Chris Kenny

NAB is what Red folks have been saying over at Reduser.net. They also apparently expect to have the first of the production cameras assembled about a month from now -- basically right before NAB. So, I assume they plan to have working cameras there.

Enough is known that it's possible to have substantive discussions. For instance, the issues that determine whether one should use an EVF or LCD are well known by people who shoot regularly. Storing footage can be discussed, because Red has given us some information about data rates. Issues related to lenses, matteboxes, etc. are substantially similar between cameras. We know what resolutions the camera is expected to support, so it's perfectly possible to have a discussion about what editing or processing tools will work. It's helpful to talk about all of these things before cameras start shipping so people can figure out what to buy, what to learn, how much money they'll need to spend, etc.

Talking to people about your camera in relevant forums is not an "in-your-face promotional circus". It's something that should, in fact, be encouraged. It's sort of funny, because I'm also an Apple watcher. Apple similarly gets accused of hyping its products unreasonably. Except, people claim Apple hypes its products by maintaining an unreasonable level of secrecy until the day of release; IOW, by being too closed. Apparently Red hypes its products unreasonably by... being too open? I'm not sure I get it. I think what's actually going on in both cases is that there are people who are legitimately excited... and the people who don't understand why, instead of accepting that those folks might just value different things, instead assume all the excitement must be invalidly generated by corporate hype. Here are a half dozen currently active threads on Reduser discussing substantive issues: What Size Mattebox? EVF or LCD? 720p WYSIWYG 4K? Thoughts on a RAM buffer RedCine Licenses? NLE choices In some of the threads asking questions, Red employes actually show up and answer. And nobody implies they're lying. And when they say they can't give out certain information yet, people actually understand that's often a valid answer for a product that's still in development.

Which is exactly why it's so frustrating that specifically in this forum, people spend so much more time attacking the project than discussing substantive issues, on which some of them could provide valuable input.

This is utterly baffling. Red's accessory pricing is extremely aggressive. What exactly is your objection?

To be fair, only a few people are complaining, and they're being yelled at for it over at Reduser as well. Red has pointed out how much the specs have been upgraded. Hell, when we reserved Red #404 last year before IBC, we thought we were getting a camera which would mostly be shooting compressed 2K RGB from a 4K sensor. Then they managed to implement compressed 4K RAW recording on-board. As far as whether it's 4K... well, when you start getting into these kinds of resolutions, I think it becomes a lot less important to nit pick about pixel counts. I saw the Red test footage projected on a 4K projector at NAB in New York. The screen wasn't huge, but I was sitting in the front row, significantly less then one screen height back. With a 4K bayer sensor, as nearly as I can tell, resolution is basically a solved problem. A couple of years from now someone will probably do a 8K bayer sensor for producing 4K output, which might look a little better, if you're sitting up close, but I'd expect the difference to be pretty marginal.

We still don't know how far the camera's ISO can be pushed without unacceptable noise, so it's hard to say exactly how much of a problem this will be. Probably wouldn't be fun to do outdoor night shoots, but you can always rent some Superspeeds for a couple of days.

Sure, you'd be using stills camera lenses on a body that costs more than a stills camera body, so it stands to reason. I can't speak for pricing there, but the most expensive F-mount lens in the B&H inventory (excluding large telephotos) is Nikon's 17-35mm 2.8 zoom, at ~$1500. Zeiss F-mount primes are $600-1200 each, a fair bit less than £850-1000 ($1600-1900). There's a forum over at Reduser where Nikon lenses are being reviewed with an eye toward using them with Red (using a Nikon D2X, which has a sensor of similar width and resolution). Some hold up pretty well, particularly if you can get away with stopping down to f4. As I've said, not ideal, but someone is going to go this route and probably get decent results.

