A relatively large announcement went live earlier today from RED, which as you’ll remember, made big promises for digital cinema a while ago — with equally big (and vague) timeframes. Today was a minor solidification of those timeframes, but many RED users were expecting solid shipping dates, and those didn’t happen. Instead, a change in strategy was announced, and a few brave RED owners will participate in an intensive beta program with the pre-production camera, dubbed “Tattoo.” After that, the S35, as it will be called in production, will see a wide simultaneous release, hopefully with some bugs squashed.
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There’s an unconfirmed, unsourced rumor going around of a translated informal conversation with someone who may or may not work in a relevant part of Canon. The rumor states that Canon is confident in its own ability to compete with RED and that they’re “not afraid.” And there isn’t reason to be afraid, at least for products like the 7D. RED’s promise of a “Digital Still/Motion Camera” is still unfulfilled, while Canon has made significant progress with its own DSMC lines.
But there’s more to it than that.
I recently had the pleasure to help out on a music video shoot here in the northwest, noteworthy not just because a great video resulted, but because we were shooting with two RED One cameras and a custom RC helicopter for aerial shots. It was interesting being behind the scenes and I thought I’d share a little of the fun. The video itself, for Mt St Helens Vietnam Band’s “Albatross, Albatross, Albatross,” can be viewed in HD over at Vimeo.
The opportunity to see a group of local freelancers and entrepreneurs coming together to make such an incredibly professional product was extremely valuable — technology has democratized and accelerated the independent film and music community to a degree I hadn’t realized. I was brought on because I had access to some special locations (most of the aerial and forest shots are near some family property in the San Juans) and so I could shoot a little behind-the-scenes video of the production. Go ahead and check out that video below.
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We posted this earlier this morning, but I want to weigh in since this is up my alley. I’m not entirely sure why people continue to compare the Red to consumer cameras. I mean, the price difference alone puts them in different categories, not to mention the format, resolution, and gear suite. Yet constantly I see people making comparisons like this one, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what they mean to prove.
It’s like comparing a couple quick little rice rockets against a Lamborghini Murcielago, and then having them race around your yard. Sure, you could draw conclusions from it, but you’re kind of missing the point.
A few weeks back I hopped onto my first Virgin America flight with Aircell’s Gogo service on-board. It wasn’t the first time I’ve reviewed Gogo and if you recall I was on the first commercial Gogo flight with American Air. The plan was to interview James Weatherson, Virgin America’s inflight entertainment engineer, while I was up in the air, but there was a scheduling mix up and the interview never went down. So we opted to do it the old fashioned way. Below is my brief conversation with James about Red and where it’s headed.
The “budget” option from RED’s enormous modular lineup has finally spit out an actual moving image for all of us to see (autoplaying video, let it run through once). The 2/3″ sensor is far smaller than the original RED camera, but it looks like that doesn’t present a problem; the shot above was a 100mm prime at T5.6. Image quality and contrast look great. Now imagine that image at somewhere between 1 and 120 frames per second and about 10 times as big — shot from something you can fit in your purse. Assuming you have a purse.
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The always-active forums over at Reduser.net have coughed up another batch of RED camera setups over the last week or so, so of course we had to share them with you. The silver color is a tryout thing, but the shipped components will likely be black. There’s a lot of discussion and it’s difficult to tell what’s new, but you can see that as promised, the range of configurations is quite large.
Rumor smashed! Wait, no, the other one… confirmed. Sorry! Anyhow, Microsoft has inadvertently (?) revealed the existence of the red Xbox 360 that we mentioned the other day. It’s an Elite, and it will be exclusive to EB Games. Well, that’s what’s going to happen in New Zealand; what happens in god old USA, who knows.
If you don’t want to buy a new Dell PC to get the Windows Vista Ultimate (RED) edition, you can pre-order the standalone operating system over at Amazon for $219.95. If you’re a lucky college student like me, you can purchase the OS at a discount price of $64.95 at The Ultimate Steal. The OS is expected to be released on December 15th but it looks like you can download it now at The Ultimate Steal.
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The big RED announcement from two weeks ago made quite a rumble, and it was only a few days afterwards that Jim Jannard announced things were changing yet again. Well, the revision has arrived. Jim says they’ve taken over “all aspects of electronic design and sensor fabrication,” apparently allowing them to do some stuff to upgrade the specs on a lot of the sensors. They’ve also announced a “reward” for their original customers with RED ONE units, saying they’ll get a really nice deal on a special setup if they want it, including a special sensor and bundled stuff at no extra charge.
