RED future...

[ChrisLyon]

I like the sound of that.

 

[Rudi Herbert]

For all his wisdom and honesty, Jim should know better...

...than to ask people "what they want" and thus this interminable list of perfectly valid options, other really unneccessary ones (yes, that means 8K) and yet others that are not needed by everybody on an everyday basis but can be enabled at will with a little ingenuity. As a basic package, there's NOTHING abosuletely wrong with RED, and as such, the RED team needs to concentrate on improving the current camera before jumping into a next generation device. Now, from my perspective, the one area where this camera (or any other but this one in particular) CANNOT afford to perform below its aboslute best is in image quality. Plain and simple.
All sensors are not equal, granted, even when their resolution is the same, but if the Mysterium is half as good as it needed to be to convince a clever and shrewd entrepeneur who also happens to be an expert photographer to launch such an ambitious venture around it, then the team's main focus should be to concentrate on maximizing the image quality out of the camera, so as to eliminate all the issues with excessive noise and clipping that have plagued so much footage lately, not all of which has been shot by inexperienced cinematographers. Do whatever it takes, increase the data rate/decrease the REDCODE compression to whatever it has to be, 10:1, 7:1, 5:1, 3:1, whatever, enable to fully RAW option for those who truly need the utmost quality, cover the sensor with one of those "magic crystals" that enhance the RGB absorption and decrease noise, whatever, however. But turn the Mysterium into the Absolutium as soon as possible, because everything else can wait.

 

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

Also, I thought the ability to attach a USB Keyboard (or wireless USB keyboard) would be a great way to alternatively control the joystick and make clip naming / management easier.

Also along those lines... (but requiring more development): an application that runs on a MacBook Pro or PC Laptop that links you into your Camera to see the Media and manage the clips on the card/drives remotely. You could then simply attach a USB WiFi network adapter onto the RED and log into it.

Actually you could control the entire camera this way, I think? And every option.

 

[Elizabeth]

Some are already done.
Some are almost done
Some are in development
Some are on our list
Some are too expensive to do and stay at $17,500
A few will not be done.

Jim

Hmmmm.

I see this thread of Jim's as his fly-fishing expedition into the RED River of ideas. Throw out a few tempting lures and see what comes up.

It is an excellent way of finding out what issues the RED TEAM might have missed that may still be able to be implemented before the cameras start to roll, casting out for new ideas for future development, and soothing impatient waters; no harm with any of this.

IMO, it is a creative, interesting thread that can serve as a diversion for some and an education for others, but definitely very constructive.

I am sure Jim and his team know what their priorities are and are focused on the goal ...
The best image possible with the most efficient workflow at the most affordable price point.

I have no doubt that they will achieve it SOONER than later.

 

[mikeburton]

LUT's

LUT's

Client Monitoring is a huge issue! I have spoken with many commercial Producers who are frightened by the fact that they won't be able to have an absolute "what you see is what you get" like they have now in HD cause of shooting RAW.
Clients have become spoiled by HD and are used to seeing their live shots big and beautiful in its "almost" final form on set!

Solution = It would be nice to be able to generate a LUT in REDCINE, SAVE that LUT, and be able to transfer that LUT into the camera for on set LiVE client and Production monitoring.
After you shoot and open up the R3d files with the LUT attached to the file in REDCINE, all of the original META DATA is still there and you are able to manipulate any other way you like with all the original LATITUDE. In camera you could toggle back and forth between RAW and the LUT just like you can in REDCINE.
Basically, the LUT's would be a nice feature to have for monitoring purposes for DP's, Directors, Producers, and especially CLIENTS! Maybe not as important as other issues at the moment but i know quite a few people would appreciate it.
This is not saying you couldn't have REDCINE on set, but its easier to be able to immediately show them than to tell them to wait 15-30 minutes.

 

[Greg M]

Client Monitoring is a huge issue! I have spoken with many commercial Producers who are frightened by the fact that they won't be able to have an absolute "what you see is what you get" like they have now in HD cause of shooting RAW.