Carl, they've corrected the page to 140 Wh. More viewfinder details: switchable color or B&W, has "SurroundView" (see outside of frame like an optical viewfinder when shooting 4K or below), does not work with other cameras (it's integrated with the on-camera image processing hardware). The options for using various types of off-the-shelf flash memory are great. Anyone who has been buying P2 cards at 6x the market price for flash memory will certainly welcome that! You'll have to be careful to buy stuff that's fast enough, though, because only some of the newer stuff is. Red also plans to sell Red-branded flash at competitive prices.

And if the viewfinder is 720p as previously mentioned, Red might sell a decent number of those to non-Red owners, assuming it's not proprietary. Anyway, it looks like if you're a reservation holder, you can get a nice package (sans lenses, of course) for under $22K: Camera ($17,500) Basic Production Pack ($1,250) Power Pack ($1,650) EVF ($2,950) Red Drive ($900) $24,250 - $2500 (bonus for reservation holders) = $21,750. Add the $500 Nikon mount and a couple of Nikon primes, and you could be shooting 4K for under $25K. Yes, we've been over all of the downsides to a setup like this vs. accessorizing with an set of Master Primes, a $4K matte box, etc, but it's still pretty incredible.

Heh. I'd assume that's a typo for 140 Wh (presumably at 14.4V). Still pretty good pricing.

I haven't seen anyone say a focus puller isn't necessary. I've only said that focus pulling is a learnable skill and someone with regular access to a RED will be in a better position than most to learn it.

Yeah, the nerve those guys have, coming over here and talking about the RED camera in the RED forum. Some people. Seriously, go read Reduser.net. Yes, there is mindless fanboyism and rampant speculation. There are also a lot of meaningful discussions about what tools to use when working with the footage, how to store the footage, what sort of packages people are planning to buy, how the sample footage looked, what people saw at the screenings, what insurance to get, what tax incentives there are in various states, etc. There is enough information out there about the camera that one can meaningfully discuss these things. What this forum should be is that sort of discussion... with the addition of contributions from the folks here who have years of industry experience. There are a few people who do this... I appreciate the contributions Stephen Williams makes, for instance. But a lot of you guys seem to refuse to take the camera seriously enough to post anything other than skepticism. It's always the same arguments, some of which are obvious nonsense, and the tone is often very patronizing or downright insulting. This doesn't contribute anything useful. I'm frankly not sure I understand what would motivate someone to post in a forum about a camera they don't believe will really exist or will matter if it does. Are you looking for a fight? Seems to me there are a fair number of simpler exercises that one could benefit from, particularly early on building the skill up from nothing. Sure, but pulling focus looking through an eyepiece isn't quite the same as pulling focus as a camera assistant, and I would suspect (though it's hard to know for sure) that a 1080p screen or the output of the focus assist software will make it easier to judge focus than an optical viewfinder. Particularly for people who haven't spent a lot of time looking through optical viewfinders.

Maybe. But keep in mind, Red owners will have: 1) Full-time access to the camera, to practice whenever they want. 2) Real-time direct feedback at 1080p and though Red's focus assist software. 3) The ability to shoot lots of footage (to check focus on a big screen) without burning through film stock. To the best of my knowledge, there's nobody in the history of focus pulling who has had all of these advantages while learning how to pull 35mm-format focus.

Redrock claims to have an updated version of the follow focus which doesn't have the play issues. The new gearing is also available as a $65 upgrade for old units. See here. I haven't used either version of the product, so I can't say from first hand experience whether the problem is really fixed, but there are some positive comments at that link.

If it's not debayered, I'd say it can be validly called 'RAW'.

The people who can afford today's uncompressed 4K workflows, yes, probably. But we're seeing the emergence of compressed 4K workflows that are much more manageable. An offline edit and a 4K conform should be possible on a decent (say, $4000) workstation. Keep in mind, 4K is only a little over four times as many pixels as 1080p. Computers have gotten more than four times as fast since the days when people started editing 1080p on them. And RED is writing QuickTime components that will get their footage (even their RAW footage) into a large number of desktop applications right away. The days of high-priced specialty systems in post production are numbered. Ten years from now, they'll probably seem as odd as they now do in the desktop publishing industry (where most designers in their 20s aren't even aware there used to be specialty hardware). I'd guess a common early pattern with RED will be shooting 4K REDCODE RAW, and processing through REDCINE to a manageable 1080p format, and finishing in that. Given that 4K projectors are still pretty thin on the ground, this should be fine even for theatrical release for the next couple of years. 4:4:4 1080p originated from a sensor the size of a 35mm film frame is a pretty big step above 4:2:2 720p from a 1/3" or even 2/3" sensor. Wavelet compression should also introduce much less objectionable artifacts than DCT compression algorithms like DVCPRO HD.

