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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 :)

WHO TOOK DRAGON UPGRADE????

Maybe they're simply playing catch up. For example, I had two upgrades on order but scheduling issues prevented my from sending in both Epics at the same time. However, my second Epic is now at RED for the upgrade.
 
Everyone is super upset with the impossibly slow upgrade process.

Truly - what is going on?!...
 
:emote_headwall: The dreaded RED WALL.
I thought that RED would take care of the upgrades first before going to sell the new units?
 
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Mark Pedersen said:
Dragon should be re-named DRAGGIN'

M
Click to expand...

hahahahaha!!!

I don't think the process is going too slow. I think they are just focusing on Epic-Ms an Carbon Fiber bodies. History repeats itself =)

-T
 
dude I am not getting mine for a while I paid for my upgrade in Sept!!!!! Maybe the next Winter Olympics ;)
 
Based on what I've read in this thread, they've sent out e-mails to most people in 1-30 spots while the 55+ are all without e-mails. 1-100 are all early adopters. I think they started sending out e-mails in early December. At the rate they're going now they won't clear through the early adopters until July or August. Even if you're a low number on the second stage of upgrades you won't see your camera until September-October at the earliest, those higher on the list may not even get theirs until 2015. This is assuming upgrade turnaround times don't improve, of course, but even if they were cut in half the early adopter stage wouldn't be finished until late April-June and I think even that's being optimistic. It's going to take a long time.

In Red's defense what they're trying to do is pretty unprecedented. Imagine if Arri tried to do something like this, upgrading all the Alexa sensors one-by-one. It would take forever. I just wish Red would have set more realistic goals for themselves rather than get our hopes up. If they had told me back 2012 that I probably wouldn't see my Dragon until 2015 I think a lot of people wouldn't be nearly as upset now.

Edit: I realize that the list is un-official and only shows a small handful of the total number of upgrades but I think the sample is big enough to get a rough idea of how things are moving. We can see for sure that they're not even halfway done with the first stage, for instance. Jeremy Torrie is #27 and hasn't gotten an e-mail.

I have no idea what the numbers are but if I were an optimist and had to guess I would say they are upgrading 150-200 cameras a month. This list only shows about 150 and there are probably at least around 1,500-2,000 in line in reality. Theoretically, if they managed to process and upgrade 200 cameras a month (50 a week, 10 per business day) it would take 10 months to produce 2,000 upgrades. That sounds to me like a plausible scenario, if not an optimistic one.

Red is not a giant company and it wouldn't make sense to hire and train an army of camera building specialists specifically to handle the influx of upgrades only to fire them once the upgrades are done. I haven't read about how many man hours are required for each upgrade but I would imagine at least 15-20. If it's 20 hours, in a 5-day week with 8-hour days each specialist could produce 2 upgrades every week. If there are 25 specialists on the upgrade team, that's 50 upgrades a week, which seems reasonable.

Bear in mind, these are highly specialized camera engineers. They're not like car mechanics who can work on any car or switch from working at Ford to BMW just like that, they're specifically trained and specialize in the manufacture of a certain camera and usually only in one certain part of the camera. More likely, we're talking about 5 different departments each with 5 of their own specialists. At $60,000 a year that 25 person team costs Red $1.5 million a year. You might be thinking "but if they sell 2,000 upgrades, that's almost $20 million!" but we don't know how much those upgrades are costing Red. If I had to guess they are losing money on the R&D alone not to mention the upkeep of the Bomb squad, the facilities and the whole rest of the company which is busy making, testing and building whole other cameras and accessories.

Everyone who is angry about the delay should try to understand that Red is not a giant company. They're not Sony or Canon. Red is probably capable of producing 25-50 cameras a day on average or 8,000-12,000 cameras a year at most. I think that's a realistic output for a camera maker like them. I don't think they can just put the rest of their business on hold to churn out upgrades, upgrades which are actually more complicated and time-consuming than just building a new camera from scratch. They could go ahead and train and hire another 25 specialists and expand the upgrade department for several million dollars, sure, but by the time they get up to speed with the other specialists the upgrades are almost done and then those specialists and all that equipment is no longer needed. They are going at a speed that makes financial sense and I can't blame them for that. This is all theoretical, of course, the upgrade team is probably bigger than 25 but I imagine this is still a fairly plausible depiction of what is happening.

I just wish they had been more realistic with the Dragon release time tables. Next time, when someone asks you when a camera will be released, all you have to do is just say "it's too early to make predictions". That's it, problem solved. I'll never be able to take a Red release date seriously again.
 
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46. Matt Elkind ---------------April 8th-------- 11:30am

Got the upgrade e-mail yesterday. One last mx shoot next Monday and then off to red for an upgrade. Can't wait!
 
any updates? i am hoping everyone is so excited they forget to post lol!
 
Nothing here, my Epic-M no. is #13xx.........no email just nothing..............
 
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