jan von krogh

i see. say, and how does fit steve jobs @ apple into all this - at least he pretends to have redcode working in its timeline? Maybe they have blackmailed him: "Steve, if you don´t comply, peter jackson will never distribute via buena vista and itunes!" hmmm. i recommend you grab a soapbox, and warn all the poor souls in front of the red booth in las vegas, that waiting 90 minutes to see peter jacksons newest shortfilm is fraud and worth being avoided.

ah, found 2 more. timecapsule 2006: and the wainting line in 2007...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=22...1&q=red+NAB

don´t get me wrong - i don wan´t to accuse ARRI of cheating on their customers in any form, they usually have a very good professional partnership with their customers. i didn´t know about the 235 - however i suppose as well, if i would have been asking about a 435 and pointing out that i would prefer a even more compact/leightweight approach they would probably had told me about 235. The "235, surprise!" statement was rather meant to underline that red has a pretty open communication of what they are doing next and what they are aiming at - even to open for some of the psoters here it seems. i, for my part, highly welcome this new method of open r&d.

first of all, red is showing (several) working cameras in their booth. Among them those 2 peter jackson used recently to shoot his 4k 15min film, which then was graded by weta and is now showing in 4k at the reds very own cinema in their booth. Its having lines of people waiting for one hour in front of it, btw. then: i think you don´t understand the workflow. the red hast only 2K realtime out, as always announced. 4k and upwards, 2540p, goes via raw to an diskarray or via redcode to another internal storage. this is then decoded by redcine in a computer, which you actually can see & use at the booth as well. pretty much like film and lab, now its sensor raw data and redcine. also, it can be decoded on the fly, good example was apples keynote where the had FCS decoding redcode live on stage. Btw, i have seen 8k live back in 2006 and i can be seen at this NAB at the NHK booth, but that is no news since one year. its also in permanent installation in japan. however, you wont see 4k live with red until they decide to built a rawportdecoder, there is the 4k out in raw. duallink 2k hd-sdi is the maximum you can feed live. I am certain that red will offer redportraw to 4k live, if people demand it, but you are actually the first person who asked for 4k quad-link hd-sdi i have ever met. what is the purpose of the application? measurement? thats integrated in camera AND there are no 4k vector/waves on sale by tektonix etc iirc. or do you secretly plan a live 4k broadcast?

so, do you think jim jannard is behind this hoax or is it rather peter jackson, pulling of a very clever marketing stunt for his next movie?

