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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Arri Alexa and Mysterium-X...

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CJ Roy said:
While I would think that most would agree that 4k and beyond is going to be more future-proof, 1080/2k is still perfectly fine for anything outside of theaters. There's still a lot of commercial and music video productions being cut in SD. A LOT.
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Umm... so all else being equal, why would I pay 3x for something that is less future-proof?

Straight to Pro-Res (which they're used to anyway) off of camera? Well that solves a lot of head scratching in post. It makes it simple, and post for the Red is quite simply anything but simple.
Click to expand...

Here's my current workflow: (1) Connect Red drive to computer, (2) Start editing. How is that complicated again?

Anyone who is scratching their head about Red in post should get a job serving french fries at McDonald's.

- Tim
 
I highly recommend that all FCP people check out the new CS5 workflow at NAB ;) All this talk of transcoding etc seems so.... quaint! :D

Cheers,

Paul
 
Cüneyt Kaya said:
are timecode and mediamanagement problems solved
Click to expand...

Love to know this too. Cuda accelerated CS5 does seem like the future (at a certain price point) if they can fix the issues and make PP more editor friendly. Crazy considering how many years they've had to work things out. PLEASE Adobe listen to editors!
 
My reactions to Alexa

My reactions to Alexa

Okay, so it looks like some people have been on here expressing thoughts and feelings on Alexa and the recent announcement and have worked through it a bit to come to some more balanced opinions. Others have just arrived and haven't read much of what's gone before and posted while still a little fired up. Time for a :grouphug: everyone!

I have been trying to read up and form a balanced opinion.

First my initial reactions as an outdsider (non RED owner nor owner of any other camera system and also somewhat outside of the Film production scene and TV scene for a while) who has been following RED development and shared the dream of Epic and Scarlet and felt the many bumps along the path during the long journey to product delivery:
  • Emotionally - Shock, horror. The rug has been pulled out from under my feet. Red has been the championable underdog with so much more to offer, in a much, much more affordable package than the competition for a long time. I think as an aspiring outsider I have felt a certain level of identification with RED for this reason. Now just before the dream comes to fruition after multiple delays and frustrations a very highly respected major player comes to market with a valid competing product. I feel like I've been sucker punched in this regard. So I imagine do many at red and on this forum.
  • Branding comparison - Arri is miles ahead of RED here, I think Greame or Jarred mentioned this point earlier. RED is finding it's way into the heads of the old guard slowly and it felt like it was just at the point of pushing in and getting over the discomfort of many for widespread acceptance, not just for workflows and vs film arguments but also in terms of a simple brand trust and recognition way. I have the feeling that many who were just struggling to accept RED may side step the issue to go with a more comfortable brand they recognise - regardless of any advantages one camera has over the other.
  • Further branding points - The Red way of working, the RED branding and design of the website and equipment all feel less than slick and professional. Don't get me wrong I love RED's open engagement and development style in many ways but the impression for any outsider is a cobbled together mess and work in progress. The website has the styling of a gun obsessed computer gamers fan page (no offence mean to the designer). Information is buried deep in endless forum pages. etc. etc. A clean simple and elegant presentation would go a long way to improving brand image and recognition IMHO. This is the initial point of contact for many people finding out about RED for the first time and needs to give a good impression.
  • I actually really like the look and form factor of Alexa. The single body with shoulder mount built in is very comfortable and familiar for someone like me from a broadcast EFP background. The smoother surfaces I wouldn't mind getting the side of my head up against whereas the Epic looks like it might bite me! This combined with the Arri branding actually draws me to the Alexa.. As do the workflows...

Okay so my initial reactions over with (just needed to get them off my chest:emote_hippie:) there are some points that need further clarification for me with regards to the arguments going on here:


1080 or 2K and futureproofing?

Don't get me wrong, I would love to record everything in the highest quality, highest resultion I can for repurposing later for film distribution or re-releasing when better distribution equipment becomes available, but is this future proofing or is this something else with another name?

Are all of these 4K equipped cinemas going to turn down and films offered for exhibition that were not shot at a native resolution of 4K and above? Or can someone correct me on this?

Will they never do re-runs of Benjamin Button or the Star Wars follow up's (to mention a few) because of the resolution they were recorded at? And if they do will audiences stage walk outs of cinemas complaining about the poor resolution or will they enjoy the stories?

And what about 4K home distribution. Will the studios not release their back catalogs on the new formats because they weren't shot at a high enough resolution when they were made?

