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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 :)

The Big Mistake...

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I like to use the pampers analogy.

"Shooting tape formats is a way of saying, this is disposable, it's pampers, use it and throw it away. This might be where the "tape is cheap" mentality comes from. Keep saying it and it just becomes true.

Film and now RED carries a different approach and a way of thinking. We filmmakers care about this. We are not going to throw these images away because we know what is being captured in 4K and now 5K is a way of documenting and preserving and we want to look to these images in the future."

I have worked on a few historical projects in my time. The best quality footage was from film. It lasted the longest and the images held up over time. RED is the only digital system I have seen that can echo this and it's the combination of the CAMERA and REDCODE that allows for this.

Every frame I have recorded to REDCODE is the furthest thing from a mistake I can imagine. It's like I've been capturing 35mm film. That feels pretty good.


David
 
Get some shut eye Jim...we'll hold down the fort for a few hours :)
 
Perhaps before you get too close, you could spill the beans on Epic S & Scarlet Fixed? Some of us are so excited to know when we might get in on the action..........!
 
Matthew Longbottom said:
Perhaps before you get too close, you could spill the beans on Epic S & Scarlet Fixed? Some of us are so excited to know when we might get in on the action..........!
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They are both pretty cool... :-)

Jim
 
Good night...

Jim
 
go to bed Jim, REST is what you should do, then when rested.....production....EPIC production....
 
Sorry for the long post.

Well, I wasted tens of thousands of dollars shooting a low budget feature over ten years ago. I'm an aggressive early adopter (which is sometimes french for "stupid"). I could see the change coming on the horizon-- in fact I always see the change coming so far in advance it bites me in the ass sometimes. I wasted the money on the front end of the digital wave, when accessible digital acquisition was little more than SD.

So, with me, you are preaching to the choir and always have been, Jim. To anyone who thinks shooting 1080 will give them a future, I always tell them my story. My story is a perfect microcosm of where we all find ourselves now. I've been down this road before, and "professionals" were the first in line to advise me to go for it. So, if you've noticed some less than deferential attitudes coming from me regarding "professionals" -- its because I've been burned by their advice. But I don't lay the blame at their door. Ultimately I'm responsible.

But, I hear that same advice echoing through these threads even today. That 1080 is "good enough". I vowed that if I ever got the chance to shoot anything ever again, it will be with the highest resolution acquisition device possible. And folks, the "HD" piped into our homes hardly qualifies as "high definition".

Trust me, we will be drowning in 4K displays and exhibition before we even realize we are wet. I thought I knew a thing or two about digital imaging-- I'd been working in it for ten years before I shot my "film". And I took the advice of many working pros who said that HD was at least five years away and the then new Sony DVCAM system will be more than adequate for your feature. Of course we all know now how that story ends.

Over the last twelve years I've been to "school". I made damn sure nobody calling themselves a professional could ever piss on my leg and tell me it was rain. I devoured every bit of technical information I could get my hands on. I drained the minds of every engineer I ever worked with. I asked more questions, read more articles, and learned about the tools of my trade and my art. I became an insufferable critic of Sony, Panasonic, Kodak and Polaroid, et. al.

In the case of Kodak and Polaroid, I went to Rochester and met with the staff of the Advanced Imaging Division. I met with Polaroid's senior development engineers. If you made digital acquisition devices in the 1990's, I knew about you and if I felt you had something to offer me, I met with you. My clients then were very serious and well-funded, so I had some great toys to play with.

When I couldn't figure out why they weren't making the camera I wanted, I started delving into their financials, their business models, their development programs. Where is the digital Panavision? When will the digital Arri get here? For years and years and years I waited. The more I learned, the more pissed off I would get. I was pissed off at the Alexa specs. If you want to play in this game, you gotta bring the resolution and raise the bar.

Then I hear a company in Orange County is going to build this new camera. Its everything I've been waiting for. I'd given up hope. I was afraid this company would build their camera and then immediately go under or get bought out by some idiot from a Fortune 500 conglomerate and the tech would die dry rotting in a vault somewhere. That's why I bought. To protect my future. I put cash down on a Red before I knew anything about Jim or Jarred or Ted or Graeme or the rest of the team.

So if you are faced with the task of picking the camera for your production and you opt for a 1080 camera - don't say I didn't warn you. I laughed my ass off a few months ago when some guy said he was going to shoot a feature on a DSLR. Yes, they're great cameras. Yes, they're more than adequate for shooting weddings and bar-mitzvahs, but you want to bet tens of thousands of dollars on that format for a feature when for a little more money you can shoot a Red? Puh-leeze!