8k might be the wrong example, as for the next 3-5 years, or at least the foreseable future, there would be no distribution in any form for that resolution, besides i suppose the demand for 8k with the associated postproduction cost might be of a similar faith like 65mm... lets rather go to the core of your question with some better examples. what if red offers or annouces a camera with, lets say, 240p instead of 120p, only 2kg instead of 4.5kg, 13 stops instead of 11.2 stops dynamic range and only 12.500$ instead of 17.500$ in lets say: 24-36 months and up. easy answer - i order and pay with a part of the money i have made out the first red, keeping the first red and moving it down in price. 12-24 months. easy answer - i order and pay with a part of the money i have made out the first red, keeping the first red and moving it down in price. if i didn´t earn money on the first red, i sell the first red to get a revenue. 6-12 months. tougher call, when i still would be undercovered with the buyprice of the first red i woud closely examine the competition and decide which strategy might be appropriate. the 17.500 per body can be earned back in 3 months, or if youre unlucky, not in 16 months. If they camera, lets say, has to mayor teething problems etc. wouldn´t be earned back over 3 featurefilms and a better red would be announced -so that would be in the worst case scenario then. A the situation, where one would have to underbid the the better equipped competition could result, slowing down the revenue and investment cycles of my company. this planning is always the same, was no different with HDCAM back in 2002, we projected it for 2 years, did a lot of talks before and then started 2003 with the investions. some things to consider: - red has stated several times, that they built the camera modular to allow updates later on. - reds next camera doesn´t aim for higher quality, but for ultracompact - red has as a (meanwhile 14 man operation) 4k displays, 4k projectors, several lenses & peripherals in development and a camera which will have to be updated in the field until ~Q3/4 2007 to unlock more features - this doesn´t indicate that their R&D is on the next better sensor right now. - also, red shared all their goals and R&D targets open as no company i saw before, so most customers have a pretty good idea whats coming next, quite different from the behemonts a la sony or the "hey, surprise, here is the 235!" approach of arri. - furthermore, basic business. this industry moves slowly, much slower than still photography, boadcast, music. print, web etc. product cycles are pretty long in the upperclass of the market, and rarely not motivated by competition. red has now a pretty good gap to their next competition (panavision, GV, arri, sony, SI, dalsa in the cinemamarket) in terms of technolgy, price and buzz. so different from industries where tough competition forces, lets say canon and nikon in a frenzy of new cameras, the market will be rather slow until finally we get good competition for red, and be it from themself. - the investment is pretty small. for hdcam over 500.000 bucks were necessary to built a complete workflow with new lenses, vtr, class 1 monitor, 2 online NLE & CC, power etc. for red i can start with 40.000-80.000, use our 35 & 16mm PL-glass and simply add 2 apple macs with FCS, so the risk is quite lower than we anticipated, we basicly thought that the next wave would be 300-700k. and finally, besides all this business - i am way to much of an moviemaniac to not be REALLY exicted by all the cool shots we will be able to pull of at 120p, having 35mm dof and digital, substantially more colorinformation in grading... hey, simply put, it will us give a better tool for better images, so i might even have considered buying the camera for one pupose alone, if there would be no rental demand - to improve our own productions. but rest assured - the rental demand is quite ok, 2 cameras total ~6months ahead of the buyers who order now in an area with 20.000.000 people and next competition is ~450km away (hello claus, btw)...

my mistake, sorry, 1300 is correct - 3500 was the price for the aja i/o hardware which they announced. these were important reasons to integrate digital for us, but we still used 35mm for special creative purposes. with red the reasons for this are now gone and we will switch to almost complete digital - that is if the tests show that the camera fullfills in reallife application what the specifications promise. partly true. until there comes the "good enough" state of technology - and 4k is more than good enough for the next decade as we won´t have any mainstreams forms of distribution which goes higher, heck, even digital 2k is ints rolloutphase. a good example is compact disc. since years its no problem to deliver 24bit/96khz to customers, but they stay CD or worse, mp3 - because its good enough. so, even if lets say, red will introduce 8k red two at NAB, we will most probably not order or upgrade. think about 35mm / 65mm. as rental you have to plan to fully break even in maximum 24 months. HDCAM gave us almost 5 years until now - and i don´t see film or hdcam dying at once due to red, so we won´t sell the hdcam systems as they keep on making good profits. lenses last longer (but are more expensive to maintain). however, i fully agree when it comes to cheap technology - if you buy dv, hdv, xdcam, p2 etc you basicly have a short lifespan in the product until better stuff comes down from the higher valued segments of the market, and "good enough" doesn´t apply. also, your obervation is correct for many computers.

oops :blink: seems if have to improve my knowledge of anglophone sayings a little bit

same here - at least not fast. how goes this w. churchill quote? "reports of my death are highly exagerated"? hmmm, i have seen lots of great stuff done by the bbc... arte, canal plus, bbc and ard keep impressing me with their production often. here i disagree - bad format? 1080p is a great format. red/genesis/d20/35mm/viper/hdcam to 1080p are quite a jump forward, don´t you think? i think the only real mistake is that they don´t solve the problem with s16->mpeg 4 inhouse. or do they have such a ultra low bandwidth on their 1080mpeg4?

