Lead, follow...or get out of the way!

[Larry Gebhardt]

Converging technologies..."Shifting the Paradigm Gears" http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/convergence.shtml

This is a very interesting essay, and I think it speaks volumes for the future. Red is leading the charge, thanks to some very smart visionary people.
I wonder if the other manufacturers have been treading these waters already...or if the Red One caught them with their pants down...how quickly will they catch up? 2009 should be very interesting. I for one think Michael Reichmann is right on.

 

[Paris Remillard]

The only things that I can see hindering this happening are the existing top tier video cameras. But really only Sony would shoot itself in the foot by offering a dSLR/motion picture camera with better specs than it's $250,000 f35. But Nikon especially and even Canon have a huge opportunity at their feet if they heed this advice because they don't have a high end video division to compete with. I really hope to see this happen very soon. Red was first, but other companies would be blind not to see the potential in the current and forthcoming technology and not to see the success of and demand for the Red.

Though I was torn a new a**hole in another thread for saying so, I'd love to see a full frame 35mm still camera sensor( yes, that's vistavision), like the Canon 1Ds mkIII, that could shoot 24+ fps. Without having to deal with specific film gauges and pulldown/magazine arrangements, digital sensors can offer infinitely variable format options. So long as your lenses have an image circle that covers the chosen format. You could even have something like a Hasselblad H3, with a 39Mp or 7.2k back, to shoot high end stills. Then shoot moving images either full frame, window the sensor down to stills 35 (vistavision), full aperture motion picture 35mm for anamorphic, super35, etc... The Phantom 65 actually already does this. 4K 125fps at 65/70mm down to 2k ??fps at 35mm. So, this isn't a new idea. And anyone who disagrees with the viability of such a product can take it out on Vision Research, not me. But the price is very high. So, I guess it's not the matter of someone making it, it's making it at the right price point. And storage and output technology catching up to the crazy data rates that these cameras will/are producing.

Exciting things ahead. Well, and right in front of us.

 

[I Bloom]

The only things that I can see hindering this happening are the existing top tier video cameras. But really only Sony would have to compete with itself and shoot itself in the foot by offering a dSLR/motion picture camera with better specs than it's $250,000 f35. But Nikon especially and even Canon have a huge opportunity at their feet if they heed this advice. I really hope to see this happen very soon. Red was first, but other companies would be blind not to see the potential in the current and forthcoming technology.

Is Nikon getting into the $20,000 camera market. Or is Canon? Don't they stay under $10,000. So in terms of Red One and Epic, I don't think that's a large enough market for them to deal with the hassle. I think Jim has a niche. Maybe I'm wrong. I have yet to hear or see any other company even talking about onboard wavelet compression, or onboard compressed raw, which I believe to be the main, among many, intellectual asset they have.

IBloom

 

[Paris Remillard]

I have yet to hear or see any other company even talking about onboard wavelet compression, or onboard compressed raw, which I believe to be the main, among many, intellectual asset they have.

IBloom

Actually, I think Canon does some sort of scaled or compressed RAW in some of their newer cameras. I think you're right, I don't think it's wavelet compressed. I'm not sure what they're doing. But the sRAW format is half the file size of RAW.

 

[Paris Remillard]

Is Nikon getting into the $20,000 camera market. Or is Canon? Don't they stay under $10,000. So in terms of Red One and Epic, I don't think that's a large enough market for them to deal with the hassle. I think Jim has a niche. Maybe I'm wrong.

IBloom

That's the thing, though. It's entirely possible that they could see some viability in adding motion picture capabilities to their top tier dSLRs at the same sub $10,000 price point. Kinda like Apple taking a $25,000 color grading app and including it for no extra cost in FCS. Or more directly, what all of the camera makers are doing by adding video capabilities to their point and shoot cameras. Why not add high end video to the high end cameras, they same way that they've added low end video to the low end cameras. When the technology to shoot at 24+ fps becomes as easy and cheap(relatively speaking) to them as the 10-ish fps that they're currently doing, then why not. Who knows...

