That's what I said when I visited the RED booth today, first thing (also got the REDbook as one of the first 200!)
But it's even MORE huge than that. Today I pulled perfect, beautiful, buttery smooth focus on a Canon 85mm f1.2 still lens using the native lens motors, an Epic outfitted with the new wireless receiver, and RED's own wireless 3-axis lens controller!!!!! I set custom stop distances, mapping, for example, a focus range of about 4 feet to a full 360 turn of the focus wheel, and it worked FLAWLESSLY. Folks, the REDMote Pro IS HERE, it's just not being called that.
The second axis on that controller is a slider that was mapped to iris, and because of the canon "steppiness" to iris change, it didn't perform as smoothly as the focus, although I could still see using it for live pulls in certain instances and definitely on lenses that don't have those discrete iris steps (of course I could also do this on my REDmote with comparable results). The third axis goes unused with Canon stills because there are no zoom motors in the lenses. RED is releasing a 2 axis version of the controller presumably for that reason. It's supposed to be otherwise the same as the 3-axis but a bit cheaper than the $2900 3-axis controller. I didn't get to actually see their floor version since Jarred had picked it up and had it elsewhere when I was at the booth. But that's my info. No info, though, on exact price or release date for the two axis. But since the controller also works with RED's own motors, one could always go with the 3=axis controller and add a motor later for zoom.
And for those who don't need it right away, I have a feeling that a compatible 3rd party 2-axis controller (large focus wheel and some other variant for the iris) will be surfacing very quickly. We all know the Birger could do this with the Impero or Optitron. So it's now a matter of ditching the mount and going directly through RED's hardware and protocols, meaning no external power for mounts, no loss of lens data, etc.
I don't know why this news isn't being shouted from the rooftops. So consider this post my effort to do so. This was an AWESOME day for Epic and Scarlet owners who, like me, may have bought into this platform in part because of the promise of leveraging smart still lenses in a practical and progressive way for film style production.
And on top of hugging Trent and Sammy as they were explaining to me that I wasn't dreaming, that this is ready to go NOW, I got to meet Jarred, which was very cool because I followed the very earliest rumblings of what became RED when I was regularly visiting and posting at DVXUser. Didn't get to meet Jim, missed him both times I went by the booth, but if I make it back to NAB, I hope I get to do that as well. So it was a great day in RED land for me.
+1 Thank you very much Elizabeth! This is actually really a huge thing.
Sorry, we just do all purpose camera's here
Connect that new andra-system directly to the camera to use still-lenses with integrated motors = faster focus-pulls, focus-distance in meta-data, maybe even more accurate, smaller and lighter... And hey, cheaper too.