People are beginning to cut the cord on the cable TV and the Satellite services and opting to get their in-home entertainment from the web. When this happened in the 1950's it was called television and it nearly killed the movie theaters until vista vision and the wide screen spectacle saved their bacon.

So if Time-Warner cable, Dish, and DirecTV, wants to strip mine my wallet again, they gotta bring me something I can't get from the internet. Sports programming in 4K is a Saudi oil field and Fort Knox all rolled into one. Nascar in 4K? This is coming sooner than you can imagine.

Thanks for providing me with an opportunity to vent, Jim. I'd forgotten how pissed off I've been over the years waiting for the Epic. Feels good knowing I'll be shooting with it in just a few months. It feels better knowing that whatever I shoot with it won't become extinct in less than a decade. Thanks for not compromising.
 
Jim Retar said:
I hope i'm wrong, I live and breath football (soccer) and 4K 3D games would be amazing.
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I hope that RED makes my, Live 4K 3D Multi-View-Auto-Stereoscopic, dreams come true. :001_tt1:
 
I shot an extensive documentary of Las Vegas at the 100th Anniversary back in 2005. The 500 hours of HD footage we shot will certainly be valuable one day but not nearly as valuable as it would be if it had been shot in 4K. Next time our team goes to Vegas to shoot more, we hope to shoot it in 4K and stream live web resolution at the same time. This wasn't really possible back in 2005 so I don't have any regrets but I certainly agree with what Jim is saying here.

www.i4vegas.tv

-michael zaletel
 
There's more than enough of us online to fuel endless speculation!

It doesn't help when Jarred or Jim pop in and offer a little tantalizing tidbit...I'm not an addict, but these guys are like dealers...Addictive self checks Red.com/store in case there's anything new to buy!

OK, I guess admitting you have an addiction is the first step.
 
Jeremy Torrie said:
Jim I'm sure you've thought long and hard about making Red Ray the next Blu Ray -i.e. the worldwide standard at a certain 4K resolution...could licensing the R3D codec to mass manufacturers be in the cards?
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Of course, RED RAY/RED 4K is more likley to be delivered over the internet rather than on physical media.

And the great thing is that (almost certianly) any hardware capable of playing RED 4K files would be able to downscale to 1080p. So people can use their existing TVs for now and then when they upgrade, suddenly everything can play back full 4K.
 
Jesper Sichlau said:
Then why does your firm release a 3K camera...
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Jannard said:
Because it is as close as you are going to get to 4K for half of $10K.

Jim
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3k is probably close to the optimum balance between resolution and other aspects of performance for a 2/3" format camera. Should handily exceed the performance of 16mm film and it is certainly far beyond 1080p as an acquisition format. Definitely a lot of bang for the buck.
Thanks for sticking with it.

What about a possible future QuadHD 3840 x2160 true super 16mm format Scarlet? That could be made on the same 3.3 micron fab as the 2/3".
 
I think before the end of next year, we'll see an iPad with the retina display, and then a year after that, full-size monitors and TVs with the same pixel technology. We're really pretty close. I think sports will be the first industry to adopt 4k. They led the HD revolution, at least from a consumer's standpoint. People got HD sets so they could watch the game in high resolution, more than any other reason.

Of course, that won't stop studios from up-rezzing 2k content and re-releasing it as "digitally remastered" 4k...
 
Can't say I agree with Jim on this. 1080p wasn't really a mistake, just a stepping stone. For most people, HD has been good enough for the last 5 or 6 years, which is fine. I know it's time to move on, but the real winner in the home is going to be 4K 3D TV's, which covers all bases.
 
Jannard said:
I had a great 6 days in Fiji with my wife. When I returned, I went to the Spider-man shoot and I fell over dead with what I saw. Unbelievable images and a crew that was so happy with what was going on. It is hard to describe the feeling that I have... EPIC is delivering images that beat anything I could have imagined. Quite a rush of adrenaline that has kept me awake since...

Jim
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Thats a great feeling. People can accomplish amazing things when they feel that way. I get the feeling you have had that rush for several years now.
 
It'll happen. Just not tomorrow. Or the day after. I know we're a bit 'slow' here in The Netherlands, but a substantial mount of TV is aired in PAL. Worse even: some new content is still created in SD...

Shooting @4k is a no-brainer with Red. But our post-path is mostly 2k. For FX purposes I'll work on the 4k sources but finishing is 2k. 4k finishing is extremely rare right now. Try playing back and grading uncompressed 4k. Now try that in stereo. It's perfectly possible. But only for projects with a suitable budget. Even with Moores law my guess is it's going to be a couple more years for 4k post-paths to become 'commodity'.
 
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