All the quotes are from the recent "the road to HD" summit at the BBC television center. let me add - even if we are becoming a mainly digital house and are leaving 35mm, i don´t agree with BBCs strategy - i think its a pretty good idea to ban HDV and lowbandwidth HD formats and start with 1080 hdcam and up, but s16? shall we trash half of the nouvelle vague? and even worse, with a degrainprocess in place -before- the mpeg4 compression lots of theproblem would be solved at once. I am really no expert at all for BBCs own production, we are affected in a different way. when we produce or work for a lets say arte-drama or doc, usually its sold later on to the other european broadcasters. so, we always have to check that we fullfill their requirements. the last project which went to BBC (was in 2006, anyhow) had ~15% 35mm footage. besides these already bad decision at bbc, there is another problem below the surface which is even worse. for documentaries, especially historic ones, several european broadcasters now -require- that the ancient b/w filmfootage has to be rescanned in HD. This basicly prohibits the use of archieve, as most houses a la pathe/gaumont don´t have hd/2k scanners and don´t hand out the originals at all. this makes the use of such material highly expensive or even next to impossible, with the consequence - reenactment... holy cow, we are way offtopic now.

dont get me wrong . i think its a bad decision on the side of bbc, but... ?Drama on film has got to stop.? Alan Yentob, Creative Director of the BBC. ?With HD cameras, we can do anything we want them to?. ?With HD you can move more quickly and less encumbered?. Jane Tranter, Controller BBC Fiction. ?There will be no Super 16mm on the HD channel? Andy Quested, Principal Technologist BBC. 35mm is allowed for drama btw - its all on BBC webpage. i feel your pain, as we have been through all this. luckily we own the complete workflow from lens to master and started very early on. basicly our 2k, 1080p and HDCAM workflows have been pretty optimized in the recent 5 years + we were able to built up & qualify enough freelancers in any departement. 4k is still the way you descibe it - however here in berlin we have pretty small teams as well, 15-100 folks are usual. basing on those experiences we will have a full month of benchmarking/testing with red for to streamline the 4k side of things. but i know exactly what you are talking of, last week we had to deal for another production with a b-camera (hvx200) which was copied to a rather exotic disk, it took almost one full day to get these files out of the storage into the nle and on the HDCAM tapes - for 6 minutes of footage. education, planning & preproduction is -really- cruicial if you shot digital for cinema.

things have changed quite a bit. meanwhile film can be of advantage, can be of disadvantage. BBC, one tough example, won´t allow S16 film on their HD-channel and is moving its drama away from 35mm. Also, with the likes of Grindhouse, Zodiac, Apocalypto, Stallones Rocky etc digital cinemaproduction has become pretty mainstream and the big wooo-hooo which sourrounded early on digital cinema production like 5 years ago has faded away, certainly also influenced by the more & more popular DI process. On the other hand, this berlinale, some distributors ("only" for DVD) expressed their concern about "HD" - without knowing they bough some HDV and it really looked not good. but these are only european perspectives and i suppose it is almost impossible to generalize here. however, from the pov of production, one thing has changed - meanwhile there is enough good craftmansship out there in almost any position, so one can easily avoid/lay off naysayers in the crews and get experienced folks. that was pretty challenging in the earlier days ~2001-2004.

no, arrilaser would be certainly 15-35% higher. last time i requested offers for arrilaser was 83 min feature, 2k scope, in january iirc best offer was at ~22.000 and after the testouts the production decided to use cinepix instead of arrilaser. however, in germany there are luckily several pretty good shops who specialise in filmrecording and have reasonable prices - some of them are "only" 2k, however. right now its showing in reds own 4k theathre in las vegas - soon after the NAB it will be available for download. peter jackson has to reedit the movie as the music (which was given be universal) doesn´t allow free distribution. audience reaction so far was -WOW-. 2.5 days shooting, lots of aerials (dogfights between WW1 planes), colorgrading by weta, red prototypes boris & natasha, cooke lens, runtime ~15 min.

