Anyone got any thoughts on that??

Looks amazing

Vaporware of course, at the moment, but still amazing.

Also, notice the "We will fund it through giving deals on red one now" which is brilliant marketing!!

http://red.cachefly.net/DSMC/epic_scarlet_brochure_large.jpg

Well everything looks amazing until reality hits usually

What i noted was that the Epic 645 which if i understand it is supposed to be equivalent to a 645 medium format full format sensor will cost... $45 000 ???? If you are an established photographer (with probably a lot of $ sunk into an existing system), in what way would investing in the Red system there give you a competitive edge? The resolution of Leaf/Phase One/H-Blad/Sinar etc today is more than enough for pretty much all client applications (and quite often too much). And how many photographers need a 9K (which is RED's naming btw, you can read a lot of people not agreeing with them on the net camera that does 1-50 FPS? In fact, how many clients want to pay for that resolution? And if you are a new photographer who havent' gotten money invested in an existing system, i bet that you wont be sinking that ammount of money into a RED system. Rather you will be trying to get the cheapest deal you can on a used MF or pro-level small format system. We all wish we could buy a brand new system when we started out, but how many of us could do that?

if you look at the overview chart further down, their own estimation is that the Mosntro 645 is a 65MP back... for $45k????

Maybe im just being to jaded but the Red company, allthough makes good cameras which they have proven already, seems to be more hype than brains sometimes. So i do question how many of these models we will actually see on the market and if so, what price. Remember that they are stating a release for Spring 2010 on the 645 version. Thats over a year from now, when the competition already outputs 60MP backs today.

So sorry Red, im not buying it. (pun intended

*edited to fix that i missed that it was "just" 45k not 55k for the 645 brain.

These announcements have really blurred the lines between video and stills. The 617 camera is mental and I want to play!

Whether they all make sense or not though, I don't know. The resolution for stills is there in all but the 2/3" cameras - and that's cool - but they don't compete on price with stills cameras. On the other hand, for video, I'm not sure I see the point of all that resolution at the moment - because output devices don't come close. Finally - how do you edit this stuff? We are going to need cluster farms in our homes and studios!

Editing? The REDCODE RAW codec keeps the datarate more manageable. The 4k RED One footage is very editable on home computer of today, although I would go for a top end one. Yes 617 is completely bonkers and my favourite of the line-up too. That at 25fps will make for stunning landscapes in motion, or even amazing panoramic stills without the problems of a scanning back.

Graeme

Imaginara,
5K, 6K, and 9K video isn't for your "clients." It's for filmmaking using video, but instead of crappy 1080 resolution, you're shooting in amazing resolution that is superior to film.

If you want to shoot video for your clients, go buy a Sony.

I really like the concept of modular..

How much waste of money and landfill of rare materials is caused by my redundant F3, F5, F4, D1 (three) , D100, D200 etc- the performance partiularly of the D1/F4/F5/F3 bodies is still amazing but redundant because the chips/buffers could not be upgraded

BUT

With no AF (AFAIK) these are not going to be DSLR beaters

and with no AF/ Steady Shot they are not going to be 'video' beaters

Great for shooting considered stills or 'films' however

(my personal definition is 'video'=handheld + cheap and 'film'=tripod/dolly/steadycam + expensive)

I cant see myself trading 'everything' to go Red - shame..

EDIT

It would appear that Stabilisation and AF are part of RED lenses

If someone could confirm..

SMM

No i totally agree. The RED for film and video application is definately kicking the butt. What i'm wondering about is the "brains" they seem to aim towards battling the medium format still market. Where video (or motion film) isn't a requirement at all. They look then a bit overpriced compared to the normal still solution just to add the moving image features if its not really requested.

However going with Red instead of the high end 24P solutions from Sony and others is definately a better solution imho if you need to be working with moving images.

Red is looking forward to a future that is already here. You can shoot a high end broadcast commercial on super 16 or 35, and then have a seperate shoot with different crew for the stills. Or, if your chosen photographer/videographer has a Red 645, shoot the commercial, add a day of production (or less) for the stills. See? You just made $100,000 and saved the ad agency you work for a bunch of cash, while earning more for yourself that would have gone to a stills guy. You can of course do the same thing now with a 5d2 and a Red One, but for really highend work, the 645 will be really nice.

The future is a convergence of stills and motion. There will always be still photographers, but they will be increasingly marginalized for commercial work over the next five years.

