Jim, the vast majority of us RED owners are ecstactic about the upgrade offers

[Denis Buhot]

Thanks Laurie, thanks Gibbie, apologies to Stuart

Thanks Laurie, thanks Gibbie, apologies to Stuart

Thank you, Laurie... thank you Gibby. I've seen your footage and it speaks by itself. You listen to people, you don't suggest I should go shoot something else, and I know you figure out quite well that there is other uses for a red 1 than shooting commercials, big screen projects and music videos. You're quite happy with the Red 1, you make great use of it and I'd just like to share your overall satisfaction.


I don't need Red for a living. I like images for images sake, and tools for what they are, just tools for the best image possible, not booting up tools. I'm fortunate enough to have arranged their life to do just what I please to do. Low-end of the market in that sense. I must be spoilt.. hence my level of expectation.

What I like to do at times is try to capture behaviors of very uneasy and shy species I have specialized in, and make movies out of that. So long, so arduous and almost infeasible that the money I eventually make has nothing to do with my reasons. As a matter of fact, I choose subjects that money and markets rule out, for their very unlikely ROI.

That's all. My case is a minor and a very specific one, in no way anything I'd advise, and I do know most of us are not so lucky/unlucky.

I respect other kinds of red 1 owners for their use of their camera(s), I know their uses, their crews and tapes for pulling focus and all. I can't do what they do, they can't do what I do either...and I understand they look me down and I just don't care . Still don't know what's more childish : legitimate frustration, or fans with their endless "can't wait" for more and more technical prowesses designed for movies to come, and not for my very present one. I don't care about 5, 6 K or more, and that limitation of my Red one is no frustration to me.

That being said, I posted a very enthusiastic post myself about my new red 1, some time ago. A truly wonderful camera, indeed. Its bulk and its weight itself could indeed be turned into an advantage, even for our wildlife shooting use.

I wouldn't detract one single word from what I said (including my desperate need for a power saving function)




And yet (or better, precisely because of that) I'm badly frustrated, because I have missed and shall miss all too often what I spend hours waiting for : rare, precedently uncaptured material of often very short duration... What I precisely want. And what I wanted the great image of Red 1 for. And what I will not get from my red one, deprived as it is of a couple of very basic features.

I had thought I could use a totally new type of Ferrari.. well...to me, with all due respect for them and what they have achieved, Jim and others sort of forgot about the windshield, or forgot to say they wouldn't provide one... Okay, I know I'm pushing things too far here.. Let's just say they ignored my need and never made it clear in due time that neither much shorter boot time nor sleep mode would ever be enabled.

And now, a new range of products is announced, with the basic features I need, and I'm not offered the choice of my red money value for a scarlet.

So, forget about money : I don't buy it and I'm not happy at all. That's it.

 

[David Dennis]

I do feel your pain. I just replaced my ancient Canon EOS D30 digital still camera with a Nikon D300 and the biggest reason I wanted to make the change was that the D30 took 30 seconds to boot, while the D300 does it instantly. There are other reasons I switched to Nikon - I like the ergonomics of my new camera a lot better - but the main reason I felt I needed a new camera in the first place was the sluggish boot.

But I don't know if sleep mode would really solve your problem.

When I was actively shooting with my Canon XL1, I put it in sleep mode all the time, and if my memory serves, it still took something like 10 seconds to spring back to life.

Right now, I'm sitting in front of a MacBook pro, and I have noticed that often it takes its own sweet time to return from sleep.

Considering what appears to be your situation - that you wait for hours for something to happen and then need your camera to come on instantly - I wonder if even a sleep mode for RED ONE would be effective enough for you if implemented. As I remember, the Linux operating system on which I believe RED ONE is based has had trouble with sleep in the past. It appears to be a very difficult engineering challenge; my Apple laptops sometimes fail to wake up, and have to be rebooted, and from what I understand there are huge problems with Windows Vista and sleep. So intuitively it would appear that sleep is a difficult feature to get right even by major operating system vendors who have tens if not hundreds of times the development resources RED has.

If I were you I would consider carrying more batteries and possibly investigate solar charging - the amount of power that's needed to run the batteries isn't that enormous and so it might be practical to carry a small panel and charging equipment out in the field. I think that type of solution is likely to work better than a sleep mode that I would expect would often let you down.

Hopefully you can understand that RED is a venture meant to produce radically superior results from what has existed in the past. This inevitably means mistakes and problems. Tesla Motors is a company that has tried to do something similar, namely rethink the electric car. Tesla has made huge mistakes, fired its CEO for things that (from what I hear) were not his fault, and now it appears to be in big trouble. They have delivered cars to about 5% of the people who have ordered them, and they are having real difficulty continuing deliveries.

I think if you compare RED's results with Tesla's, you can see RED has its entire founder + engineering team intact, and appears to exist as a group of people who, even after many years of working together, still works with mutual respect and warmth. If you think of it, this is an incredible feat, something that rarely exists in the very cynical and fractious modern world.

Jim and his team are highly impressive people and are amazingly passionate about what they do. In this painfully cynical age, I admire this more than words can express. They are imperfect. But they will work like crazy for their customers and friends.

I look forward to becoming one of them.

D

 

[Scott Mason]

I just want to go on record about how pleased I am with the news. We were one of the first to get a redone (#138), and I have never been happier with any purchase I have ever made. We have shot close to 10TBs of amazing footage (well of course it all can't be amazing we were learning as we go!) But I have to say the redone is my favorite camera and I have shot with most of them (many costing much more than redone)

The moment Jim announced the new system I was extatic. Do we have endless amounts of money to buy more cameras? No. Will we? Well only time will tell. But there were many things we were not "happy" about the redone. The weight was the biggest challenge (and will always be) and the mini xlrs were another one of my not so favorite choices. Did that make me not like my red? Hell no! Every camera has it's short comings and redone is not imune to this. What we did was focus on it's strengths and try to enhance our productions with those strengths, and know it's weaknesses and try to avoid them.

