Jim's Last Post - Send him off with some pictures of Red in action.

[lumiere]

OK Boys, this is as far back as it goes other thank the email exchanges Jim and I had back in 2004. This is the extensive slide deck / business plan I drafted after my first trip to Japan when I recruited Ted. This one is for the history books. I called it the O-CAM:

The O-CAM Business Plan

Slide 18 is the most interesting IMO.

 

[Brian Timmons]

OK Boys, this is as far back as it goes other thank the email exchanges Jim and I had back in 2004. This is the extensive slide deck / business plan I drafted after my first trip to Japan when I recruited Ted. This one is for the history books. I called it the O-CAM:

The O-CAM Business Plan

Fred- This is quite a detailed look from the inside.
I know from budgeting film projects how plans change. How much do you think RED followed through on the basics of this initial business plan particularly the budgeting and logistics? I have a feeling things were more expensive than projected. It usually is.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

 

[lumiere]

Blair is an OG. Love that. Awesome dude as well. Since we're strolling back memory lane.

You lads are bubbling up some nostalgia and I'm waiting on my barber. I feel like a lot is lost on the modern generation of filmmakers of just where we were in the 2000s when RED teased and launched the RED One.

I wasn't at the show, but I was tuned in and paying attention. And fortunately I have a semi-decent recollection of this exact time. I was about 7-8 years into my career in the film industry and film was still the primary medium. However, we wrapped on Superman Returns which was shot on the Panavision Genesis, which at the time was the only S35-ish solution at just a smidge smaller than Super 35mm 3-perf, but also 1080p. That moment in particular was when digital was really on the radar for the film industry. I could write a book about the conversations surrounding film and digital during this exact time.

We occasionally used cameras like the Thomson Viper, which was a 2/3" sensor, 10-bit, 1080p. But there were a lot of hangups in the workflow and general quality. And then literally everything else at this time were 2/3" or 1/2" 3X CCD cameras from Sony or Panasonic. All of which were much more expensive and didn't captivate the film industry. Speaking to both companies at that the time, 4K was a distant plan. Mostly targeting 2013-2016.

Though somewhat comical now, the industry really wanted at least a Super 35mm sensor with good color reproduction, dynamic range, and non-video-ish image processing. This was mainly related to sharpening and codec related issues along the way. But yep, the desire for a larger sensor for both the aesthetic reasons as well as decent lens choices was very much apparent.

Interestingly enough, the digital still cameras were doing good things. We had APS-C, APS-H, and Full Frame 135 sensors. We were going to get there one way or another. And notably, the still cameras were of higher quality compared to early digital video systems. The 1Ds took many by surprise.

We had one additional tease of where things were going, and I do credit Panasonic for this a lot. The HVX200 video camera, fixed lens, non-square pixel, smaller sensor, not exactly great color was released in 2005. It was really the first compact HD video camera to record to solid state media, but there was a lot of room for improvement in so many directions.

Sony released the F35, CCD 1080p, but Super 35mm in 2008. Much loved by many, but also after the RED One. Panasonic's first Super 35mm sensor was Varicam 35 in 2014 and that was 4K, 7 years after RED released the RED One. Sony accelerated their plans with the F65 in 2011, which was a 5.7K camera, though marketed as an 8K/4K system w/ interpolation. I liked the F65 despite it's size. That was two years after RED Epic 5K hit the world.

Canon and Nikon didn't have that presence in the motion picture industry to that degree, so it was going to be interesting to see how they responded. Canon in particular had really popular DV cameras in the XL series, but nothing beyond that really in this space. Nikon announced their D90 camera in August 2008, DX format, 720p video. Canon announced their full frame 135 format 5D Mark II in September 2008, about 1 month later, with 1080p video.

Arri was involved here with the D series cameras in development and production from 2005 onward until the eventual release of the Alexa in 2010 building much on where the D series camera from. The D20 and D21 featured the same sensor pixel pitch that the eventual Alexa featured. I think interestingly, the RED One landed and the Epic came out about a year before the Alexa. And really in the motion picture world it was a battle of these two systems with the Sony F55 and Panasonic Varicam 35 somewhat also throwing jabs, with the F55 being pretty popular globally for sure. Sony is a very, very big company.

Rewinding a bit to 2006. At my studio we made the switch from scanning Super 35mm at 4K to 6K, going from our custom and the first 4K film scanner to the Northlight 6K, which is a very elegant machine. The RED One at $17,500 was an astronomical and economical proposition if the image quality was there. Our film scanning setup was well over $1mil when taking into account the scanner, rerez hosts, and service contract per scanner.

2007/2008 I got my first working experience with RED One material and then the camera itself. In the film studio world nobody at this time had a RED workflow, most were really anti-digital despite it popping up more regularly. Semi-ironically, I built a red colored PC in my office to ingest and process R3D footage into our studio's proprietary RLL format. Speed of workflow was relevant here as film scanning was around 27-ish seconds, brought down to about 6-9 seconds. Laser recording was similar, the Lux's at 26-ish seconds, then the ARRILASER was much faster, around 7 seconds. Processing RED day one on a big system was around 30 seconds a frame to convert to 16-bit TIF or RLL.

I was still tied to the studio, so camera ownership of this level was not on my radar just yet. I mainly worked on Panavision films for the first 12 years. But, as the bug grew, and I decided to go out on my own, RED proved to be an obvious choice for my work. Though I couldn't do an Epic initially, I jumped in with Scarlet in 2011. The following year, upgraded to Epic and bought a second camera. So on and so forth from there.