How competitive will it be as a DSLR with a movie mode? The Scarlet FF35 seems to be the closest to that right now (apart from the $45,000 medium format solution) It's likely to be about a $14,000 camera once you put a viewfinder and a grip on it, competing with the $7000 1Ds mk III (probably the 1Ds mkIV by the time you can buy the RED) and the D3x, however much that turns out to cost ($6500?). Right now, the 1Ds mk III doesn't shoot video, but the 1Ds mk IV probably will, and I would guess that the D3x will as well (although Thom Hogan doesn't think so, and he tends to know these things).
Right now, judged as a still camera, the RED has better specs than anything you can buy today in two areas. The less important is frame rate - because it's a movie camera shooting stills, it has a continuously variable frame rate up to anything you might want in a still camera. I would be surprised if any other camera in the 24+ MP arena goes over 5 fps in the next year (unless it's a similar surprising hybrid) - the RED allows D3 speed with 1Ds mkIII resolution simultaneously. The second area where the RED is beyond anything on the market is dynamic range - they claim 13 stops (although the RED One claims 11 and is said to have about 8+ really good stops)... Even if they get 11 printable stops (the darkest two may be fine in a moving image, but too noisy for a fine-art print), that will be at least as good as next year's best DSLRs, maybe slightly better (I have high hopes that the D3x may be close to an 11-stop camera - the D3 and the Alpha 900 are both pushing 10 from RAW).
Assuming that the RED's DR is superb, but not a quantum leap over what else is out there - let's call it just about the same as the best pro DSLR -, and assuming that the competition has a pretty nice 1080p movie mode (EX1 level, likely without all the audio capabilities of an EX1, with FF35 depth of field) in a pro still camera by that time (neither DR nor movie mode guaranteed, but both seem like reasonable guesses), the real difference will be 1080p movie mode versus RED's full resolution movie mode.
RED is saying "pay twice as much for your camera (compared to a Canon or Nikon pro DSLR), and get a full-fledged movie camera (resolution as good as anything in Hollywood) built in". Would you be willing to pay this if the Canon and Nikon DSLRs had decent 1080p video? What if they didn't?

-Dan

no yes

The point is RAW video - will the Canons and Nikons provide RAW video at full rez which lets you pull off stills ??? If not you are not comparing apples and apples etc.
MHO.

Exactly.

Not to mention XLR audio inputs, variable framerates, synchronized multi-camera setups, more/better grip options, PL/Canon/Nikon lenses, etc.

The Epic is obviously geared towards feature productions, but the Scarlet is going to fit perfectly into small production houses. I have a friend who does a lot of in-house marketing video material for a clothing company, and he is ecstatic about the Scarlet. I think he fits right in to RED's target demographic (they already own a Red ONE, which is overkill for their needs), and adding a Scarlet or two into the mix will help their production tremendously.

I see them competing more with Film or high end video cameras like the Genesis, not the usual small sensor video cameras.
Besides lot of film is shot handheld.
They are aiming at high end video/filmaking and by those standards they are very cheap.

I'm not disputing that the RED provides a lot of things that the Canons and Nikons don't - I'm just wondering from the viewpoint of someone who primarily works in stills and uses video as a supplement, whether those things are worth it. Obviously, if you don't care about the video, they aren't (RED didn't just announce a DSLR in there, as much as some were hoping for one), and if you're primarily a cinematographer, they are a revolution - my question is getting people to think about where the breakpoint is for those of us coming from a still background, but adding motion to our work... For myself, I don't know which side I'll fall on. I want to see what Mr. Nikon has for us next week...

One thing that would make the REDs much more appealing is some way to project high-res movies. Right now, I don't see any way of displaying a moving image above 2560x1900 (and only one way - a 30-inch monitor - of displaying one above 1080p). Will RED be releasing a high-resolution projector on the order of 6000x4000 pixels? That would be absolutely fantastic for both still and moving images, assuming that it didn't weigh 200 lbs or cost $100,000. 4K (4000+ x 2000+)digital cinema projectors exist, but they both weigh 200 lbs AND cost $100,000