the cost advantages of shooting digital instead of 35mm are quite remarkable if you have a tight budget. no stock, lab, telecine/scan, runner, daily, soundsyncing... that all sums up to some $$$.$$$, if planned carefully. there are many good scripts, actors and crews wasted every year because they still shoot the movie, but due to budget reasons on Dbeta-DV and then its quite a bit more challenging to find at least distributors for the DVD-market. Usually we could help out such one or two such productions a year with hdcam, but still the sony gear was to expensive to really make business in this spot of the market. with red this will be quite different. 2007-2008 we will mainly focus on earning the cameras back, but once that is done, i think we will often support more risky or less good financed projects. quite a difference if you have to earn 200.000$ back or 40.000$ per camera. what i really find amanzing - the whole peter jackson red WW1 short everyone is raving about right now has only used 500GB in Redcode... 500GB disk is less than 100 euro, even with triple backup less than 300$ "stock" cost for a 16 minute 4K short doesn´t sound to shabby. another trend which helps this development is that the prices for filmrecording have come down finally. meanwhile its no problem to get a good 2k filmout for 90min at ~15.000, thats including DD Sound and the testouts. but be warned of one thing - good cameras can be a nightmare for low-budget! they are cruel in exposing sloppy sets, muddy makeup, weird wardrobe etc. which would simply disappear in ntsc or pal.

size & weight are rather arri 235 than millenium however. really? is the SI any smaller than red? i was under the impression that they are comparable in size. i agree, for ENG the XDCAM HD workflow is superior, and the pricing is quite good as well. Any news on when Infinity is shipping btw? i fully agree.

i don´t think that anyone would notice you. the bouncers are there to control the hordes of buyers and interested professionals. btw, did you line up for the presentation and saw peter jacksons shortfilm?

thank you very much, but i suppose you should rather take david stump ASC or peter jackson into consideration. however, i think its is quite interesting, that some posters here are proud to be called j**ks by dozens of people, as it allows some deeper insights in motivation and social competence these individuals.

i wouldn´t compare them to red, all have - no raw - no uncompressed - no 4;4;4 - no S35 sensor - no 120p - no ArriPL mount - no 4k / 12 MP etc hm, digibeta cams are still more expensive than the red one - also HD is less than 25% of the resolution of red. i think 4K between HDV and digibetaprices is rather where in the longrum the red will find its pricing. this is the important thing - i --always-- told arri that i wanted to buy a digital 35mm sensor arri, and they had no offer. now, we as a midsize production, large scale rental houses as ludwig as well freelancers will start offer in the market with a, as it seems, somewhat superior camera to genesis or d20 for a fraction of the price. this won´t affect A-budgets in the beginning, as we simply can´t and won´t offer the logistics, support and international service & support for, lets say, 8 cameras. however, in germany a-budget is ~8-12 mio euro typically, and this market as well as b,c and indy will be fully adressed with offerings. additionally, many producers who traditionally rented the camera now will see a lower buying price when comparing to arri/panavision genesis. i agree, sadly nobody has a clue where there are from .... but i thought about russia often as well

i think you are wrong there - the marketing of red didn´t please me too much (3d renders instead of shots on the website still) but i bought because - maximum quality - good workflow (with raw/digital lab included with camera) - creative shooting options missing from most digital cameras - outstandig business possible - s35 sensor and pl lock allows new use for our 35mm glass - second order as we saw the quality projected in 4k in september 2006. and that is rather typical for the buyers i know. yes, thats whats its all about - dv, however, i try to avoid that whenever i can.

not for us reservationholders - for us its just 15.000$ as we got 2.500$ vouchers from RED for every single camera as a gift. one can start with a very nice small package slightly below 20.000, the mother-of-all-red configuration is slightly above 30.000$. for featurework i would consider to have ~>$10.000 additional storage near the set/studio to benefit of the possibilities of digital cinema aqusition (backups, on-set roughedit etc) as red uses all proven, stadard technology whereever possible, you can use v-mount power, regular cf-cards or expresscard, arri-pl lens (with adapter nikon, 2/3 sony, canon), 15/19mm rods etc - so buying used gear is possible for the ones on a budget. what is important to consider - the lenses (besides the ones of red and adapted nikon/canon) cost quite a bit again, and flaws in the lens will be quickly revealed with such an image quality.

