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Enter the Dragon


Keith Walters

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There's a new thread (now closed) over on Reduser called "Dragon update".

 

Basically it's pretty much the same format: JHJ tells us how fantastic it is, (using almost the same suite of over-the-top hyperbole that he has used from day #1, for the somewhat knickerelastic Red One :P ), then you get about 500 of the usual one-line replies basically saying: "OMG!", "Wow!", "Excelsior!!", "Great!", "You da man!", "All previously accepted and extant standards of technological excellence in electronic motion image capture technology, have been henceforth, thereafter, and irrevocably been overthrown by this latest silicon tour--DE--fource from ... well ... whoever makes the things for him!"

 

But nowhere do they actually tell the casual reader much about what it is and what it does.

 

I'd post there and ask myself, but threads I post in Reduser seem have a habit of vanishing without a trace, which is amusing, but time-consuming :rolleyes:

Several posters make reference to "16 stops of Dynamic range", but I can't seem to find the post this originates from.

On past experience with Red, this often means that they use 16 bit analog-to-digital conversion in the sensor, which by no means necessarily gives you 16 stops DR.

(I suspect that 99% of the posters over there still have no idea that the CMOS sensor is still an analog device, at least where it counts!)

 

Presumably, the Dragon is an astounding improvement on the Epic, which in light of earlier pronouncements, scarcely seems possible! (I never actually got round to seeing The Amazing Spider-Man , but I managed to sit through Prometheus without needing the incontinence pads I brought with me, just in case).

 

Meanwhile, very large account ads are still getting shot on MPEG4 with Canon 5Ds...

 

Anybody who expects commonsense and and logical thinking from the real-world film industry obviously needs to spend more (or at least some) time in it :P

 

What comes after the Dragon? The Bruce? (You know, Enter the Dragon; Bruce Lee?)

Nah, I guess I can't really see Red coming out with a camera called "Bruce" ....

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And now there's another thread on there called "Sensors", that still tells you SFA.

 

"We at RED have put a tremendous amount of our resources towards sensor development. We do it in house. We do not have outside companies doing the work for us."

 

I wonder what that means. As far as I know, improvements in sensor technology (or any semiconductor technology for that matter) all come from improvements in chemical and physical infrastructure in Fabrication plants. Surely they don't have one of those "in house". Or if they do, why are they so reluctant to tell us about it?

 

I don't really understand any of this. They could sell a sh!tload more cameras if they gave customers the option of bypassing Redcode if they wanted to. All it would take is another module that bolts onto the brain and outputs realtime industry standard formats.

 

Shock horror, but most of the world does not have HDTV, and the majority of it is still analog. Even if and and when they get Digital TV, it will almost certainly just the same old analog NTSC or PAL studio signal, converted to digital just prior to transmission. (This is hardly a new concept; in France, just about all TV stations used to work in PAL, transcoding to SECAM at the transmitter, as SECAM is almost impossible to do post-production on). A cheap one-size-fits-all 4K, 2K, 1080p, 480i, 576i camera that could drop seamlessly into the existing infrastructure would be a godsend to developing countries.

 

You could perhaps compare Sony's White Elephant D-1 format, with the D-2 Format that Ampex turned it into....

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"We need to do a lot of things better. We need to have a more stable platform. We need DNX-HD and ProRes support. We need to have people understand our workflow. We need to continue to improve our product. And we need the industry to understand that the future is a 4K delivery."

 

Am I hearing right?!

They need a "baked in" workflow?

What has this man been smoking, and where can I get some? :rolleyes:

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