One appealing application for the FF35 RED is to use a 30-inch monitor (in a tasteful frame) as the world's largest digital picture frame... Have a slowly changing landscape image (perhaps a timelapse) in a picture that, at first glance, appears to be a 16x24 print. There are some very cool applications for that in getting people to think about change in nature(how about a landscape that went through a year in an hour, or one in which the stream was flowing?). Hopefully RED's new REDRay player will be small, quiet and inexpensive enough to use in installations like this (right now, the need to use a noisy $3000+ Mac Pro to drive the screen is as much of a barrier to an installation that remains up for a month as the $1000+ screen itself)

I assume they won't have a projector capable of displaying the images from the 617 - WHAT are we meant to do with THOSE? A 24 inch printer can't print all the pixels on the short side of that imager (a 24x72 inch print is still a native 388 dpi, requiring a downsize to 300 for most printers) - do they really mean for people to make 32x96 inch prints at 300 dpi as its standard display format? There's no projector that approaches that, even at OMNIMAX costs... Even major science and natural history museums (who have the best projection currently available in IMAX and OMNIMAX) have no way of showing that output - is there something like that on the horizon?

-Dan

Exactly! This is my situation as well. We have a Red One but it is over kill even for music videos. A Scarlet would be fantastic, as it will be better than our Sony EX cams.

I want the Epic 645 for stills. This is want, not need. But yeah, if we were all Red, we could use the accessories on different brains. I love it. Exciting times.

If you build it, they will come. Two years ago no one in their right mind would have realistically thought that a 6x17 sensor, much less a 50 frame per second 645 size sensor, would ever be slapped into a camera by anyone not NASA or the NSA. Perhaps the flexible LCD screens can get even higher res and cheaper? I think its all coming, sooner than we realize.

When the product is scheduled for intro in 2010 and currently estimates a price of $55k for the back alone some of us still question whether anyone will still. A 6x17 sensor will be incredibly expensive to fab.

Almost as interesting as the cameras is REDs channeling of consumer product marketing into a very specialized and professional oriented market.

Well, it just seems to me that these cameras are not even remotely ergonomic from a still shooters viewpoint.

They are big, awkward, and heavy. I can't see them replacing most people's sports models such as the 1D mkIII, or the D3.

They make claims that we can't verify, so the claims are questionable right now.

I can see some medium format users being interested. I can see film makers being interested.

But I really can't see Canon and Nikon losing any sleep as RED has been saying they will. In fact, I think they are relieved at what RED is SAYING they will come out with, at the prices mentioned, and at the timescale they are projecting.

It gives both Canon and Nikon plenty of time to spruce up their next offerings.

While the high speed shooting is very good, how useful will it be for most shooters? That's a lot of memory being chunked out at those rates.

If you just want stills, I'm sure there will be cheap enough / good enough cameras to meet your needs from Canon / Nikon etc. If however, you want a parity of quality across stills and motion, very high speed, or very high resolution, RED will suit your needs. The visually lossless REDCODE RAW codec would allow you to shoot many times more stills on a CF card than you can today, while keeping all the advantages of RAW. After going through about 6 CF cards doing a wedding earlier in the year, I'd certainly have found that useful, not to mention the hard drive space to back it all up.

As for claims, well, the proof is in the pudding, but the pudding is in the oven right now. The cooks are working on baking it as well and as fast as they can. I hope you can enjoy trying the puddings when they come out of the oven.

Graeme

Yeah, but where the heck are you going to view it?

I don't believe it. 24 MP isn't that great a difference from 21. About 7.5% increase in resolution. I'm not convinced that RED's RAW files are any better than anyone else's. As for being smaller, that would only be if they were compressed, not such an innovation. If it's lossy compression, it's lossy. The smaller the file is made through this compression, the more data is lost. If they do any more compression than Nikon does in its lossy scheme, then it will be noticed, despite RED's claims. Besides, as they constantly say on their site, the product is subject to DRASTIC change in specs and price. We don't even know what these will actually turn out to be!

In addition the only really interesting camera for high IQ stills is the FF35. With the viewfinder, handgrip, and battery, this will cost somewhere around $16,000, or more, likely more when it finally comes out. That doesn't include a lens. This is into medium format territory.

It also looks to weigh a good five+ pounds when equipped as a complete camera. For those complaining about the size and weight of the top Canons and Nikons, this is a boat anchor.

The other cameras are lightweight in IQ for stills, or way too expensive.

You can get medium format cameras from well respected manufacturers with equal, or higher IQ for well under what they are asking. RED's cameras are also woefully lacking in any modern ergonomic features.

Whatever you say, these are video cameras first, and still cameras second.