Like I said I get the reason for wanting the best quality/resolution now to be prepared for giving the best quality in the not distant future. However I don't think that 2K vs 4K is the deal braker it's being made out to be. Stories still get told, films make money... 2K is actually pretty damn good quality if you ask the average consumer (i.e. outside of Hollywood and film geek circles) Most people enjoy movies for what they are at the cinema and come out talking about the story not the resolution of the projection. At home I decided to fork out money for a surround sound setup rather than a Bluray player because at the screensize and viewing distance the resolution improvement over DVD was not massively appreciable and it added nothing to the story, adding surround sound made a huge impact on the immersiveness and clarity of dialog over the stereo speakers which seemed to miss the centre channel.


If 4K is the future and where we need to be where does this leave the 3K scarlet?

Also will 4K work on our Holodecks in 2056? :blush5:


------------
EDIT - that's enough for a single post! more points later.... This was not intended as a rant or defence of Alexa or what Arri have said on these forums just a perspective on the announcement and Resolution issue.
 
Wow I was typing so long about 20 posts appeared!
 
I'm not generally a ranter, but I've got to say that Arri should be ashamed to show their face on this forum: "The highest sensitivity and dynamic range on the market"

WTF? Where was this established. It's great to promote yourselves, and we all respect marketing, but seriously? You're going to anoint yourself winner with zero substantiation?

Okay, if that's how you want play, don't expect my respect. Your credibility just dropped off a cliff for me.

And all this talk about resolution doesn't matter? Come on, get serious. That's just ridiculous. Hell, why not release an SD camera? It's the same argument. SD was "good enough" for decades. People still rent more SD movies on DVD than HD. What do we really need all this HD crap for anyway?

Resolution doesn't matter. Yeah, right. Let's call a spade a spade here. If Arri had actually caught up to Red and COULD ship a camera that was as sharp, I'm sure they would have. Instead, there's all kinds of "spin" going on here to try to compensate for an area where this camera truly falls short. Shame on you Arri. Shame.

/rant

- Tim
 
Are you guys getting pissed off because Arri embellished?

Get used to it. Marketers do that everyday.
 
Okay so I see another perspective on this now - that of the camera buyer...

If you as an individual are going to drop big $ on a camera system it had better serve you for a long time or recoup the investment quick. Therefore the future demand for 4k aquisition can become a major factor. I guess rental houses will see this as a camera that will rent well and recoup their investment quick due to the Arri name and premium they can charge for it.


Strange I never considered the Alexa as a camera to buy, just one to rent if and where appropriate - the RED to buy.

I guess in my previous post I was thinking in Producer/ single project terms.
 
The TV market is more where I think this will go too. The ready to edit 1080 is ideal for those kinds of pipelines and deliverables. The fact that the XML is there and it all links up to the RAW for reconform is a bonus you don't get with the KiPro route on RED.
 
Chuck Z said:
Are you guys getting pissed off because Arri embellished?

Get used to it. Marketers do that everyday.
Click to expand...

I don't consider false advertising to be an embellishment.

A lie is a lie is it not?
 
Cüneyt Kaya said:
are you referring to the codex? a codex costs 1000 a day..
Click to expand...

That's what the full Codex costs. You don't know what the mini-Codex will cost. In either case, I was referring more to the "petabytes for a full feature" remark. The current ArriRAW format - based on the D21, which has more total pixels than the first Alexa due to its 4:3 aspect ratio - runs about 900GB per hour at 24 fps, uncompressed. Even if you were to continue with that size, you would have to record 1000 hours of dailies to reach a petabyte. And that's assuming that nobody is going to offer a compressed RAW recorder, which is not necessarily an accurate assumption, especially given that Cineform already has a compressed RAW format and devices such as Cinedeck are offering products based on Cineform technology. Not to mention Codex's use of JPEG2000 (what do you think Redcode is based on?) on their devices already (although not yet implemented for RAW files).

I don't work for Red or Arri, and I don't play favorites based on anything other than the proper tool for the particular job at hand. All I want is to know enough about everything out there to better advise people on post paths and finishing methods, as well as each device's strengths and weaknesses. And everything ever made has strengths and weaknesses, including both Alexa and Red's products. But misinformation works both ways.
 
petabytes was just overstating...haha, my english and the internet again.
technicially you are right i guess :)
lets say 1 tb per hour, we shoot here around 40 hrs per feature.
thats 40 TB of footage, back that up twice and you are at 120 TB. seems a lot for one feature. lets say 100 TB. still a lot
 
It is, but we've all seen how Moore's Law has been making larger and larger amounts of data more manageable. I just bought a little 16GB USB stick for my laptop, I remember when a 250MB stick seemed like a big deal.

When Dalsa came out, dealing with uncompressed 4K RAW data was a major sticking point, making the camera fairly impractical, yet every year, it seems more and more possible to deal with large amounts of uncompressed data.

But as Mike Most suggests, there will be more and more data recorders with a compressed option even when the option is left out of the camera.