Well, RED is a purpose-built digital cinema camera, while pretty much everything else in its price range is essentially a broadcast camera. But those broadcast cameras do get used for cinematography, sometimes, and to that extent RED is competition for them.

What's not to get? Red is releasing what looks to be a tool that will create really great images, at a price some people (probably most of the people at reduser.net, who are, after all, a self-selected sample) are willing to pay. It's frankly rather bizarre to me that people are essentially being denigrated in a cinematography forum, of all places, for getting excited about image quality.

It's more meaningful to talk about workflows being data oriented (or not) than cameras. Red doesn't have an internal hard drive -- it uses either a removable flash cartridge or an external hard drive based magazine. So, the same thing is possible.

Even if your $75K figure were right -- and I suspect you know perfectly well that one doesn't need $40K worth of lenses, a $4K matte box, a $10K tripod, etc. just to get an image -- that's still less than the likely cost of 35mm film stock for a single typical feature. Maybe you only work on high-budget projects where that doesn't make a difference, but for a low-budget indie it's pretty significant. Why are you guys pretending nobody has ever made a decent movie without at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars and a crew of a few dozen? I'm quite sure you all know very well this is not the case.

Obviously there are specific workflows today which rely on specific technologies. This is unsurprising. In a couple of years there will probably be some workflows which rely on Red! I do think this kind of inflexibility will slowly disappear over the next 5-10 years though, as the industry shifts more toward a data-oriented approach (largely becoming agnostic about the physical storage medium), as acquisition is increasingly done at much higher quality than is necessary for delivery (effectively eliminating any quality penalty for converting between formats), and as Moore's Law makes converting between formats ever faster and easier.

Glass half empty much? It looks like reservation holders are mostly getting their 4K $17,500 cameras this summer. Compared with that, the "bad news" mentioned in that post is pretty insignificant. In particular, the feature issues will only impact the first ~100 reservation holders (less than 10%), and will mostly be related to the on-camera RGB features -- most people seem to be interested primarily in shooting 4K REDCODE RAW, which they'll be able to do from day one -- and as far as the manufacturing issues go, Red is saying they expect to fill all the reservations by September-October, which is in line with (or even a little before) what people were estimating anyway. Red isn't backing away from a previously announced delivery schedule here -- there was no previously announced delivery schedule.

Jim Jannard has posted an update on the status of the project here. The summary is, they're on track to ship around NAB, but some features won't make it into the very first shipping cameras (they'll be provided via firmware updates), and initial production will be a little slower than they anticipated (though they still expect to have all the reservations filled by September or October). From a later post in the thread, it sounds like they also plan to announce pricing on the rest of the accessories soon, and there's a comment that reservation holders will be very happy, suggesting perhaps they'll get special prices on accessories, or a neat bundle, or that the price of the camera might be higher for people who didn't reserve.

It depends on how married one is to the notion of shooting "natively" on one's deliverable tape format. From the perspective of someone who prefers a much more data-oriented approach, I see the fact that deliverables are often in different formats as a major advantage that Red has over, say, the Varicam. Red has huge flexibility in terms of shooting formats. Between the camera's on-board format options and desktop processing, you can deliver anything from a 4K DCI movie to standard-def television, without messing around will upscaling, pulldown, etc. Sure, this kind of thing isn't going to fit into every workflow, but if you're using your camera in workflows that do allow for it, it's a pretty big deal, and a big part of the reason why I, for one, see Red as a much better value than other cameras in its price range.