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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 :)

What is EPIC?

Tim Duran said:
Steven, conceptually you're right. Problem with your thinking is that everything you said applies to the Epix-X. The M is all gravy (almost). And using your semiconductor model, margins are 30-40%+. All the hard work for the M's is priced into the X's. The only difference is the machined body and those precious red screws.

One of the smartest finesses Red has undertaken is the free titanium ring. All of us who have had deposits sitting around for two years asked for a little juice to help alieve the pain. By giving us the upgrade, A) Red made a great public relations coup and B) (and more importantly for them) they gave themselves the right to stop making and stocking parts that would become obsolete shortly, the excess inventory hurting their bottom line.

Smart guys these Red managers. Remember that and all you Redusers out there stop sobbing for poor poor Jannard and crew.
Click to expand...

Well, except Jarred & Co. have said several times that they make LESS on the -M's than they will on the -X's. So if you think they are lying to us, then you can keep that stance. I for one don't think they are... it's a matter of trust and I've seen enough to trust Jim's crew.

And as for your semiconductor margins, for the numbers you suggest, you likely need a couple of magnitudes more volume to recoup the R&D costs as well.

I don't think anybody is "sobbing" for the Red Boys... but at the same time I don't think they are fleecing us either. Nonetheless, you are asserting things as an absolute that you don't really know... unless you want to tell us you have some inside track within the Red Corporate confines...

-sc
 
Just to be clear... Tim has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.. I like him.. but he is wrong in almost everything he has said.

Just want to make that clear :)

heh heh heh.
 
Jarred Land said:
Just to be clear... Tim has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.. I like him.. but he is wrong in almost everything he has said.

Just want to make that clear :)

heh heh heh.
Click to expand...

I hope you never say this about me ;)

My guess is they make more on X because they probably pre-paid for the parts to save $ (common practice) so the delays are killing them as those parts have gone up since they ordered but they are locked in
and once Japan and others deliver, they can make some $. Which is what FOR PROFIT companies do. They make $ and Jim does that while also putting the same Camera the big boys use within reach of 10's of 1000's
of people.

M is too labor intensive (despite how fast they can hand build one) AND machining parts is EXPENSIVE - so I tend to believe Jarred... call me crazy... and I loved Jim's funny comment he made a few months ago.

"Want to become a millionaire? Easy, start with a Billion dolalrs and then try to design and release a new digital cinema camera."

Lets also not forget how much RED spent on the dreaded BUG last year... I truly think all these guys would work for peanuts they have so much fun with all these cool toys
surely explains why they are on here 23/24 hours a day, 8 days a week. :)
 
This is killing me! :-)

Epic...is the camera I should have had last weekend when I was at 9500ft elevation and took this picture with my iphone...
 

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Whatever the dollar amount Jim is putting into developing these cameras, without his peculiar heart and soul, Red would be just another Camera Co.: Until the tin men find a heart, they're playing catch-up.
 
David Rasberry said:
…It was a case where a Sony F3 S-log curve was recorded to an external Prores native recorder and values beyond 104 IRE were hard clipped in the file when opened in FCP or PPro. S-log is not Prores friendly apparently.
Click to expand...

I do not know how you experienced this, but it is certainly not my experience. ProRes is capable of recording and reproducing image data right up to 109 IRE. However it is easy to clip data above 100 IRE if you do not take care with your workflow, so IMHO Sony have made a slightly risky choice to use values above 100 IRE in their S-Log curve. ARRI do not do this with ALEXA LogC, so you can't accidentally clip off useful image data. Of course RAW (either ARRIRAW or REDcode RAW) is safer still.

Apologies for rather going off topic and discussing other cameras on an EPIC thread. Moderators feel free to delete this if it's inappropriate.
 
Nick Shaw said:
I do not know how you experienced this, but it is certainly not my experience. ProRes is capable of recording and reproducing image data right up to 109 IRE. However it is easy to clip data above 100 IRE if you do not take care with your workflow, so IMHO Sony have made a slightly risky choice to use values above 100 IRE in their S-Log curve. ARRI do not do this with ALEXA LogC, so you can't accidentally clip off useful image data. Of course RAW (either ARRIRAW or REDcode RAW) is safer still.

Apologies for rather going off topic and discussing other cameras on an EPIC thread. Moderators feel free to delete this if it's inappropriate.
Click to expand...

I think it was more a case of over exposure by the shooter. Blue channel was clipped and exceeded 110 IRE.
 
David Rasberry said:
I think it was more a case of over exposure by the shooter. Blue channel was clipped and exceeded 110 IRE.
Click to expand...

That's where a big advantage of RAW comes in of course. White balancing can push image data which is not clipped on the sensor into clipping, and once that's baked in it's gone.
 
