Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • 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 :)

Where is the delivery schedule?

I'm both more excited than the RED than ever before and not as excited as I will be. I badly want to have the RED because I'm sick of shooting with basically glorified prosumer cameras (I guess the HVX-200 will be a low-level professional camera, but it's still somewhat prosumer, esp. pricing). It's the most frustrating thing because I have the money for something like the RED, but I have to wait until my number is called so right now it doesn't matter how much money we have. I'm not super excited yet because I'm too far away, I'm at least late January and possibly more like late February for my first RED (our company should have two by then), so I'm not really going to start getting excited until more like the end of this year / start of 2008, when I realize it's getting close. Otherwise I will just dwell on it forever. Back in June I was obsessed and couldn't think of anything but how cool it would be to have the RED. Now I'm just trying to make do with the equipment I have and make some good projects with what I can.
 
Yeah, it´s a bit frustrating working with the gear one has, now that Red is on the way, with it´s great quality. Ours will arrive probably in May 2008, so I think you´re a bit better off than we are...
 
I think you might get yours a bit earlier than that, we'll see, but I'd guess it might be more like April. At least hopefully.

The RED is really a revolution, and I think anyone who says otherwise really hasn't considered the other options out there and the prices of those options. I mean for us right now, we can't afford to go out and buy a $60,000 or more camera, and to get quality even 1/4 as good as the RED as far as resolution goes, it costs at least that much if not more. If there was a camera out there I could buy for $12,000 that could give me actually really good looking 1080p footage, I'd buy it now and sell it for a loss later, because we're going to be shooting a lot of projects in the next five months if things go as planned. But that just isn't possible. You have the Sony F950 and that's out of the price range. So you end up being stuck with having to rent, I guess, and even that option doesn't really worth with us if we're doing low budget projects. If we do a music video for only $5,000 or so, we can't afford to spend $1,500 on a good Sony F950 package, plus pay the DP, plus pay crew members a few bucks, pay for a location, our storage and office space, our editor, and make a profit. So that leaves us buying the HVX-200 and figuring that at worst we'd lose $1,500 by re-selling it next year, and if we shoot 10 or more projects the cost per shoot is just $150 or less. That's affordable. But it's not ideal, either.

There is just such a huge gap right now between what is available for a small production company for a reasonable price and what will be available once the RED is readily available. You don't "need" a prime lens set to shoot anything, not with the RED, so you could easily assemble a solid $45,000 package even with a really nice tripod by the end of next summer with one lens, the 18-85mm, some batteries, CF cards, etc. And you'd get the kind of image quality that can compete with anything the big boys shoot. That's revolutionary to my mind.

All of the other equipment I have I'm pretty satisfied with for now (besides wanting an 8-core Mac, but whatever, we do have two new MacBook Pros so we can at least work with 'em). I mean after my order today I have plenty of lighting kits and lights for low budget work (12 lights in all plus tons of accessories for them), I have a good dolly that works nicely, we have a van for transportation, a good generator (and getting another smaller one), a great reference monitor coming, everything else is in place.

What I wish in retrospect after my last project, which is sort of killing me right now, is that someone would have just told me, "Dude, don't shoot with the XH-A1, it's crappy, you won't have a good looking image. Just fork over the $1,500 and rent the Sony F950 for a day." Because I can afford $1,500 to have an unbelievable quality music video, but I can't afford to be looking at something with too much noise because the camera we used is either defective or the XH-A1 just sucks period. I can't tell which one it is, but there was plenty of light, so it's not like there is any excuse for this. Grrr, especially when you hire a DP who is supposed to know what he's doing, I wish he had just advised us to rent a better camera for a day.

The footage we have will look awesome on our Website, and on YouTube, or anywhere online. It's totally unusable for television, so even though the video is every bit good enough to play on something like Fuse, not now it isn't, not with the digital noise. *sighs* Where is my RED...

Next time around I need to find a DP in L.A. who knows how to use the HVX and knows how to make it look as good as it can, because that's the key for now.
 
I'm thinking about taking the trip around the world to pick up mine in person! :-)
 
Red Revolution - and for now the HVX

Red Revolution - and for now the HVX

JonathanLB said:
I
Next time around I need to find a DP in L.A. who knows how to use the HVX and knows how to make it look as good as it can, because that's the key for now.
Click to expand...

There's a ton of great folks out there who do. Including me.

Like you, for now I'm using my HVX for the lower end commercial work I'm doing. Just finished a greenscreen stage shoot with it for a client's tradeshow video. And I'm using the HVX for their television commercial coming out soon, too. It's crap compared to the Red- but for a lot of applications it's fine. Throw a Brevis on the end of it and it makes some pretty sweet pictures.

Yes, in a perfect world we'd all either rent F950s or have our Reds. But for now, it's OK to make do with what we have.
 
Stacey Spears said:
When I placed my deposit on-line, it did show sales tax and I am out of state. I may need to relocate to OR for a month, when the time comes. :)
Click to expand...
Not sure what kind of unconstitutional rules are in your state, but they aren't SUPPOSED to be asking you for sales tax unless you are in California. And "use taxes" aren't legal to collect at time of purchase either.

Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9:
"No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state."

Here's more of that... U.S. Constitution
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top