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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

RED One MX or Scarlet X?

Thank you all for your great answers.

Red One MX looks really really good. Body of the camera alone costs only around 6000 dollars. And that is really great for the camera that can do 4.5K RAW in 30 fps. But I want to shoot from hands and R1 is twice as heavy as Scarlet. And Scarlet is upgradeable. But you have to upgrade it if you want nice resolution with higher fps.

Ooooo. That is really hard decision. :-)

Can you tell me what fps and resolution Scarlet has when it's upgraded to Scarlet Epic?
It's absolutely the same as Epic or it's slightly different?

Thank you very much
 
This is a cool thread, gave me a lot of good info, considering I'm directing a short movie this summer, and want to shoot on Red cameras, but wasn't sure if Red MX would be actually cheaper than Scarlet to rent, plus I'll have one handheld sequence, and maybe some tiny rooms to shoot at night. Turns out the Scarlet is very cheap in terms of renting, something like 2000 bucks max for a complete package for one week + Zeiss CP2 5 lenses package, seems pretty reasonable. One thing I was confused about though, was that when I made the suggestion to the producer of shooting on Scarlet, he told me it cost them 18000 bucks worth of equipment alone on their latest short movie.

This is obviously a huge diff, considering that I was thinking about 6000 bucks max of equipment: Scarlet, lenses, then lighting, dollies, steadicams, etc.

Are there like hidden costs with shooting on Scarlet?
 
no hidden costs, not sure where he got that number from. They must of needed a rocket or colorist would be my guess? Honestly thats a lot of costs they failed to grasp then...

personally i bought a scarlet over red one. I found it hard to get gigs on an entry level camera, and I like high speed stuff so for me the upgrade to Epic was a good idea. it makes it easier to get to dragon if you can do it only 10k at a time i think
 
Not sure where he got those numbers from at all. I'm renting a full kit of 2 RED MXs with Zeiss Superspeeds, filters, and support gear for $7500 for a 1 month shoot. Scarlet prices I was looking at were more in the range of $9500 for the same package. Honestly, the biggest concern for me as a DP with getting "great rates" on Scarlets from places that aren't official rental houses is the lack of capable support, the terrible accessories that come with the camera, and the necessity to use subpar glass because few people buy a Scarlet and invest in lenses worth 2-3 times the cost of their camera.
 
I'm thinking it might be that, for the data, hard drives are pretty cheap to get, so I don't think that's a problem there (but then again, I'm trying to inform myself as much as possible on the Scarlet), so maybe colorist, but even then, it's not that much. For example, the DP is gonna get paid 200 bucks a day, so I doubt a colorist, or the post prod guys would be getting more than that. I have a lot of daylight action (not literal action ^^), and quite a few scenes at night in a house or in an amusement park, I'm thinking of going the practical way, which I read is what Deakins is doing a lot lately, especially on Prisoners, which is using practical lamps, and then building from that.

Anyway, it's either this or BMPC 4K, and right now, although BMPC just came out, I'm not convinced at all with the look of the BMPC, and think Red cameras have this unique quality when used & lit properly, it's not a look I really see on other cameras, and my ambition is to make my movie look as cinematic & professional looking as possible, I can't stand a movie that looks cheap.
 
Karel

When you upgrade a Scarlet to Epic you actually send in the Scarlet and you get back a brand new Epic X. There's no difference. It's a real Epix X the same as if you bought a new one from RED.

Hope that helps
 
Thanks a lot Troy. That helped a lot.
So now I am going for Scarlet. I guess picture quality will be awesome and its upgradeable to Epic which is to me is my dream camera. I guess Scarlet will be very good start point to RED's world. :-)

I wasn't sure if tech specs of Scarlet Epic will be the same as Epic. Because when you se on official website there is Scarlet Dragon upgrade and the specs are not the same as the real Red Dragon. So thanks a lot for help. :-)
 
I think that that is a wise choice. The upgrade path basically creates a floor to what the camera can depreciate to. Plus the DSMC system was a huge improvement IMO.
 
As usual I agree with Gunleik.