 

[Mitch Gross]

Well Silicon Imaging has on board wavelet compression in the form of Cineform. There certainly is a new category that I and others generally refer to as Digital Cinema cameras to help separate them from a video camera of even the highest order. It isn't the question of frame rates and merging stills and motion picture capture, it is really the concept of capturing a RAW image and then esentially leaving it that way to save the processing for later. In this way cameras such as RED, Silicon Imaging and of course Phantom are more akin to film where the material needs to be processed and manipulated in some form of post process in order to be used. As lovely as the F23/F35/HPX3000/Genesis et al can be, on all of them one takes the record medium and can play the signal out live in an essentially finished form, which means that it is a processed signal. Wavelet compressed or not compressed at all, it is still RAW data as opposed to a video signal, even if it is an uncompressed video signal.

By the way, the Phantom 65 specs have expanded over time. At full resolution (4096x2400) it can now shoot up to 144 fps. Easy for me to remember -- one gross.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Larry, thanks for the article. I need to hang out more at Luminous Landscape and other sites like it.

I have been wondering for years why Canon, for example, as not made a Genesis slayer with their top-end DSLR sensors. Strap a shutter, chip and a harddrive to the thing, and blow everyone else out of the water. Of course, that is essentially what Jim is doing.

My first narrative short will certainly follow this ideal - RED moving pictures mixed with DSLR timelapse, etc.

I agree that RAW is really a game changer too. Ever since I started shooting RAW I cannot even imagine shooting the old way, on "burned in" JPEGs or video.

 

[I Bloom]

That's the thing, though. It's entirely possible that they could see some viability in adding motion picture capabilities to their top tier dSLRs at the same sub $10,000 price point. Kinda like Apple taking a $25,000 color grading app and including it for no extra cost in FCS. Or more directly, what all of the camera makers are doing by adding video capabilities to their point and shoot cameras. Why not add high end video to the high end cameras, they same way that they've added low end video to the low end cameras. When the technology to shoot at 24+ fps becomes as easy and cheap(relatively speaking) to them as the 10-ish fps that they're currently doing, then why not. Who knows...

The keyword here is sustained. 10fps or 24fps sustained. I'm not saying they won't do it, but I'd wager the Red is very very different from the average DSLR.

Well Silicon Imaging has on board wavelet compression in the form of Cineform.

Inside the camera?

IBloom

 

[Jarred Land]

Is Nikon getting into the $20,000 camera market. Or is Canon? Don't they stay under $10,000.

IBloom

$$ is close.. a Mark III with a couple L lenses gets pretty near $20k, Im not sure how many Mark III's they sell a year though...

 

[Meryem Ersoz]

That's very interesting...it's exactly what I suggested SCARLET should be, a combined video/stills killer, back in the days of rampant speculation....

My specs were: boxy shape like a fatter Canon 5D so that you could tripod mount the camera on a Wimberley head, with a dumb mount that could accept either Nikon or Canon mounts, shoot 2K, with a switchable still/video mode.

My vision was of the ultimate nature, travel, adventure sports, and outdoors video/still photo machine. I even have a great name for it, in my head: the RED WILD.

My thinking was that you could use such a device to eliminate the need to carry double systems for video and stills. I often get frustrated at feeling that I need to choose, because of the weight restrictions around carrying both for long distances.

SCARLET, as the article points out, closes this gap, but a serious stills person, will want to use their existing lens collection. It will appeal to video producers who want great stills, but less so to stills people who want some video capability, in my opinion. And the stills hobbyist market is still exponentially larger than the serious hobbyist video demographic.

Jim did not seem to think much of my idea, however, his comment was that he could already pull great stills from a RED ONE...while true, I doubt many still photographers would be willing to lug this much camera weight around, to possibly shoot video. But if RED really wanted to sell a ton of these, they'd weight the camera's features towards the enormous still photo serious hobbyist/pro market, conceptualizing a great stills camera that does outstanding video, rather than the other way around.

I run a the planet's largest nature and outdoors video production contest, and I was talking with a Canon rep at NAB about sponsorship, and why Canon sponsors every crappy little landscape photography contest in the world and not one video contest, and he pretty much shrugged at the idea that video was even worth sponsoring -- that they sell thousands of still cams for every video cam in a similar, parallel class.

And then EPIC came out -- a nice size, approaching my "fat 5D" form factor, but no mention of a still mode and SCARLET, with a still mode but some limitations to the lens options.

I'll probably trade up one of my RED ONEs for an EPIC because it more closely approaches the specs that I suggested, but I still think there is a strong argument to be made for the WILD, my ultimate dream camera...and this article bears that out...