Scarlet Upgrade...hmmm...not sure.

[Robert Ruffo New]

More data equals requirements for more processing and storage.

A red rocket card is 3-5K ish depending on new/used. Its pretty old tech.
The new red rocket x card, to my knowledge, has a estimated price release of about 6-7K

Adding a new 5K Dragon sensor to Scarlet will increase the media consumption considerably. Therefore many, including me, would need new, larger cards for typical on set use. RED mags are SSD's, they are proprietary, they only fit in a RED camera and they are considerably more expensive than even the fastest SSD's one can buy in similar size ranges.

Not trying to make anything up. It's all very straightforward information. They have every right to charge what they need to charge for such things.

As for editing. There are a ton of reasons to have a 4K file in a timeline. Repo, and downsampling are two good ones. I personally don't consider editing just cutting these days. The footage gets graded, composited, repo'd, tracked, etc in all manner of programs...all of which benefit from a larger initial file size. Likewise, many folks would rather start with a 4K master in the color suite before downsampling. Finally, if RED's ambitions are to be accepted whole-heartedly, 4K viewing and distribution are right around the corner. Right or wrong, they're the advocates and they're designing they're workflows at 5 and 6K size starting points.

Uh... Premiere will DISPLAY MOVING Video at 1/4 res for real time - but the rest stays full res, and so your arguments make no sense. You can do any repo and the rendered output is full res at the end.

 

[Robert Ruffo New]

Absolutely.Fair enough.

I guess my point was, more or less, do I need to upgrade a camera that requires a card that costs half as much as the camera in order to truly maximize its potential. For 5K I could probably build a pretty nice computer that would accelerate all my stuff, not just r3ds. Feasibly, I could also get a BMC 4K camera as well...if I was so inclined...which I certainly am not. Just worth mentioning.

I totally get the media data rate argument. Very possible and good to know. Red Mags are pricey...really pricey...and I don't think its wrong wishing that they weren't so much.

The problem is the media is part of what it costs to own a kit, part of the investment we all made. If it goes down fast in price (as the Epic already did) it means the rental value of Epic packages will also go down, even lower. That said I think soon many people will begin to conclude that buying cameras is no longer worth it - better t rent unless you shoot every day - the value just goes down too fast.