Question about serial number

[Grzegorz Gill]

Hey,
I just bought a Scarlet new, not BT two weeks back and to my surprise when it arrived I had a very low serial number, #00781. Weren't these cameras in the thousands?

-GG

 

[Kyle Gentz]

Wow, yeah, weird. I bought mine Nov3rd and I'm 749

 

[shatek king]

Maybe its someones old scarlet that they traded for a epic. And they changed up the parts

 

[ericyoung]

I would guess Red have given up trying to deliver in any sort of serial number order, as long as a Scarlet body is up to current specification. With all the trade-in deals, the logistics are hard enough already.

They wouldn't be selling refurbished Scarlets as new - that's what the Battle Tested part of the store is for.

 

[Maik Müller]

Easy explanation: you have 781 after RED has sold 100k.

 

[Alex Rawet]

We had 294 about a year after the Scarlets started shipping, not sure why

 

[Andy White]

Think of batch testing and production lines. maybe 20 or 30 on test benches... then, once they're burned in, there's been many more cycles of units come off the line, so it isn't going to be a sequential system.

My (stage 4) Epic was in the 1800's but many others at the time where in the high 2000's and others where in the 1500's.

Probably so many variables we don't know about too!

I can't see it being a BT one, as RED are good at separating new from BT and would, I imagine, want to keep their reputation

 

[Grzegorz Gill]

Yea thought to see what other people had to say. My bomb rep said he didn't know how many scarlets they manufactured and assured me mine was brand new and not battle tested. I wonder how many are out there in the world though.

 

[Vithya Sharma]

How many REDONE/MX produced?
i thnk 20K plus?
Someone to be the first #00001?

 

[Robert Ruffo New]

There are very few Red Cameras in total, of any model, many fewer than you think.

Montreal is a major production center, maybe five or six cities in the whole world shoot as much as we do or more, by any counts (shooting days, number of staff involved, total budgets).

I count four owner-ops of anything Red, maybe 25 Red cameras of any model in all, less than 15 Epics in the entire city. This doesn't count say a rich surgeon who uses the Epic to film his kids, because I would have no way of knowing about him, but I doubt there are that many of those.

My math may be a bit off for Montreal, but it's pretty close. Now multiply by 10 (to allow for all the other major centers, some of which are bigger). You get 150 Epics. Of course, there are cameras in secondary markets, but how many really? I know a guy in a Southern State, and he owns the only two Red cameras in the whole state.

We're talking hundreds of units, maybe a few thousand in all. Don't believe me? There is much evidence. Call one of the most popular Red accessories makers (Reduser bot won't let me state the name). When you call you get the guy who invents the products and makes them himself partly by hand to answer the phone. How big a market could that be? It's like Steadicam. There are fewer out there than you think. The Pilot was one of their most popular models ever, and it sold less than 1500 units (I was told by a quiet reliable source that they only made 1500, and still have inventory from that). Two guys make all Steadicams (not the weird i-phone things, but the real Steadicams) in a single workshop, part-time.

All this to say, when producers tell you they know "3 other guys with Epics willing to rent for cheaper" - in most markets they're lying.

 

[Elliott S Frank]

There are very few Red Cameras in total, of any model, many fewer than you think.

I'll beg to disagree.

(Let me start by saying this entirely my own analysis: Jim Jannard is a)brilliant, and b)extremely private. Since RED Digital Cinema is privately held, both Jim and the company have NO obligation to release ANY numbers and/or correct any of my assumptions.)

Let's start by using some numbers from LinkedIn. As of tonight, LinkedIn shows "201-500 employees" for RED Digital Cinema, with 270 having profiles on LinkedIn. If RED is like most companies, not everyone on the payroll has a social media profile. But let's just say that there are (for the sake of the argument) 300 employees. If we assume that the employees make, on average, $40,000/year (i.e., $20/hr), then that's a $12 million/year payroll. Based on typical manufacturing operation numbers, they need to be selling ~$100 million/year worth of product(s) to support that headcount. At ~$20,000 a unit, that's 5,000 units/year. Given that RED has been delivering Epics and Scarlets for two years, that's 10,000+ cameras in the wild.

Some of the serial number tracking done on RED ONEs suggest that between 5,000 to 10,000 RED ONE cameras were assembled by a contract manufacturer.

Both of these numbers suggest that RED Digital Cinema is a company that is delivering 3500 to 5000 units a year, since 2008. That's 15,000 to 20,000 cameras. World-wide. Not just in Toronto.

That's not a lot of cameras compared to the totals from a Sony (everything from point-and-shoots to [overpriced] D-Cinema cameras), or a Canon (ditto), but it's enough units in one particular market niche to impact that market.

And the number of freelance owner/operators doing day hire may not be indicative of the number of cameras in that area. In 2010, Santa Cruz, California (a city of 40,000 people) had two production companies, both doing primarily industrials and the occasional commercial, that were shooting on RED. If you wanted to do day hire, they weren't interested.

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

Even right when the Scarlets were first shipping, the serial numbers were all over the map. If they stockpiled a number of them in a warehouse (or storeroom) and just never depleted down the supply, I could see a "low" serial number like this one being tucked in the back in a corner, and never getting cycled out.

 

[Grzegorz Gill]

Wow, thanks for all the information guys!