Boring...

[killfilm]

Jim, a teaser up on red.com would satisfy most. at least with some specs

i remember the red website with only the pictures of the racing cars, but boy, did it roll

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Is it cynical of me to suspect the magician's secret weapon, misdirection?

"What's with this sticky PL mount? What's with this audio hiss? What's with this rolling shutter? What's with this ..."

"Look, everybody: SCARLET!"

If they had posted even a hint as to what the **** it was I would call you cynical. With no specs it's obviously a classic publicity stunt of some sort. And the timing is extremely strange. It's too far away from NAB to be sustainable. The only thing it coincides at all with is the climax of a growing series of frustrations and impatience by the user base.

I wager the outer bounds of any sort of interest in Scarlet is another week. After that it's going to need another bucket of chum. There isn't a whole lot to announce that people care about except for: resolution, sensor size and fixed or PL lens. That's 3 announcements over 4 months. RED also wants it to be a big suprise at launch to drive foot traffic to REDOne so I don't expect the real big news to break until then. They might give us one of those 3 so that's one announcement every 2 months tops. Even with one announcement every two months you can't sustain hype and the effectiveness of those two announcements will be probably on the order of a shrug.

I also feel like people have grown weary of the "open development cycle" with REDOne. It's all exciting at first as progress is zipping along and new features are added practically every day but like development of anything bug fixing is about as glamorous as a footrace through salt flats for 8 months. There's nothing really visible to see change and the only thing you get to 'witness' is problems which last for a week. I'm expecting the attitude largely surrounding Scarlet to be "Just call me when it's done."

 

[Seth Larney]

Hey guys,

I think some of you may be being a little harsh on Red here. It seems to me that when Jarred opened this section, what they probably had in mind was something along the lines of : The more we know what our users want, the better off the product will be, so let them talk about it as much as possible.

I can't really see it being much of a publicity stunt, don't forget, the general public doesn't read reduser, red user's do ..

I for one love Red's open development approach, and I will be sad if they decide to change their way's because a bunch of people don't 'appreciate' them being open and taking suggeestions. Do we want another "we promise you'll have a great product .. but then we're not going to tell you anything about it for the next 3 years while we plod away in our garage trying to figure stuff out, some of which we may not be able to without our clients feedback, so we'll probably just turn into vaporware" type of company ?

After a while of reading the Scarlet forum, Jim and co will have a good idea of what we want .. it's pretty straightforward.

 

[Erik Bien]

Respectfully, I'd buy that as the reason RED announced plans to build a "professional pocket camera" at NAB 07, and there have been "RED-mini" speculation threads aplenty between then and now.

I think Gavin and I are in agreement, it's the timing of the announcement (okay, and its utter lack of informative content) that has me suspicious. "What's in a name?"

 

[Michael "Dorkman" Scott]

I said shut up.

I got the joke and laughed a lot. Very well-delivered.

Anyway, it seems obvious to me that RED has borrowed a page from Apple's book. Every year by MacWorld the rumors have been flying so much about what "might" be announced, that whatever actually gets announced is immediately the greatest thing Apple has ever done, whether or not it matches the rumors.

Since there's no redrumors.com, RED is in the semi-transparent position of having to stoke the hype-fires themselves by throwing us a bone and letting us work ourselves into a froth about what might be. Who needs marketing when we'll happily hype OURSELVES senseless over a name and vague description?

I also can't ignore the notion that, as others have said, the "speculation" they're encouraging is a backdoor way of asking us what it is we would want from a "professional pocket camera", whatever that means. Whatever comes up most often as the most desirable features (without encroaching on Red One's territory) becomes Scarlet, and isn't RED the most amazing company for ALWAYS knowing what the market wants without even having to ask? :whistling:

I'm no insider so this is as much speculation as anything else. But I wouldn't be surprised (or angered) if that was the way of it. It is great that RED is so open about the development process, but let's not forget that the benefits flow both ways -- they have a team of think-tankers and beta testers that not only do they not have to pay, but are actually in many cases paying THEM for the opportunity and more than happy to express their gratitude for it!

It's really quite clever.

 

[planet e]

you need to look at the original announcement where jim says,

"We know that the name has leaked out, so we want to avoid any postings and speculation."

hilariously, it has been endless postings and non-stop speculation and ridiculous ramblings on a new dedicated SCARLET sub-forum ever since...!!:glare:

jim knows his peeps!

now, having said that, i think that he is a pretty literal guy, says what he means and means what he says....

so i think he actually meant what he said, that his intention was to foreclose on rumor-mongering, but he also knows exactly how we are...and that we would fire up the rumor mill, the speculation mill, and any other silly mill that would fuel the RED ardor.

but that's on us, i think, not on him...he doesn't even need to be that machiavellian, not when we do the job so well for him. a few little drips and we all go berserk.

this thread being a classic example! of the RED moebius strip, the snake eating its tail...

i only hope that the subsequent resounding silence means that they are working their asses off to push #1008 out the door ASAP.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I doubt they're going to be paying too much attention to our speculation threads.

We want 4k. Ok.. duhh given. We want a S35mm chip. Ok... duhh given. Scarlet is going to be the product of what they manage to cram into whatever size little box they decide on and can sell for less than around $8,000.

RED was already limited by what they could afford to deliver. Scarlet is going to be the same problem only the price is going to be determining factor of every single feature. This isn't going to bleeding edge. This is going to be bleeding edge at what they can afford.

If they took our feedback seriously they would deliver a $2500 REDTwo in the size of an HV20. They know what this community wants in an imaging device now it's just a question of figuring out which we would rather have... which requires actual two way conversations not feature requests.