Nick Shaw said:
That's where a big advantage of RAW comes in of course. White balancing can push image data which is not clipped on the sensor into clipping, and once that's baked in it's gone.
Click to expand...

Bingo.
 
Nick Shaw said:
That's where a big advantage of RAW comes in of course. White balancing can push image data which is not clipped on the sensor into clipping, and once that's baked in it's gone.
Click to expand...

Conversely, if you have a debayered image which is "Guaranteed Safe" such as EXR you can be confident that no channels will clip and not be RAW.

I work with EXR data every day and it never clips the picture and it could go through dozens of generations without any noticeable degradation. RAW is nice but sensible RGB is good too.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
Conversely, if you have a debayered image which is "Guaranteed Safe" such as EXR you can be confident that no channels will clip and not be RAW.
Click to expand...

Absolutely. I'm a big fan of EXR. But this discussion was in the context of camera recording formats, and I am not aware of any camera which records EXR.

It will be great when we get to the situation where we can be confident that all systems in the pipeline will use unclamped float, with real-time performance, and no danger of accidental clipping. But I don't think we're there yet.
 
What isn't epic?
Shooting and paying for film stock.
Paying more for a camera than you would a house.
Cheap lineskipping vDSLRs.
Paying for firmware updates.
Having to buy a new camera to upgrade to the next best thing.
...
 
noahvolek said:
What isn't epic?
Shooting and paying for film stock.
Paying more for a camera than you would a house.
Cheap lineskipping vDSLRs.
Paying for firmware updates.
Having to buy a new camera to upgrade to the next best thing.
...
Click to expand...

But if you shot and paid for film stock, the other items on the list would not be a problem...
 
Wasn't it Robert Altman who said:

"the cheapest part of making a film, is the film"

By the time you are actually shooting a film, the filmstock and processing and finsihing is only a (relatively small) part of the overall picture.

Digital doesn't make it cheaper as much as it maybe gives you more "takes" and more choices and maybe more room to "play".
Pushing the take limits didn't stop Altman or Kubrick with filmstock.

(o.k. there are only so many takes in a setup, I know)

The other thing digital did was put high end tools in everyones hands.

SPIDERMAN ON EPIC----DATA carts, daillies, towers, LTO's, etc, etc,
ME ON EPIC --- Laptop, RAID 5, Apple Color, Davinci...

Digital made the LAPTOP a LAB, or as I like to say:

"Let's process those R3D's on my LABtop."

With Digital aquisition lab costs went to zero (in smaller setups) and now we can all line up at the fifty yard line.

But really.

A film takes people. A lot of people. It takes collaboration. The bigger films have many more eyes on the prize, making sure that image being captured is top notch. Sure, some one man bands are going to turn out some decent material, but the process of film making (as a small or large group effort) makes a huge difference to the final product because a lot of talent in many areas is behind any decent film. I hope that doesn't change.

David
 
Nick Shaw said:
It will be great when we get to the situation where we can be confident that all systems in the pipeline will use unclamped float, with real-time performance, and no danger of accidental clipping. But I don't think we're there yet.
Click to expand...

You don't need EXR though to output unclipped footage. It's just the 'safest' since you can't clip or crush at the file level. There is absolutely nothing I'm aware of to prevent RED from including a "Protect Highlights/Blacks" checkbox to take whatever RAW settings you established and fit them to the colorspace of your output format, whether that be TIFF or DPX or ProRes etc..

Take your raw settings, feed it a [1,1,1] color... if the whitebalance etc results in a [1.1,1.3,0.9] output and feeding it a [0,0,0] results in a [-0.1,0.0,-0.2] then apply 0.2 lift and a 0.6 Gain and whatever your grade in REDCine is should be preserved within a 0.0 -> 1.0 domain. I'm still not certain why they don't do that for 10bit file formats. It would make RGB output effortless.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
Take your raw settings, feed it a [1,1,1] color... if the whitebalance etc results in a [1.1,1.3,0.9] output and feeding it a [0,0,0] results in a [-0.1,0.0,-0.2] then apply 0.2 lift and a 0.6 Gain and whatever your grade in REDCine is should be preserved within a 0.0 -> 1.0 domain. I'm still not certain why they don't do that for 10bit file formats. It would make RGB output effortless.
Click to expand...

But I don't want my output scaled to fit 0.0 -> 1.0.

RED footage shot at ISO 800 produces values considerably higher than 1.0 from the half float linear path in the SDK. See here for an example. And I want those values preserved so I can deal with the over-brights as a creative decision further down the pipeline, not automatically scaled to a 0.0 -> 1.0 range.
 
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