Canon was the question mark here for me. And for those who remember November 2011 with the much anticipated Cinema EOS launch as well as the Scarlet launch, it a crazy day. But it was similarly a 1080p versus 4K sort of moment. The 5.9K C700 took a little longer than expect to get to the market, but their C500 and C500 MK II have been the best production camera offerings to date IMO, outside of rather powerful mirrorless bodies.

I met a lot of the early adopters of the RED One along the way, from owner/operators, to smaller rental people, and larger rental houses. We all faced the similar hurdles of the era.

Looking back at it, RED's real innovation was putting everything together into a 4K digital cinema camera that was production ready at a compelling price with a decent sized sensor and image quality. Plus it was a camera people wanted to approach. They did this about 5-8 years ahead of what the other larger players. There were other systems that didn't really make the cut a few times along the way. RED also developed the full post workflow very effectively. When we got wider support for GPU Acceleration, the whole industry changed overnight as renders were significantly faster. Prior to that, proxies and editorial workflows were very much necessary for larger projects. It is wild, absolutely wild, that we have realtime playback of 8K REDCODE RAW and that transpired in 2016. Moderately insane to how time consuming it all was prior to this.

I still like to highlight the Dragon sensor release though. In Hollywood, for those who haven't dabbled in digital, but were still film focused, it was the sensor tech that turned many heads for about two years. And it was 6K resolution in a small Epic body. Digital on nearly every technical merit has surpassed film as of 2024, but I like to remember the concept of a digital film alternative, which RED positioned themselves as. The primary medium of our industry did change along the way, but the market and work grew many, many times in this span of time as well.

Interesting about the scanning @Phil Holland. A lot of people don’t know that I used the RED ONE to scan the majority of footage I used in WWII IN HD for History

 

[lumiere]

Fred- This is quite a detailed look from the inside.
I know from budgeting film projects how plans change. How much do you think RED followed through on this initial business plan?

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

A lot from the concept, but it was a collaboration between Jim and I over a few weeks discussing what we wanted in a camera (modular, RAW, etc). But the biggest difference is Jim decided to go to 4K direct. I didn’t think it was possible, but then again I’m not Jim! His brilliance and power is to aim so much higher than most of us think is possible. Also, I didn’t have the nerve to tell him “you need to finance enough so we can build our own imager”. So I kept it more conservative.

So one thing I felt strongly about was to make a RAW camera for $8K. With one 2/3“ CMOS, the glass choices were too limited. I get it. But I wanted to capture a larger market share.

My father in law got brain cancer and I couldn’t be in Cali, I had to be on the East Coast to support my wife. So I bowed out.

Ultimately Jim and Jarred changed the industry by building a camera studio filmmakers wanted to use. It was the right thing to do, and I can’t think of a better duo than these two to make it happen. Historic what they did. Graeme Nattress (which I brought in is the third most influential character in that story with REDCODE.

Now the prosumers will benefit from these two decades of innovation with Nikon.

 

[Brian Timmons]

A lot from the concept, but it was a collaboration between Jim and I over a few weeks discussing what we wanted in a camera (modular, RAW, etc). But the biggest difference is Jim decided to go to 4K direct. I didn’t think it was possible, but then again I’m not Jim! His brilliance and power is to aim so much higher than most of us think is possible. Also, I didn’t have the nerve to tell him “you need to finance enough so we can build our own imager”. So I kept it more conservative.

So one thing I felt strongly about was to make a RAW camera for $8K. With one 3/4 “ CMOS, the glass choices were too limited. I get it. But I wanted to capture a larger market share.

My father in law got brain cancer and I couldn’t be in Cali, I had to be on the East Coast to support my wife. So I bowed out.

Ultimately Jim and Jarred changed the industry by building a camera studio filmmakers wanted to use. It was the right thing to do, and I can’t think of a better duo than these two to make it happen. Historic what they did. Graeme Nattress (which I brought in is the third most influential character in that story with REDCODE.

Now the prosumers will benefit from these two decades of innovation with Nikon.

This is an amazing read. You're right about that slide 18 and considering how many Komodos were sold that sub $6k price range is still popular.
Sorry to hear about your father in law even though that was a long time ago.
Always interesting where the road of life takes us.
There really needs to be a doc or really a book that details this RED story. The more I hear the more it seems like we have a very basic understanding of how things actually happened.

I'm sure the camera blogs will likely blow this revelation up with discussion.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

 

[lumiere]

But like Steve Jobs said so well, an idea, a concept is such a small part of success. It’s all in the execution. And that is 100% Jarred and Jim of course. When I look at that photo of Jarred and I reviewing the presentation before the show at NAB I realize how young Jarred was. He became the president of one of the most influential camera companies in history of cinema with no real business experience. Talk about talent. Seriously. And Jim recognized that in him, and that’s part of his power. Recognizing talent. I honestly don’t think Jarred is going to stay with RED much longer (I have no idea) but I heard him call the V-RAPTOR X his retirement camera. Whatever he chooses to do next (I’m going to guess production), I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw him get a statuette within a few short years.

I’m getting back into production after I sell my current company so maybe I’ll be allowed in the room when he accepts it

 

[Brian Timmons]

Whatever he chooses to do next (I’m going to guess production), I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw him get a statuette within a few short years.

Next on Nat Geo, "The foxes of Big Sur"

I hope Jarred stays or at least maintains an influential presence but I understand he has a life beyond making cameras.

I’m getting back into production after I sell my current company so maybe I’ll be allowed in the room when he accepts it

I know about your work. You're definitely one to reckon with.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

 

[Phil Holland]

Thank you for that extremely early look Frederic. Absolutely fascinating seeing the plan through completion.