Not video cameras, they are moving raw image capturing devices normally requiring post work to become "video", although RED has mentioned that video out taps in lower rez could be comming.
Video is something else, like JPEG vs RAW, it has a colour space, colour encoding scheme ala 4:2:0, codec and compression baked in and it has WB and contrast dialled in. RED is definitely not a video camera in the normal sense.

And in my opinion RED cameras is not about knocking over stills cameras, its about providing both moving image and stills possibilities from the same equipment having the same expression and look - either from a stream of images or singles - and keeping it RAW.
If you are happy with shooting JPG from a dSLR or some other camera - RED cameras might not be the best choice. If you feel RAW is absolutely necessary for your stills workflow, shooting baked-in video from a tiny chip should feel wrong and limited. If not you are inconsitent between stills and moving image work in my view.
RED cameras is about providing the same flexibility and artistic freedom as we are used to from our MFDB's or dSLR's in RAW mode.
I care little for the rez as long as its sufficient, I simply must have the RAW option though, even if it is from a 2/3" chip or from a 645 chip.
We all have different needs though.
MHO.

Robin, I think you're good with what you're saying. RED is RAW motion and stills images treated as equals. It's about megapixels per second sustained, rather than just resolution alone. I can understand how that does not excite some people at all, but we've only just began to explore what can be done with this new digital cinema technology. I'm personally very excited by it all....

Graeme

The Mysterium Monstro looks absolutely tailor-made for 3D. An image pair on that sensor just makes perfect sense.

One of the main reasons why I think the RED is such a good camera.

I had my video kit stolen some years back. I never replaced it as I hated the crappy compromised cameras that were marketed with umpteen useless features, that supposedly looked good when doing feature lists in ads. The video equivalent of my megapixels are more numerous than your megapixels in still cameras. Not to mention dribble marketing, where the features are very slightly improved every year, when it was obvious that it was just done to make this year's model look marginally better than last year's crippled model.
Sadly, not having the money that Jim Jannard has, I was unable to manufacture the sort of camera I thought should be made.

Video is what you get with shooting a sequence of stills, whatever the codec, that will result in a motion related file that one will be watching as a "movie".

It doesn't really matter what they want to call it, or you want to call it, it's what its used for that determines what it is. I'm not interested in semantics. You might as well say the same thing about film based movies if you like. They're still movies, or Tv shows, etc. The fact that one "still" can be used by itself has nothing to do with it.

These cameras take stills and video. That's what they're for,

But they're designed primarily for video, not stills.

Well, he made a big fuss about setting Canon and Nikon back on their collectives asses on his site. He was pretty forward about that.

What you may think of as umpteen useless features, most videographers think of as necessities.

What a pain to do in post what should have been done in the original shoot.

There are many things you simly can't do well in post, RAW or not, and this goes for stills as well as for motion.

I certainly do think these cameras have their place, but I do think it will be rather limited in many circumstances.

Just as JPEG still work flows have their use alongside RAW still work flows. However calling RED a video camera is similar to treating RAW and JPEG as the same thing - typically going directly from RAW to TIFF/JPEG without changing the parameters first. Some do it but its not the most optimized of work flows. No matter if one agrees or not to the RAW being an advantage or not - RED is RAW and RAW is not video just as JPEG and RAW differs in the stills world.

Personally I fail to see today's RAW work flow for stills to be "rather limited in many circumstances" so I believe that motion RAW will take off in a short time as it did some years back with stills.

The pain in post is not about doing what you should have done in the shoot (sometimes it is as a shortcut has been taken and needs to be corrected), its about having the means and possibilities to take it further.

All this is such a deja vu from some years back when stills went from JPEG/TIFF to RAW and some people were hard to turn. Today this isn't an issue any more as the ones who benefits from either work flow simply uses that work flow. If you feel RAW video isn't for you then drop it, however others might not agree with you and choose differently.

The times are changing and I feel they are changing for the better in this regard. I'm thrilled to expand and change my business model accordingly, change is good
MHO.

Not such an innovation ?

Innovation in compression is THE innovation

Good compression doesnt have to degrade the image - its just a better way of saying the same thing - although I am confused how a complex image can be compressed without loss - Im not a compression engineer..

