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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 :)

Everything changes... IMPORTANT post.

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Well I didn't have a strong opinion on this at the start of the thread beyond thinking all the fear and doom mongering was silly, but at this point in the thread I hope that Jim cuts hard and cuts deep.

I'm stepping away from it in fact as I oddly feel slightly angry about it all.
Perhaps that is a sign that it has been good for me. :)

love

Freya
 
Iain Philpott said:
I think the fact of the matter is simple. There are enough RED Epics out there to shoot every feature film in the world all at the same time. The market is saturated with them. The rental houses have enough of them to satisfy demand. The only 'big' sales left are to people who already own them via upgrades such as Dragon.

However if you substantially drop the price there is a much bigger audience to sell to. At the right price there is the world of wedding videographers for example. But it needs to be at the right price.

That's what RED is about to do - move out of a saturated market place and find more customers - it can't survive selling 200 cameras a year.
Click to expand...

But couldn't the same be said about the Red One as well? The Scarlet? It seeems that we have an insatiable need for what is better than what we have.
 
Its not just wedding and such. There are so many areas RED has never went to directly, and their tools aren't really made for that (but may be upgraded using special firmware):

Industrial, Surveillance etc.

Next week is the "Vision" exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany. Probably the hottest spot of sensor development, industrial and serveillance camera use, world wide. If you go there, you will see all the big guys. And you will be blown away what there is. 4K sensors "from the shelf". I expect a few 4K high speed cameras at really low cost to see there this year. Last year we saw like 17 2K cameras doing up to 340fps, for as low as 1700 Euros. Feeding uncompressed (!!!) RAW at over 600 MByte/s.

This market is soooooo much bigger that this damn film industry!

Where do you believe have those Vision Research and similar cameras been sold to in the past?
You need them for automotive, military, machine vision etc.
When you see such cameras in the film business, you mostly see a "gimmick". Its nice niche they take to meet nice people and make publicity with nice shots. The money is earned with machine vision. But there the competition is pretty hard.

Think of the Birger mount - developed for Machine Vision needs.

Or the SI-2K body, it was an industrial head.

Back then, the Drake camera (Jim knows exactly what I am writing about), was using an industrial head.

Jim aimed from day 1 to sell 10,000+ cameras for military use. He told me so. We all don't know if such think happend / happens. The RED BULL STRATOS stuff was a good advertising in this regard.

Guys, if you believe that there is a saturated market of movie makers - well, yes, could be true for a certain degree of investment level.
As has already been said, if you lower the price, more poeple will buy (especially when the quality is good).
But opening up completely new markets is a a completely different story.
Imagine 5K+ sensors in surveillance cameras spotting places all over cities, spying for hooligans in football stadiums and so many other things that come to mind after 9/11. Not that I like that idea, but THERE is a market. Talking intelligent agencies here. Latest stuff, best stuff - what they need.

We all know from those Bond & Co movies that we can zoom into that surveillance cameras endlessly.

Here we go...

Jim, give me a note and I wear a RED T-Shirt on Vision 2012... :)

Cheers,
Axel
 
Terry, your a smart one huh? It's a well known fact that brand new cars lose 1/2 of their value in the first 4 years, ergo I bought a car that was 4 years old. My 08' Mercedes was 70k when it was first on the lot, but I bought it for 38k just a couple of months ago. You are right however it is irrelevant that I even bought a car, or even what kind of car that I bought, but you had to nitpick at my post though didn't you?

Terry VerHaar said:
Not that it's relevant but, before I'd believe THAT I'd have to see documentation. LOL
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You were making a point about how your car was a better investment than your camera - as a side bar to prove your point about the severity of an Epic price reduction. So a response was reasonable - not a nitpick.

You did notice the LOL? I assumed you were injecting some levity and responded in kind. Maybe I was wrong. :frown:
 
Guys - can't we just have a big :grouphug: ???

Not long to go now... we all have differing business models... the Epic reduction is bad for me too, as I lobbied hard to get one for a project that has been moved to next year.

So I now wait to see how much egg on my face in $$ I have.

But I am sort of resigned to seeing how the cookie crumbles now.
 
Plus, this thread is good for getting the old post count higher - LOL!
 
I never said my car was a better investment than my camera. But now that you bring that up, I can guarantee that I can sell my car for more than that of my camera.

Terry VerHaar said:
You were making a point about how your car was a better investment than your camera - as a side bar to prove your point about the severity of an Epic price reduction. So a response was reasonable - not a nitpick.

You did notice the LOL? I assumed you were injecting some levity and responded in kind. Maybe I was wrong. :frown:
Click to expand...
 
Just a random observation your post reminded me about...

two years ago, I was directing a hellish TVC shoot in the midwest. And the client confided in me that he had recently bought a maserati. I smiled and said "yeah, I don't drive a masarati". He said "but you will, thanks to that camera".