Red One MX is a super high quality camera that makes no compromises. You can do serious work with it - and post lattitude is immense. You can buy cheap huge drives and shoot for many hours without offloading - something that has come in very handy for use when we were shooting doco work with no DIT ream at hand (and no electricity at hand…) It has zero fan/heat issues. IR is easy to fully eliminate with just one Rossco Tru-color that costs almost nothing.

Red One MX is good enough for huge Hollywood features - but no cheapie 8 bit cam was ever used that way (except once, for the truly awful "Act of Valor" film Hulbert shot - my guess is Canon gave them $$ to do this)

People rig up Reds with ridiculous huge 19mm rails and other macho stuff but you really don't need any of that. Our rig is 12 pounds, running - which is just enough weight to hand hold without too much shake and to mount on a Steadicam.

You can really grade MX footage as though it were film.

Most importantly you can get results as good as those from any other camera - only benefit of things like Dragon is that they require a bit less work to get there.

SOmething like a BM camera, with no OLPF - that always looks compromised, no matter how good you are. And 8 bit - you can;t grade no matter how good you are, at least nothing that changes the image much - and some effects are only possible in post.

You could have a serious career, today, shooting only One MX.

All thsi to say, we kept our One, and continue to use it despite also owning many other high end cams.
 
We have both cameras. We purchased our first Red-One from Red new, and paid over $50,000.oo for the complete package. They are much more affordable now used. But, aside from that, we have never regretted purchasing the camera, and even got a second one. We also bought a used Scarlet.

In my opinion, the ONLY thing that the Scarlet has over the Red-One is size/weight. That's it. I prefer the Red-One over the Scarlet whenever possible. It is more straight forward, has more options in the menus, more connections on the camera body, and is actually easier to use. It is an excellent "studio" camera, but for the field, the Scarlet is our choice. The R1 is just too friggin' heavy, especially if it's holding a large lens.

That said, I would not allow the fact that the R1 can shoot at faster speeds be a determining factor for you. Mainly, because those faster speeds can only be attained by dropping the quality from 4K HD to 2K if you want to shoot at 120fps. When this high speed footage is edited in, back to back, with the 4K HD image, it looks like crap. As a result, we have decided not to shoot anything but 30fps or 24fps with our R1s. 120fps is just not fast enough anyway to justify the loss of quality. Yes, if you want to do that, you will have to buy or rent an EPIC, which we, personally, do not have the money for.

We love our Red-Ones, period. And, we use Red Drives, not CF Cards or SSD Cards, and it works just fine. If the camera is on a tripod, what's the big deal?

Good luck.

George

.
 
Thanks very much, George, for your answer. I wonder how much worse 2K 120fps footage will be in 4K completed footage? Can anyone post some 4K footage with few seconds 120fps 2K in it for download? It would be really helpful for me. :smilewinkgrin:
 
Weight, size, haggard media (unless you get SSD), boot time, and EOL product are the huge operational hinderances with the R1 that all have associated problems/expenses. If your background is DSLRs or smaller large chip cameras, you'll be shooting yourself in the foot going to an R1... Your on set procedures will grind to a halt and you'll actually need an AC for even the simplest of gigs. Plus a new (expensive) tripod that holds 30lbs+. CF cards hold only ~8mins of footage and the RED drives drop frames like crazy (especially now that they're old) unless on a tripod...

Scarlet's I/O is comparatively weak (even compared to mini-XLRs the 3.5mm jacks are a joke, you can't power two RED displays without a $1250 add-on or $4000 add-on)... And without support gear it's very hard to hold/use the camera (unless you go with a SideHandle, as that gives you something to grab and control the camera with.) But other than that, it's a very quick/efficient system.

120fps at 2k sounds nice, but you'll be over it in a week and I'd argue that speed and ease of use is far more important on a day-to-day basis. Once you sit through your first 90 second boot up on set, or realize just how often you're ejecting and/or waiting for a media exchange, you'll really question your decision going with the R1. People put up with its "nuances" because it was the only 4k/raw game in town... But now, not so much.
 