How good REDs compression is I dont know but dont underestimate the technology

S

Why are you bringing up JPEG? I didn't mention that. I never use JPEG myself, and it has nothing to do with the conversation. Is assuming that someone who doesn't think these cameras are as wonderful as some think uses JPEG some sort of put-down, meaning that we can't possibly understand the wonderfullness of these bloated monsters?

Well, if you want to use these for stills, then go right ahead, assuming that they materialize a year from now. I can't see any advantages for the still photographer, and see many disadvantages.

I'm not as concerned with the video portion, and yes, it is video.

The majority of people would like a wider angle lens on their cameras, not a telephoto that is absurdly long. But a 4x but very useful zoom range is not as impressive in ads or to dumb salespeople as a 10x [but far less useful]zoom range. Bigger numbers are always better in marketing!
Plus, why assume I'm not a videographer and you missed a major point of the post. I was complaining about [price point +] trickle marketing, with each year having a very slightly tweaked camera, rather than simply releasing a decent camera in first place. Also the 'non-professiona'l cameras were crippled so you would have to pay an awful lot more just to get some basic features that are deliberately withheld.

Not quite grasped the benefits of RAW have you? It will be extremely useful for filming, especially for ease of grading [or timing as the Americans call it I believe] and will probably save a lot of money. Shooting RAW is not a subsitute for getting it right in camera, it's an addition to geting it right in camera. A fantastic addition. Plus if you do documentary work, where you have little or no control over lighting, then it will be even more useful.

The main limit it seems is paucity of the imagination.

You simply have not grasped the point of the JPEG reference have you? It is very germane to the conversation.
The footage out of a digital camera is normally the moving equivilant of JPEG, RED however gives you a moving RAW file - an incredible achivement.

These cameras were obviously not aimed at you and you don't actually have to buy one, so why not chill out.

I believe that RED RAW is not the same as Nikon or Canon RAW because it is compressed RAW. How this degrades the image, I don't know, but it probably does. RED RAW might not even record every pixel position as many video recording codecs do (HDcam DVCproHD), but displays a 4k file after processing and decompression. Just speculating here, not criticizing. Maybe Graeme can address this?

And FWIW, I don't think digital motion capture takes the place of still photography due to the long exposure of motion picture frames and the associated motion blur. I would think one would want to set the camera to the type of image capture desired.

I'm curious as to how you know that "most" people would want this.



I didn't assume anything about you. The major reason why technology trickles down is because it's expensive at first, and gets cheaper over time. Expensive cameras have the expensive features, later, cheaper cameras get them as the price drops. What else is new?



You can try to be insulting, but you haven't grasped that post production is very expensive, and RAW won't being those costs down. You also haven't grasped what most all professionals, and even amateurs know, which is that post can't bring the same look to the end product that doing it during the shoot can. Digital filters, for example, simply don't do what filters on the lens do, etc. I would hope you at least know that.



Please, don't overdo it!

First of all, you may have noticed that I'm mostly concerned with still photography here, not motion. I made that pretty clear. RED also made it very clear on their website that they were going to blow Canon and Nikon away. I don't see that as even remotely possible.

And no, I don't see RAW video as being an incredible achevement. Technical advances come all the time. this is simply a matter of moving the files out quickly, and letting enough memory absorb it. If it proves to be of major benefit, others will follow. If not, they won't.

Despite what RED groupies here may think, we'll have to wait to see how much of an advantage RAW is over uncompressed, or lossless compression for other professional video formats.



You may not recognize what a DISCUSSION forum is, but this is one. It isn't a RED cheerleading group. If you want that, you should go to REDs forum.

Without RED cheeerleading (he he), I think they're trying something different.
The Pricing model did surprise me, but the Scarlet basic is spot on the $3,000 they mentioned (might be a loss leader)
It's still interesting despite those that try and bring people down for innovation.

Yes, the compression records every pixel, just like the RAW you're used to. We don't throw pixels away (unless you asked the camera to record a cropped out region of the sensor for achieving even higher fps). The pixels go through a wavelet based compression system and are recorded as individual frames, so none of this long GOP motion estimation stuff that you use on a delivery codec like h.264 or MPEG2 to get the bit rates down to a very low level.

Because it's the full RAW data that gets recorded, you have the same latitude in post to manipulate the image at it's full bit depth and not get the kind of issues you get with manipulating normal video. Because wavelet compression is used, you don't get the awful blocky artifacts and ringing / mosquito noise that plague DCT codecs like JPEG, so the image remains clean and nice to work with.

Graeme