Björn Benckert
Well-known member
I'm anticipating Dragon to be a sensor and hardware upgrade. It will be interesting to see how it scales on the Epic and Scarlet.
Personally I'd love a FF35 (width primarily) sensor in there. I think 3:2 is a just a sexy format for IMAX and several other common motion picture crop factors. However, I can see many reasons towards staying at 2:1-ish. At around 36mm wide we could see a max resolution landing between 6K-9K. At the high end 9k is close to the original "game plan" for a FF35 sensor. However, handling 9k material is going to be interesting with media costs being what they are. I would expect to Red to update Redmag SSD prices this year to stay a bit more competitive with what's coming on the horizon, but that's up to them. If there will be a higher capture resolution, expect Redmags of 512GB and 1TB to exist very quickly.
I think a 6k sensor would yield better noise performance rather than 9k. I don't think it will be exactly 6k if that's the case. Something like 6.6k will likely be the target. If we are targeting a 4k finish, this makes a lot of sense.
6k-9k FF35 would be great for still shooters for sure. Dynamic range increase would also be great. I'm pretty damn impressed with DR from Epic and Scarlet already and we have HDRx in there for insane situations right this second. Built in ND would be great, but not a deal breaker for me. Having the DR in camera to shoot ISO 50-6400 would be killer though.
Whatever increase in maximum resolution, I'd like to see both cameras capable of capturing motion "at speed" at the max available resolution. Meaning 24fps, 30fps, or *wishful thinking* - 48fps.
For example:
Epic Dragon = 6.6k 120-160fps max
Scarlet Dragon = 6.6k 30-48fps max
That would put Red well ahead of what's coming in the next 2 years. Hope we land close to that.
I do not find media expansive. We where working in 4k 16 bit uncompressed back in 2001 and then we even had to shoot and process film before we could digitize it into our 3 huge raids of 2 tb that we bought on 3 years leasing... then the cost of capture today seam quite easy to overcome. now it's 10 yeas later so I think it should not be any problem to get on the leasing contract again