Sounds like its time you start educating your clients about what RAW actually means. Most "commercial producers" have spent years looking at crappy video taps, I cant imagine they could possible be "frightened", much less expect to see a perfect image in the field.

btw- Red has already told us LUT support is coming.

 

[mikeburton]

Sounds like its time you start educating your clients about what RAW actually means. Most "commercial producers" have spent years looking at crappy video taps, I cant imagine they could possible be "frightened", much less expect to see a perfect image in the field.

btw- Red has already told us LUT support is coming.

Yes, you are absolutely right regarding educating the clients, however, that still doesn't diminish the needs of the client. Like I stated, many clients in the advertising world are getting younger and younger and have been spoiled in the last 5 years or so by HD Monitoring through a Live Camera feed. The LUT's will help ease the already over nerved Producers and Clients on Set. Good to know it is a feature in the works!

 

[LEON]

We have things in the works that will scare you they are so cool. Stuff so good that I can't sleep anymore. But we are also mindful that we need to solve issues now and take care of our customers so we are in business next week.

Keep telling us what you need. We know what works... tell us what doesn't. We are learning about this camera business everyday. We really want to earn your support.

If it wasn't for these darn bugs....

Jim

Dear Rob, Jim, Graeme, Stuart,

Thank you in advance for the camera and we know that it is not
enough to create films.
We need to manipulate the ORIGINAL RED files created by the Red camera
with the ease of DV editing in FCP.
Later, we will we change color, crop, adjust, filter, change formats for distribution, sales, printing.
BUT FIRST we need A SIMPLE WAY to edit those files.

Why should we first transfer to some lower quality or heavier medium ?
The original has full qualities and is not heavy, what prohibits editing ?

 

[Brook Willard]

We need to manipulate the files created by the Red camera
with the ease of DV editing in FCP.

You can drop the QuickTime files the camera makes directly into FCP... to edit with the ease of DV editing in FCP.

 

[LEON]

You can drop the QuickTime files the camera makes directly into FCP... to edit with the ease of DV editing in FCP.

The quicktime files but not the ORGINAL RED files ! or am I really dumb ?

 

[Brent J. Craig]

Sounds like its time you start educating your clients about what RAW actually means.

You can educate them all you want, but you still end up lighting to make the video tap look good. I can't even begin to say how many shots I have seen relit because the video tap looked dark or blown out.

In the end, the clients are going to remember the DP that gave them amazing looking shots live on the day and didn't need to 'fix it in post' like some others. Most of them don't have a clue whether your camera shoots RAW or cooked, but they know what looks good on the screen in front of them. Sending pretty pictures to the clients is hugely important!

 

[Jeff Tanner]

You can educate them all you want, but you still end up lighting to make the video tap look good. I can't even begin to say how many shots I have seen relit because the video tap looked dark or blown out.

In the end, the clients are going to remember the DP that gave them amazing looking shots live on the day and didn't need to 'fix it in post' like some others. Most of them don't have a clue whether your camera shoots RAW or cooked, but they know what looks good on the screen in front of them. Sending pretty pictures to the clients is hugely important!

Any professional DP who re-lights because of what the video tap looks like should never be allowed on a set again (and I'm speaking of shooting film when the tap is just a poor video image off the viewfinder. I'm certainly not including HD or any video format where a good, properly set up monitor is truly "what you see is what you get"). It doesn't matter if the client is screaming and jumping around threatening to fire everyone in sight. That is exactly when the Director/Producer/DP have a deep discussion with the client and explain what the video tap is for...FRAMING and judging ACTION, nothing else. I honestly can't imagine a professional cinematographer lighting to a video tap.

 

[Greg M]

You can educate them all you want, but you still end up lighting to make the video tap look good. I can't even begin to say how many shots I have seen relit because the video tap looked dark or blown out.

In the end, the clients are going to remember the DP that gave them amazing looking shots live on the day and didn't need to 'fix it in post' like some others. Most of them don't have a clue whether your camera shoots RAW or cooked, but they know what looks good on the screen in front of them. Sending pretty pictures to the clients is hugely important!

