Epic Dragons life expectancy

[Marcos Montenegro]

I love my Dragon but I'm done with being on the "bleeding edge" for a while.

One of the things not mentioned here is the post investment that's needed with these upgrade just to be able to handle the new sizes of the R3D files. I'm not just talking PC/Apple workstations or CPUs, but storage, storage, and more storage, video cards, NLE's that are trying to catch up with these new files and therefore are buggy as hell, 4/5K grading screens, etc, etc. This makes a $70K investment closer to $100K.

I started traveling down this RED road with the DSMC promise. I've come to realize that my wish to have just 1 camera to do everything was simply naive and wrong. I still carry around my Nikon D750 DSLR and shoot beautiful moving timelapses with it that make me money. I've paid that baby up ions ago, and I never have to go to the latest and greatest to get more clients. Your work gets you clients, not your equipment, period (unless you're a rental house).

RED is absolutely paying attention to Sony, Canon, and all other players who are now entering this cinema camera market. They're making it very hard for us independent owner/ops to justify any more RED upgrades when $3K can get you a "see-in-the-dark" 4K camera with excellent dynamic range. As sensor technology keeps getting better, so is RED, so it's a win-win for us and hopefully RED announces something more indie oriented in a year or 2.

Until it does, keep shooting, keep pushing the envelope with what you have and don't worry about something you can't control.

 

[justin ahlmann]

this thread has been my original question for the past year. making the switch to red epic dragon from scarlet has definitely been worth my while, but moving to weapon i question how long i can keep up, or want to. live event filmmaking is my bread and butter so i actually consistently hope for improvements not on resolution, but on low-light sensitivity & DR. RED hasn't made a big deal about weapon's low-light improvements in detail, just that they exist. more improvements on this would make a big deal to my types of clients at least.

 

[Ryan Sauve]

RED hasn't made a big deal about weapon's low-light improvements in detail, just that they exist. more improvements on this would make a big deal to my types of clients at least.

Nailed it. Until there's any significant improvement in light sensitivity, frame rate (240+ using the full sensor), and other tech like lightfield (adjust focus in post), Epic-Dragon should do fine for quite a while.

 

[Demetri Zuev]

Alexa has a 5 year old sensor technology in it and still manages to produce great images as well as staying current to market spec wise.

You shouldn't worry at all about your Dragon, at least till a new sensor tech from RED comes along.

Yes, Weapon is better, but it's not $20000 or $40000 better. I would be happy if RED updated their cameras less often but included more and refined them more. This way we could've gotten a Weapon Dragon after Epic-MX - that would be a huge leap worth this kind of money. Instead, I'm starting to feel a bit like an Apple customer here, every year there's a new iPhone and then there's an S model that does a little of everything better. I'm not against it - every business picks a marketing and production model that suits it best, but I'm not a huge fan of this approach.

 

[Leroy Jackson]

I was thinking the same thing about apple lmbo. A friend of mines asked me if i'm upgrading to the 6s Plus... I said Heck to the NO. There including things in the 6s plus that they've known about since the 5s. Same with Red. Dragon sensor is great.... But why not put wi-fi, ProRes in the Epic Dragon? It's like they know we want it but we gotta get a new camera to do it....... A really REALLY expensive new camera. Anyway. I love my 2 Dragons. I don't see my self getting rid of My Epic-M Dragon for a very very long time unless I get bored with it haha.

 

[Leroy Jackson]

Alexa has a 5 year old sensor technology in it and still manages to produce great images as well as staying current to market spec wise.

You shouldn't worry at all about your Dragon, at least till a new sensor tech from RED comes along.

Yes, Weapon is better, but it's not $20000 or $40000 better. I would be happy if RED updated their cameras less often but included more and refined them more. This way we could've gotten a Weapon Dragon after Epic-MX - that would be a huge leap worth this kind of money. Instead, I'm starting to feel a bit like an Apple customer here, every year there's a new iPhone and then there's an S model that does a little of everything better. I'm not against it - every business picks a marketing and production model that suits it best, but I'm not a huge fan of this approach.

I personally don't think it's even 5,000$ better. I mean I'd be willing to drop a few grand for ProRes and built in Wi-Fi. The extra half of stop in DR I can live with out. Also compression is slightly better so another 2 grand for that... so yeah 5 grand TOPS. That's just me though. Plus I get to keep all my "OLD" modules lol. Not bashing... But Def not happy... Well with the new pricing anyway haha.

 

[M Most]

I don't understand the rub against 8K at all. It is literally a standard that has been defined back in 2007 along with 4K.

Really? Because as far as I know, there is no such thing as "DCI 8K" or "UHD 8K" as you describe in your chart. Standards require standards bodies and formalization, not just someone making a chart and declaring that it is so. The DCI specification covers 2K and 4K. UHD (3840x2160) is an agreed upon format among numerous manufacturers and content providers, as well as a pending SMPTE standard. 8K does not formally exist except in labs owned by Red, NHK, and a few others. Declaring that is is a "standard" or that it has been since 2007 is, to me, not backed up by facts.

 

[Hugh Scully]

But then there's noise, DR and low light sensitivity. Will these really be an issue or are we fooling ourselves that we need more than what the Dragon is capable of? With light technology coming out using LED solutions, keeping power outlets down while still being powerful and also colder and cheaper than HMIs. Is getting enough light really going to be an issue? We still need to light our images, so there will always be light.

This is a key point regarding how and why you use a particular camera. Would we want to give up the organic grain, the photographic quality of the RED image to shoot in the dark? I think that it's great to have cameras with native ISOs of 2000 for exactly that, but I don't want a cinema camera like that. I always think of the RED cameras as a replacement for film. Film is not the best for available light shooting but it provides a beauty that I see in the Red Dragon image. If they can squeeze out another stop for the no light guys, great but I wouldn't want all the wacky conjuring that other manufacturer's use like internal noise reduction to get it. I'd rather shoot with the Dragon at 320 - 800 ISO and light, as you say.

I Will video games and CGI completely take over when it reaches total photo realism? How much of the feature film market will be taken over using that technology? Real time photorealistic graphics for shooting feature films on the fly, without rendering? It's happening in test labs right now. So what more is needed out of a camera today and future work for feature films? Yes, we will always want to photograph the real world, but cost versus quality will always drive the industry into using pure CGI if it starts looking like real photography and when that bar is reached, the cost will start coming down for everyone to be able to use it.

I admit, I never thought of this. I think that the advances in VFX are fantastic. Special effects are in the DNA of movies since the very beginning like with George Meleis. I think in camera effects are making a comeback in some ways. I think your better point is that "we will always want to photograph the real world... " I don't think that will ever lose its predominant place in cinema, or any of the other commercial places where lit, or at least deliberately exposed, moving images are of value.