We have shot over 4TBs of footage that was captured and put on the news that day, even when people were saying post was impossible... This camera is not a camera, it is so much more. It does take a technical person to use it fast and efficient, but the beauty of it is that a non-technical person can still use it well. Mark Pederson keeps saying "If you are clever, you can..."

Do I want to spend another 40k for epic? Of course not. Will I? Well time will tell. I am thankful for the new design. Sometimes I think some people on here would have been happier if the new technology was "shelved" and we could profit from our investment. Well in that case it is. We will have had 2 years (which is an eternity in cameras) to profit from our camera before the next better thing comes along.

Now with most companies we would have to buy that next best thing, but Jim is giving us a $17,500 credit towards this. No company in their right mind would ever do such a thing. I think at best they would give us half. Jim is a legend in my mind. I stood behind red from day one, and will continue to stand behind them.

With this new system I see it so much easier to grow my business, and we do not want to trade our red in! The red will always be a great camera, we will use it for years to come. Yes it is a little heavy, so we will get a scarlet for those long hand held days, and if our business permits we will get an epic.

In all honesty I see the redone going on more jobs for us than the epic simply based on rental price. If we are going to television with a prudent producer they will want to save money, and technicaly the epic would rent for twice the redone. And if they want to save even more money they can go with our scarlet. (P.S I looked into HD ENG lenses and they start at 6k going well up to 30k, but that means you could have a great ENG camrea for 2500 for the scarlet and 6k for a lens, pretty good when the great DV ENG cameras are 20K)

I think the smartest move for us with less cash flow is to buy the best scarlet you can afford and outfit it. Many of our red accessories will work, but many of the new ones will be great (like the wireless control OMG) Build your DSMC over time and when you have made enought money from it (and your redone) upgrade the brain. I imagine there will be a base pack that will get a brain shooting without all the frills and if you grab that too you will have multiple cameras that all work well together.

For the price of a F900 we can all have an arsenal of cameras to do whatever we want. Good advice I was given long ago when avid first came out, get your clients, then purchase equipment. I think many are under the same assumption I had in the early 90's, if I buy this gear I will get clients. Everyone wishes it works that way, but alas this is not how our business goes. Why do you think people post things like, lost a job to the hvx-200. Clients want good service with a great end product, most of them are not into all the technical aspects. Many of you were doing that with dv cameras long before redone came around. I know I was, thank god for the 35mm adapters!

My concern is we will piss off Jim and Co so much they will tell us to F-off (I am pretty sure this will not happen.) But they all worked really hard to improve their camera company, and some people do not give them credit for that. We would not have the DSMC the way it is without redone. Thank god for the few years of "beta testing" that led us to where we are. The funny thing is many of us made a great living with these "beta" cameras, and if they had been like 99% of the companies out there Nov 13th would have been the first we heard of it, and next year would have been the first time we could get our hands on it.

With that said, I feel sorry for all of you who mortgaged your house etc to get this redone and do not have any work. It is a hard thing to stomach and I wish you all the luck in the world. My only advice would be to put a reel together and hit the pavement. Offer huge introductory discounts and try and get some clients that keep coming back. I am sorry if you feel the camera has let you down and you've lost clients, that is hard to take, no matter who is at fault.

Since day one there has always been a workflow that works (very time consuming, but it always works)

Render everything to a self contained movie and cut. If you don't like this approach you will need to look into spending some time and/or money into testing others. I use clipfinder and it makes the world so easy. I render everything we shot to offline files, cut to my hearts content in FCP and then just re-render (entire takes, sucks but always works) to online files, re-link and output. This always works no matter what kind of editing we do. So workflow should be a non issue, because, yes you can edit with the proxies, the news edits I talked about earlier were all done with proxies on a laptop, in the field. (P.S. a newer version of clipfinder will make this all even easier.

So sorry to rant, but all of these posts were getting to me, and I think red should know that there are probaly more of us who are happy with the camera, the company, and your decisions, we probably just aren't as loud.

mahalo for the best years of film and television making of my life, I look forward to more to come.

scott

 

[Denis Buhot]

thanks David

thanks David

I do feel your pain.
D

for caring to suggest. Ten seconds needed for my camera for returning to life would in fact be enough most of the time, unless I plan to rest on sheer luck.

However, it doesn't change the value of your answer. I pressed many times the red team to give that type of answer to the sleep mode feature request. I got none of that type, explaining the problem and why it would not be enabled. Carry more than four batteries... and food, and water for three days... in my kind of field...... I'm not a Titan. What other choice, though !

 

[David Dennis]

Carry more than four batteries... and food, and water for three days... in my kind of field...... I'm not a Titan. What other choice, though !

I figured that would be your answer, and I certainly understand. I still like my lightweight solar panel suggestion, especially with you being out for so long.

From the technical explanation point of view, I think it's interesting to note that the old Canon D30 did not have a sleep mode - when it shut off automatically it had to be rebooted. The problem was solved in both the DSLR and RED worlds by speeding up the boot time, not by adding sleep mode.

Maybe one of our RED friends can chime in with the truth about this question since I think both of us are curious, and unlike me you are a bona fide RED customer. (I am not going to be one until Scarlet is out).

D