Sorry, but I totally disagree. I personally have never re-lit a scene so it looks good in the video tap, I cant imagine why you would ever do this...thats just foolish! My clients come back because they trust me, and not because the footage looked good on the shoot day....but because it looked great when the spot was delivered.

 

[R. Gonzales]

Its Really about the rental market isn't it?

Its Really about the rental market isn't it?

Add my vote for a Red Pro. The $17,500 camera seems to be a perfect fit with the indie and smaller budget market. They get a great camera with unheard of features that they can purchase outright for about the cost of one indie feature camera rental.

The higher-end professional rental market needs a bit more:
-Mil-spec electronics and components that take abuse, both environmental and physical.
-Professional, industry-standard connectors
-Redundancy in the places where things can go wrong, or very quick modular fixes that can be performed on set
-Mounting holes everywhere
-Ability to use existing infrastructure such as block batteries and normal BNC's
-and everything else Brook said in post 92!

The great thing is that as long as the two cameras continued to share a common platform, time and money that went into the development of the Pro would also benefit the users of the less expensive camera.

People have to remember that in the rental market, cameras that even partially compete with Red rent for $1500 per day, not including a $100,000 recorder.

Rental houses are already talking about strapping on kludgy breakout boxes and downconverters to the Red One. This will result in each place offering slightly different cameras with different features and connectors. You will never know what you are getting when you rent a 'Red'. It would be so much nicer to have a rentable camera direct from the source. People that need one will pay the price.

I am not sure I can agree with you totally. The way I read your post is that it's about killing the supply of Red cameras and increasing the demand. There is going to be about 200 Reds in T.O. by spring and the rental market is going to take a dive. So Make a Red Pro charge more money for it less people will buy it thus increasing the Rental demand. Most, if not all owners of the original Red may not be able to afford a second camera and it’s support system. And those who can will be able to rent a Red Pro for a premium because supply will be less.

Well that's just my take on the raise the price posts. After the development has stopped and Red feels its time to make a Red Pro with new functionalities and accessories, then they should be sold as an add on and Keep the Red as it is. After all the camera is suppose to be modular.


Method

 

[sander kamp]

The quicktime files but not the ORGINAL RED files ! or am I really dumb ?

Yes and no. The quicktime files allow you to work on a proxy of the original file (2k, 1k, 0.5k) but they do so by pointing to the original file and extracting the proxy from it in real time. That's why you need the original file in the same folder and can't move it. So the quicktime files are the same quality, bit-depth and everything as the original, but since you can't play back 4k in real time you are working in a lower resolution.

 

[Luis de la Cerda]

Pricing

Pricing

I'd like to share my humble perspective on the whole pricing madness that has erupted in this thread.

I'm an independant producer. I own several cameras and I also rent. For me, the magical ownership price point sweetspot has been 10,000 dollars until red showed up in my radar. When considering ownership of a camera, I have to think about the useful lifespan I can expect from a camera vs. revenue it will generate for me during that timeframe. We all want great quality, reliability, versatility and whatnot, but at the end of the day, we need to treat our businesses like businesses if we want to keep doing what we do. And that means compromises have to be made. Different clients with different budgets knock on our door and we do our best to try to accomodate their needs while delivering exceptional quality and still make a profit. An expensive camera doesn't justify itself for ownership unless the work volume during it's useful lifespan make economic sense to own it. I can see how rental outfits can justify the cost of more expensive cameras because they get to see lots more action than independently owned cameras do, but as nice as it is to own the camera you shoot with and know all it's ins and outs, sometimes you just have to limit yourself to renting.

When red announced it's price point, they changed a lot of things for a lot of us, because the quality we would be buying at that price point would significantly increase it's lifespan and thus justify the 30-40K total pricetag we would have to swallow initially. I think this is the reason so many have placed their orders so far. Ownership for a camera this good at this pricepoint just makes sense. If I can get 8-10 years out of a red one, it'll pay for itself while I get the benefit of ownership, meaning the flexibility to take it wherever I need to without paying the rental outfit extra, extending shooting schedules without incuring in rental fee penaltys, etc...