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Mike P. said:
Weight, size, haggard media (unless you get SSD), boot time, and EOL product are the huge operational hinderances with the R1 that all have associated problems/expenses. If your background is DSLRs or smaller large chip cameras, you'll be shooting yourself in the foot going to an R1... Your workflow will grind to a halt and you'll actually need an AC for even the simplest of gigs. Plus a new (expensive) tripod that holds 30lbs+. CF cards hold only ~8mins of footage and the RED drives drop frames like crazy (especially now that they're old)...

Scarlet's I/O is comparatively weak (even compared to mini-XLRs the 3.5mm jacks are a joke, you can't power two RED displays without a $1250 add-on or $4000 add-on)... And without support gear it's very hard to hold/use the camera (unless you go with a SideHandle, as that at least gives you something to grab and control the camera with.) But other than that, it's a very quick/efficient system.

120fps at 2k sounds nice, but you'll be over it in a week and I'd argue that speed and ease of use is far more important on a day-to-day basis. Once you sit through your first 90 second boot up on set, or realize just how often you're checking the gate and/or waiting for a media change, you'll really question your decision going with the R1. People put up with its "nuances" because it was the only 4k/raw game in town... But now, not so much.
Click to expand...

Most fo your post is FUD. Who checks the gate on a digital camera? Red Drives hold many hours of footage. Workflow is as easy as DSLR - drag and drop into timeline of anything except Avid - what could be easier than that? Works fine even on a 2008 8 core Mac, no Rocket card.

Only clearly better cam is Epic. Alexa is better color, but less resolution. Scarlet is smaller, but I would not say better, and has limitations that Red One MX does not.
 
Scar all the way!!!! Started off with that now waiting on my Upgrade for the Dragon :)
 
Mike P. said:
checking the gate.
Click to expand...


Why would you check the gate, and especially why would you check it more on R1 than on Scarlet?

And btw, I have two Red Drives, both I bought second hand, and neither one has ever dropped a frame. I've done tripod stuff, dolly moves, and sometimes even handheld.
 
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Semantics; I merely meant swapping cards. And I meant on set workflow, not post.

It's FUD? Really? How fast do your R1s boot-up, Rob? And how many minutes of footage can you hold on CF cards (even at RC28)? How many RED drives do you have that have never, ever, dropped a single frame? Pffffttt...FUD? Please. I get it, you own a few R1s and you want to continue to rent them, but don't tell me that the known problems/issues associated with the camera don't affect yours. How many times have you told a renter "to reboot the camera" if the call with a problem?

It still makes pretty pictures, but the R1 is cumbersome, it's as simple as that. Users (owners especially) have gotten used to it and were forced to know it's ins and outs, but for someone just jumping in, it'd be a step backwards for an EOL device (unless you get a really wicked deal.)
 
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Mike P. said:
Semantics; I merely meant swapping cards. And I meant on set workflow, not post.

It's FUD? Really? How fast do your R1s boot-up, Rob? And how many minutes of footage can you hold on CF cards (even at RC28)? How many RED drives do you have that have never, ever, dropped a single frame? Pffffttt...FUD? Please. I get it, you own a few R1s and you want to continue to rent them, but don't tell me that the known problems/issues associated with the camera don't affect yours. How many times have you told a renter "to reboot the camera" if the call with a problem?

It still makes pretty pictures, but the R1 is cumbersome, it's as simple as that. Users (owners especially) have gotten used to it and were forced to know it's ins and outs, but for someone just jumping in, it'd be a step backwards for an EOL device (unless you get a really wicked deal.)
Click to expand...

Why would you shut down the camera to swap cards - and how could two entirely different things be "semantics". It takes maybe one second to swap cards, CF or SSD. It really sounds like you just don't know what you are talking about.

In the entire time we have owned our R1MX it has seen maybe 150 days of production. In that time it has lost 3 frames on 2 clips. We use Red Drives (almost never CF cards).

Yes it takes 90 seconds to boot. Big deal. It does through 5 battery changes a day, which means a total of 7.5 minutes lost to boot time in a day. If you are turning your camera off and on every two minutes then that is not very smart and easy to avoid doing.

Camera has crashed for no known reason maybe 4 times in total - a much better track record than our Alexa. Reboot took 90 seconds. So the cost was a total of 6 minutes of lost set time, over many years of use. Wow. Such big problems!

We never rent unsupervised, so maybe mistakes due to incompetence are thus avoided.

