturbing. How can anybody sleep at night when stuff like this is going on in the world!

 

It's a video camera, and it shoots great looking footage but it turns out it isn't the second coming of god after all!

I was counting on that camera all this time to save my eternal soul and to show me the true way in my life and now I'm beginning to suspect it might only be a video camera.

 

Even worse it seems it might be possible that the camera is only as good as an Alexa!*

Yeah I know that's a camera that has been praised by so many people for producing great images and everybody seems to love it but I was expecting so much more! I was expecting to be able to commune with that which is in everything!

 

I'll now hide under a bridge while I watch people be mean to each other for my personal entertainment.

 

*(I mean other than the high frame rates, 6K and low light capability of course)

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It would appear that all the Drama surrounding Red cameras isn't being created by Jim Jannard alone.

I'm just a little worried that if Jim isn't there to feed into such peoples need for OTT drama then they will go looking for another source for it.

 

Can't relate to it myself. Have way too much drama in my life already!

 

People with quiet lives looking for excitement I guess.

 

Freya

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As to the actual pictures:

 

Red have, to some small extent, been promoting epic as a combined stills and motion camera. Go to their offices at Pinewood and you will be proudly shown fashion photography done with an Epic. And it isn't that pretty; there's one picture of a girl walking toward camera, in what looks like a very upscale Regency ballroom, on a shiny wooden floor. The reflection on the floor is, in the print I saw, a really unpleasant clipped white with crispy edges.

 

That's what I associated with Red pictures. In the same discussion, the guy from the company said "we believe in resolution." Yes fine you've done that, but the pictures are... a bit...

 

As I say, for the longest time I avoided criticising Red based on the pictures as I hadn't seen much. And certainly, I wasn't that distracted by image quality problems in, say, Prometheus, although that's possibly because I was too busy being distracted by the pan-galactic awfulness of the writing. It is difficult to compare the prices of Alexa and Epic without trying to build a like-for-like Epic kit, which I frankly can't be bothered to do just for the sake of argument. My opinion remains, however, having shot with neither of them and having no prospect of doing so, that Alexa produces vastly nicer pictures.

 

P

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As to the actual pictures:

 

Red have, to some small extent, been promoting epic as a combined stills and motion camera. Go to their offices at Pinewood and you will be proudly shown fashion photography done with an Epic. And it isn't that pretty; there's one picture of a girl walking toward camera, in what looks like a very upscale Regency ballroom, on a shiny wooden floor. The reflection on the floor is, in the print I saw, a really unpleasant clipped white with crispy edges.

 

That's what I associated with Red pictures. In the same discussion, the guy from the company said "we believe in resolution." Yes fine you've done that, but the pictures are... a bit...

 

As I say, for the longest time I avoided criticising Red based on the pictures as I hadn't seen much. And certainly, I wasn't that distracted by image quality problems in, say, Prometheus, although that's possibly because I was too busy being distracted by the pan-galactic awfulness of the writing. It is difficult to compare the prices of Alexa and Epic without trying to build a like-for-like Epic kit, which I frankly can't be bothered to do just for the sake of argument. My opinion remains, however, having shot with neither of them and having no prospect of doing so, that Alexa produces vastly nicer pictures.

 

P

 

Really? When I was last there it was all decked out like some kind of weird military themed den. I was half expecting a sign saying "no girlz allowed" or something. I didn't see any fashion photography or anything. Maybe after they had a girl visit it made them think "Hmmm this is a bit...". The people there seemed very nice tho.

 

As I've said many times, I thought that Prometheus mostly looked visually awful. The actual movie did look a bit better than the early trailers. It looked especially bad in standard definition for some reason. The costumes looked like something designed for that "Lost in Space" remake some years ago. It was all very odd.

 

HOWEVER...

 

Ridley Scott has a new movie coming out that is shot on the Epic, and I actually think that it looks okay. In fact it's the first thing I've seen shot on the Epic that I have thought that about. Until now the RED One MX has had a better track record visually than the Epic which is odd as they share the same sensor but I guess it takes time for the new movies to get out there. Anyway check this out:

 

 

I reckon it looks like a much better movie than Prometheus too.

 

I really hope that dragon will help take things to another level.

I think one of the big problems that Red have is that the cameras don't have as good of a look out of the box as say the Alexa, and then on top of that they tend to be used on lower budget productions that don't have as much scope to get things right in post either!

 

The stuff I am seeing coming from the Dragon so far, is just little tests that people are cobbling together on a pre-production setup and it already looks a world better than what we have seen come from the Epic in the past. This is great news, especially with so many people looking to upgrade.

 

I am expecting it to be basically a new improved video camera however. I don't actually expect it to heal the sick or anything like that.

 

Freya

Edited by Freya Black
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