we can only speculate here, but the prices of the -parts- in the camera are pretty low - i wouldn´t be surprised at all if the production cost of a body would be below 5000$. simply compare Nikons & canons topclass-SLRs... besides the sensor there is nothing highly expensive in the cameras (besides tons of knowhow & R&D). Thats the advantage of microelectronics, different from finemechanics - once designed, they can become pretty inexpensive to manufacture. and, i think that is really proven, jim jannard is one of the worlds most successful businessman, and it would be pretty surprising if he would break with this tradition. it seems his investment was pretty clever. however, i agree that he was and is so passionate about the project RED that i also had the feeling that he would complete the camera, even if just 200,300 people would have ordered. best example - the 300mm prime as first lens which he basicly wanted most (sports & wildlife :)) i agree. when our first cameras arrive we will put them though a month of tough testing, evaluating and benchmarking. i have to admit that i am pretty exited, now knowing that our first RED shots are ~90 days ahead.

i have to agree with david mullen here - and i have big $$$.$$$ in our digital cameras, so i am certainly not an usual suspect of the "film for ever", "digital bashers". film works, lots of mayor players have invested millions of dollars in their infrastructure, and especially as the -distribution- is mainly film basing there will be years and years to come where we will see lots of film used and sold. what we can assume, is that the raise in digital cinematic productions will be -strongly- accelerated, and i suppose not only a-budgets but also indy etc. one thing however is for sure, the market share of digital cinematic cameras skyrocketed - and the sales of new 16/35mm will be somewhat more difficult from here. many business models will be altered. and, most important for me, most of the creative & quality issues one could have when shooting digital are now easy to overcome - be it 35 dof, arri pl lock, higher frame rates, very high bitdepth for DI/CC, 4k, lightweight, compact camera and yes, also last but not least - production costs when shooting digital now can begin to be really really interesting. one thing will be interesting to watch - i think we have a new candidate for the best selling cinemacamera of the last 25 years.

oh no, there are plenty more.... michael haneke, mel gibson on apocalypto, lee tamahori (i liked once we were warriors very much btw) on 300, tony bill on flyboys, even michael moore on bowling for columbine... and i just mention directors who went fully or almost fully digital, if you go for digital parts combined with 35 we would have to start with the wachoski brothers etc. do a little reading by yourself, you will find so much more alone on panavision.com. not only in California, the delivery of the RED is awaited by 1500, or i think after nab thousands of cinematographers who bought. At this moment in time, i am rather interested in what it can´t do - and how we can implement a streamlined postproduction process. what it can do i have pretty good idea already - shoot fantastic, grainfree images at higher framerates than our existing sonys can and allows the use of our 35mm & S16mm PL-glass + finally gives a higher bitdepth which we always wanted for complex colorcorrection. indeed - its already big fun now to read the early posts here (hoax, they can´t do it, such a sensor can´t be developped, no way that they will be able to sell the camera for that price, nobody will take delivery because the buyers are not pros etc etc). i can´t speak on behalf of red, but we have 2 cameras coming which is especially important in the early stages when red certainly won´t have a running european support network. but now you are mixing production and camera. our production insurance covers 24h replacement / or takes the costs in any form up to 800.000 euro a day - quite expensive insurance if i might add that, but there any many shots we couldn´t dare if we wouldn´t have such a insurance. however it seems red has -strong- demand, to be precise, stronger than with any photochemical or digital camera i ever knew. in germany, the networking between the owners of the <500 serial numbers is pretty good and this will be a gapfiller until red knows what they will provide as aftersales service - payed or included. just one example of a reduser.net account. check out the user ludmux - ludwig münchen. http://ludwigkameraverleih.de/ he has 5 on order, starting ~100-105. anyhow, it will be first come, first serve. right now, we are overhauling our whole pricelist and we are pondering where to position red, beginning with above or below hdcam? from our classical 0.8% a day calculation they camera would be slighty below 200euros a day then, that is with the production pack (cage, rail, support, matte), on the other hand is seems 2007 one can make big bucks with the camera as demand is by far exceeding offer. the red booth at nab gives a good idea of the amount of mails & calls we do get.

if you would check out the posters in detail, you might realize that among these "hobbiest" are emmy-award decorated, NY filmfestival winners, multi-million rental shop owners and A-budget cinematographers from all over the world. however, i have a different views on cinematography.com than some of the posts you quoted have. there are very few, maybe 5,6 posters altogether here, who are highly biased and regulary post unqualified & childish comments. but these few people are just a minority, as they are in the whole industry as well.