Actually it's because of the hard work and learning and growing as a filmmaker. Not a camera. But without the camera, for me, I don't know if I'd have grown so much, so fast.
 
My two cents; technology prices fall, that's inevitable. I got a Scarlet for fun (1st) and fill the need for high-end corporate work (2nd). It's more of a toy for me and my wife than a tool for work and maybe that explains my contrasting view of the matter compared to those who see a price drop as a negative.

Does it hurt the resell value? Sure, but I know I'll get my money's worth in the end. My first corp gig with the Scarlet generated enough to pay the camera and accessories off in full and opened doors to other gigs so I can't complain. I was hoping, however, that when I bought my camera, there'd be an eventual upgrade path to the Epic that wouldn't involve selling my Scarlet then buying an Epic. Although slim, the possibility does seem more probable now than it did last November.

I'm camera agnostic and have no loyalties to any camera company but if this Scarlet-Epic path materializes, it's going to be difficult to leave RED, that's for sure.
 
patrickortman said:
Just a random observation your post reminded me about...

two years ago, I was directing a hellish TVC shoot in the midwest. And the client confided in me that he had recently bought a maserati. I smiled and said "yeah, I don't drive a masarati". He said "but you will, thanks to that camera".

Actually it's because of the hard work and learning and growing as a filmmaker. Not a camera. But without the camera, for me, I don't know if I'd have grown so much, so fast.
Click to expand...


So Patrick,

which car are you driving now?

;-)

How much have you grown, so fast?

Was you customer right?

Questions over questions...

Axel
 
Sony, Canon, et al. — get your copying machines ready!
 
Ryan Sauve said:
My two cents; technology prices fall, that's inevitable. I got a Scarlet for fun (1st) and fill the need for high-end corporate work (2nd). It's more of a toy for me and my wife than a tool for work and maybe that explains my contrasting view of the matter compared to those who see a price drop as a negative.

Does it hurt the resell value? Sure, but I know I'll get my money's worth in the end. My first corp gig with the Scarlet generated enough to pay the camera and accessories off in full and opened doors to other gigs so I can't complain. I was hoping, however, that when I bought my camera, there'd be an eventual upgrade path to the Epic that wouldn't involve selling my Scarlet then buying an Epic. Although slim, the possibility does seem more probable now than it did last November.

I'm camera agnostic and have no loyalties to any camera company but if this Scarlet-Epic path materializes, it's going to be difficult to leave RED, that's for sure.
Click to expand...

Ryan, I like your picture. Really says, I have so much money I don't care if the price drops. ;)

With the price drop, you are really going to get a similar deal to exchanging your scarlet for an Epic, and you can sell or keep the scarlet. So, even better.
 
To solve the rental issues.

To solve the rental issues.

We are all in charge of our own businesses, and need to buy down to what we can afford, so we can quickly pay things down before things like this happen.

However, it takes time to pay things down. Maybe Red should draw a line in the sand, based on some arbitrarily nominated average rate of rental return a week, and for every week sooner than the cut off date, that somebody bought a camera, they get an set amount of extra credit towards buying new equipment with a maxinum percentage reduction per item (to keep them above cost) or a period in the future, and any special deals. A sort of "You scratched my back, and I'll scratch yours" deal.

Example. I don't know what average returns are like, so I'll make up some simple figures to make it easy to understand. Say I bought a camera. 5 weeks ago, and the arbitrary average weekly return means the difference in price to the price drop would take a year to cover. So you are given X amount of credit equivalent to the price drop less 5 weeks (5/52 weeks of that year period). Somebody that bough it 51 weeks ago gets 1 weeks credit. The credit can be used against future equipment that the firm can rent, but only say up to 20% off each item, so Red never makes a loss on any item, just not much of a net profit. They have up to a year to spend the credit, or a year minus how long ago that you bought the camera, with a minimum of six months to spend it.

Now we can all be happy. As it will take a little time for rental prices to be truly affected by the lower prices anyway, giving you even more time to get more rental returns.

If that sort of thing sounds acceptable suggest it.
 
Our job is not to secure you rental rates. If that was our model, we would do it ourselves.

Our goal is to put professional equipment in the hands of as many aspiring cinephotographers as possible. If you can make money renting your camera out... great. But that is not what is driving our business.

Jim
 
Jannard said:
Our job is not to secure you rental rates. If that was our model, we would do it ourselves.

Our goal is to put professional equipment in the hands of as many aspiring cinephotographers as possible. If you can make money renting your camera out... great. But that is not what is driving our business.

Jim
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AMEN! :closed2ur0:
 
Thanks for the hall pass Jim!


Jannard said:
Our job is not to secure you rental rates. If that was our model, we would do it ourselves.

Our goal is to put professional equipment in the hands of as many aspiring cinephotographers as possible. If you can make money renting your camera out... great. But that is not what is driving our business.

Jim
Click to expand...
 
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