If the price was raised beyond a couple thousand, most of us woud choose to stick to our current solutions and just rent when the project at hand deemed it necessary. But ownership is where red company profits are derived from, not rentals. Of course, fewer cameras would also spread out the R&D costs over a much smaller number, increasing the price even more. Eventually, you'd end up with a much more expensive camera with similar characteristics to the 17.5K one as far as results go, giving the competition a better chance at eating into red's market share. Bad news all around. I think this is one of the reasons Apple has been so successfull lately. They have broadened markets that were thought to be specialized small niches by lowering the entry tickets to mass levels. Oh, and they've sold like a zillion ipods, but that's another story

In the end, this is all out of my hands. If Jim decides it makes sense to move the pricepoint beyond the reach of people like me, we'll adapt and find a way to continue doing what we do. I just hope it doesn't happen.

 

[jaadgy akanni]

For all his wisdom and honesty, Jim should know better...

...than to ask people "what they want" and thus this interminable list of perfectly valid options, other really unneccessary ones (yes, that means 8K) and yet others that are not needed by everybody on an everyday basis but can be enabled at will with a little ingenuity. As a basic package, there's NOTHING abosuletely wrong with RED, and as such, the RED team needs to concentrate on improving the current camera before jumping into a next generation device. Now, from my perspective, the one area where this camera (or any other but this one in particular) CANNOT afford to perform below its aboslute best is in image quality. Plain and simple.
All sensors are not equal, granted, even when their resolution is the same, but if the Mysterium is half as good as it needed to be to convince a clever and shrewd entrepeneur who also happens to be an expert photographer to launch such an ambitious venture around it, then the team's main focus should be to concentrate on maximizing the image quality out of the camera, so as to eliminate all the issues with excessive noise and clipping that have plagued so much footage lately, not all of which has been shot by inexperienced cinematographers. Do whatever it takes, increase the data rate/decrease the REDCODE compression to whatever it has to be, 10:1, 7:1, 5:1, 3:1, whatever, enable to fully RAW option for those who truly need the utmost quality, cover the sensor with one of those "magic crystals" that enhance the RGB absorption and decrease noise, whatever, however. But turn the Mysterium into the Absolutium as soon as possible, because everything else can wait.

I just wanted reiterate Rudi's points 'cause it's exactly how I feel. After what is proposed here is achieved, when all the really relevant kinks have been ironed out of the RED One, gimme my friggin' camera 'cause I've got a lot of shooting to do, for godssake!!!

 

[Finner]

Wow some of you have come up with the best idea ever. Red really should raise the price for the camera. I think being able to pay $75,000 to $100,000 per camera would be really nifty.

 

[ChrisLyon]

I wouldn't think the price would jump very much. Thinking about 2,000 orders of Red so far, tacking on 5 thousand dollars more on future orders (assuming 2000 more people purchase Red One) could add a million dollars for R&D while still staying at almost 1/4th the price of everyone else that even comes close to the Red. Hell, lets cut that in half- adding $2,500 (total price being an even $20,000) they'd be making $0.5 Million to add to production expenses. I seem to be the only one to be pushing this price jump, but it appears to be needed and, personally, if I'm forking out $40,000 for all the accessories and necessary recording media PLUS a computer/hard drive system to manage the files, I'm now looking at:

$40,000 for the Red+Accessories (not including a lens)
$4,000 for an average Raid HDD system
$4,000 on an Apple Mac Book Pro
$1,300 for Apple Final Cut Studio 2
$49,300 TOTAL (before tax)

What's $2,500 to me now?

Even without the Mac and Final Cut, most people don't have the hard drive space currently to store a lot of RAW data. Plus, if you have that system (Mac, Final Cut, HDD system) you can hire yourself out as a DIT.

I dunno. I'm just not seeing the big difference if a moderate price jump was made for future Red purchases.

 

[Rick Darge]

What's $2,500 to me now?

Taxes.