As for the affordability of it all, well, obviously for now we are talking about premium prices that are beyond the pocketbooks of most indie filmmakers who look to Red for solutions. But whose to say that for bigger features, recording uncompressed RAW won't become commonplace eventually?
 
Tim Morten said:
I'm not generally a ranter, but I've got to say that Arri should be ashamed to show their face on this forum: "The highest sensitivity and dynamic range on the market"

WTF? Where was this established. It's great to promote yourselves, and we all respect marketing, but seriously? You're going to anoint yourself winner with zero substantiation?
Click to expand...

"Obsolesence obsolete." (Red)
"Scarlet: Fall 2009" (Red)
"The best fleshtones" (Panasonic)
"The best editing software on the planet" (Avid)
"The greatest name in color" (Technicolor)
"The ultimate driving machine" (BMW)
Any claim ever made for a product that hasn't even shipped yet (Red, Arri, Sony, Panasonic, Apple, and just about any technology company you can name)

Marketing is marketing. If you're going to get bent out of shape over this, you should be just as judgmental with every other company and product. Companies say things to get attention drawn to their products. It's a fact of business life.
 
Interesting to see reactions here.

It's a little goofy to me that Michael - who's primary job right now is to sell and market Alexa - is spending his time reading and posting on REDUSER - a forum devoted to people who use and want to use RED cameras. But I guess that just shows that ARRI views RED as serious competition.

There's a lot of reasons one camera gets chosen over another on films and television shows. Sadly ... many times it's not about which one will deliver the best representation of the Cinematographer's work. There is clearly room for more than one high end digital cinema camera on the market.

Here's the reality I see:

EPIC on the big screen is going to steal the show. Hands down - it will crush Alexa in pure image quality. You all can speculate all day long about this - it won't be long before folks can judge with their own eyes and move past marketing.

EPIC's form factor is going to empower and change the way many Cinematographers (and crews) shoot.

EPIC's advanced features are going to offer so many things you will not find on Alexa - I guarantee that even on Alexa shot projects - they will bring in Epics to do certain things.

I don't know about the rest of you - but I'm looking forward to next WED.

In other news .... Kodak has released a new film stock on Super-8mm. When you can't move forward fast enough .... might as well leap backward.
 
Tim Morten said:
Umm... so all else being equal, why would I pay 3x for something that is less future-proof?
Click to expand...

You may not, but if it made post easier, simpler and faster, a lot of commercial, promo, music video, television producers would. What exactly does a 100k commercial have to benefit from being future proof? So that in 5 years, when THAT ad campaign is dead, they can somehow resurrect it? In commercials, it doesn't matter. Alls that matters is that it's done on time and on budget.

Tim Morten said:
Here's my current workflow: (1) Connect Red drive to computer, (2) Start editing. How is that complicated again?
Click to expand...

1. You plug a red-raid to a computer and start using it as a media drive?? There are two 5400RPM LAPTOP drives in there, raided together. It's somewhat of a miracle that they work as well as they do, and you're actually going a few steps further and having it read from multiple sectors on the original RAW. That's really safe.

2. Edit what? Proxies? Which color science are you shooting with vs. what color science are you processing with? Are you cutting in front of your clients with proxies? If not, what program are you using that cuts the raw natively?

3. How are you conforming? With B. 30 on the R1 & MX, Redline is out until it's updated. What's your current workflow with MX cameras?


Tim Morten;578121Anyone who is scratching their head about Red in post should get a job serving french fries at McDonald's.[/QUOTE said:
There are a lot of steps you're skipping over. I think you've got your cameras mixed. The Alexa's Pro-Res solution is ready to edit, out of the box. The Red takes a lot more steps, and some of those steps and solutions are missing because key components aren't updated yet. In most situations, you have to transcode. If conforming off the raw, you'll have to figure out another way outside of Rubber Monkey to ingest, conform and transcode your EDL. Maybe Clipfinder with RedCine-X beta.

I'm not talking about image quality with any of this, I'm just talking about ease of use, post-wise.
Click to expand...
 
M Most said:
"Obsolesence obsolete." (Red)
"Scarlet: Fall 2009" (Red)
"The best fleshtones" (Panasonic)
"The best editing software on the planet" (Avid)
"The greatest name in color" (Technicolor)
"The ultimate driving machine" (BMW)
Any claim ever made for a product that hasn't even shipped yet (Red, Arri, Sony, Panasonic, Apple, and just about any technology company you can name)

Marketing is marketing. If you're going to get bent out of shape over this, you should be just as judgmental with every other company and product. Companies say things to get attention drawn to their products. It's a fact of business life.
Click to expand...

No one is complaining about Arri's official marketing...

Jim
 
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