Red still repairs and supports Red Ones.

"Known" problems come from the early days, pre-MX, and I have never personally seen any of these so-called known problems.

R1 is not cumbersome. It just works, and it's a good weight for any use, including Steadicam, unless you load it with useless macho gunk like tons of 19mm rails, and its' cheap to get a V-Mount beltclip for the battery. Epic is a bit too light. Not enough inertia. R1 is lighter and same shape as Alexa. Woudl you call the Alexa cumbersome?

Like I said, FUD. You sound like you have never actually shot with a Red one MX since the early days in 2007, maybe never.

When you do be sure to check the gate (lol)
 
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Just to be clear, you're agreeing that it does take 90 seconds to boot, that CF cards hold barely any footage, that the drives can (and do) drop frames, and that it's heavier than a DSMC camera? Okay, good. We should end the discussion there, because I don't see how any of those facts are FUD (merely stating how it is).

It's because I recently used R1MXs (after ~two years on DSMC) that it's so fresh in my mind how cumbersome the platform is by comparison. It may sound like I haven't used the MX a while, but you sound like you are wearing rose-coloured glasses.
 
Mike P. said:
Just to be clear, you're agreeing that it does take 90 seconds to boot, that CF cards hold barely any footage, that the drives can (and do) drop frames, and that it's heavier than a DSMC camera? Okay, good. We should end the discussion there, because I don't see how any of those facts are FUD (merely stating how it is).

It's because I recently used R1MXs (after ~two years on DSMC) that it's so fresh in my mind how cumbersome the platform is by comparison. It may sound like I haven't used the MX a while, but you sound like you are wearing rose-coloured glasses.
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The drives dropped 3 frames in 4 years and well over 100 days of shooting including on vehicles and at very loud live shows If you think that's unreliable...

I don't ever wear rose colored glasses . I've been bluntly critical of Red many times. I've been banned from this forum for that reason (actually, my entire account deleted).

But, you know, credit where credit is due. Red One Mx is a solid cam with truly excellent image quality. In some ways I prefer it to Epic (like for long interviews)

Yes CF cards hold only 8 minutes of footage each, but why would anyone use them when the hard drives are extremely reliable and inexpensive?

As for 90 second boot, fine, but black shade is MUCH faster and has to be done WAY less frequently. Black shade on Scarlet takes 15 minutes. One Red one it takes about 5 minutes

There are no heat or fan noise issues with One MX, Scarlet does have those issues, even more than Epic in my direct experience.

Price being equal I would personally take an One MX over a Scarlet.
 
As with a lot of things in life, there is no perfect answer here as there are pros and cons to both systems. Many of those pros and cons have been detailed throughout this thread, so no need to rehash them, but suffice it to say that there are legitimate reasons for choosing either camera based on one's needs for their style of shooting or for a particular project. If one is contemplating a purchase of either of these two cameras, I would recommend having a serious look at support/warranty side of things and comparing that so you know what to expect. But otherwise, test each camera in the context of what you need to shoot and see which one achieves your goals.

Also, keep in mind that everyone's experiences with a particular camera are not going to be the same. I like to say that Red cameras, and maybe cameras in general have personalities. No two are exactly alike. My Red One has been reliable for the 7 years I have owned it. Some of the issues others experienced I did not. Doesn't mean they were wrong, just means my camera didn't show those same symptoms or I wasn't using it exactly the same way they were. Like Rob, I haven't had a lot of issues with dropped frames on Red drives but mine have been in ET ISO mounts since the day those were available so that might explain the stability. SSD has been virtually flawless on the R1. I have the option of going Red drive for long interviews, SSD for everything else. Black shading is quick. The R1 has all the built in I/O I usually need. No modules needed (other than tiny ET breakout box). It gets very quiet during interviews. Great variety of recording resolution/quality. Epic/Scarlet are better in many ways, in particular Epic. But Red One still does a great job.

For run and gun where I wanted the camera to virtually disappear and get rid of a lot of weight and bulk I would not choose either Red One or Scarlet. I would choose a GH2/3/4, BMPCC, 5D (maybe) or maybe even a small video camera built for run and gun type of shooting.
 
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