Of note is the disclosure of 2K speeds up to 350fps on the larger sensors, 250fps on the smaller, and the pricing of the “complete” Scarlet with a fixed lens at $3750, which is pretty reasonable.
It’s another one of those “huge images stacked on top of each other” announcements so click on through to see everything.
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I know, I’m really taking the bait here, but they followed through big time on the last one. My insider says they’ve had “a little breakthrough” today. My guess: they’re moving the dates up. Jim says:
“New announcement on Dec. 3rd. Everything has changed… just as we promised. :-)”
Give me a break!
Although I’m a big fan of the Casio EX-F1 and wrote at length last week on how major the RED announcement was, I can’t disagree with this list. The D90 hasn’t lived up to its hype, the 1D Mk III does have serious problems, the Scarlet is simply not viable as a DSLR, and the EX-F1 is a one-trick pony.
This isn’t to say that these cameras are weak — on the contrary, they’re all perfectly good cameras, they’re just not the second coming of sliced bread, as their makers wanted us to believe.
Down at the very bottom of RED’s enormous Epic/Scarlet page there is this little item you may have overlooked. We told you they were trademarking “RED 3D” back in October, and sure enough here is the dedicated 3D setup we thought would come to pass. In light of the rest of the announcement, it’s clear it’s essentially just a special baseplate and lateral fasteners to stick a couple RED brains together, but that doesn’t stop the thing from looking totally awesome.
Image credit: Benni Diez at Reduser.net forums
For the last couple weeks, Jim Jannard of RED Camera has been teasing everybody on the REDuser forums with vague promises and outrageous claims of revolutionizing the industry. Skepticism would be the natural response, but after the original RED One camera turned the industry on its head in 2007, people learned that the company said what they meant and made what they said. Early adopters knew they were getting in the ground floor of something that would not only change the industry but likely completely metamorphose once things got underway. As it turns out, they were right, and RED’s announcement today represents the ideal of the RED camera system made reality. What does today’s bombshell mean for the hi-def video industry, and what does it mean for you and me?
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This, my friends, is a camera. Jim Janard over at Red has begun telling the world about his new modular camera system with its Mysterium-X sensor. There are a few upgrade paths for those who already own a RED ONE, the older generation including upgrading to the new sensor, trade in RED ONE for the price of an EPIC, or receive a sensor upgrade some time in the future. If the RED ONE costs $17,000 expect this one to be slightly more.
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There’s a fun and functional countdown over at Red.com that suggests, if I am not mistaken, that the new RED products will be revealed at 9AM tomorrow on the East Coast — 6AM my time, great. Check out our previous teaser posts for the mysterious renders that RED head Jim Jannard has been posting.
Another taste. You may be getting tired of these little peeks, but I think they’re just dandy. Looks like a couple XLR ports (labeled “Push” probably because they’re inset and you can’t reach the release), some video outs and some sort of proprietary connector on the right.
I’m wondering whether these pics are from some super-modular system? They don’t strike me as being set up in a particularly on-camera way. Perhaps the announcement will include a new hardware “suite” for accessorizing the RED lineup?
Update: Added another picture –>
[Thanks, Mike]
What the deuce is it? They’re speculating wildly at the Reduser forum; some think it’s an combination rail/battery/control pack for the Scarlet (it says “Scarlet” around the “eye”), some think it’s not even orientated correctly in the picture and Jannard is playing a joke on them. Others question the material, ports and so on. We won’t know for sure until a week from now, but in the meantime feel free to let your imagination run wild. I’m keeping my eye on the forum so I’ll let you know if anything develops.
Oh my… I don’t know what it is at all! The big RED announcement is in two weeks and Jannard got a little too excited and posted some mysterious renders. He also says, in the same ebullient tone as last week:
I am now comfortable in saying that the most aggressive speculation will not come close to what we will announce Nov. 13th. We fully expect over 1,000,000 hits on www.red.com on the 13th.
Well well Mr. Jannard! Tooting our own horn, are we? Deplorable man!
Call it hype or call it confidence, but RED has lived up to the hype and they’ve got a lot to be confident about. Here’s what RED Head Jim Jannard said in a recent Reduser forum post:
“We will announce the new Scarlet and Epic programs on Thursday Nov. 13th.
I want to say that no one has any idea how incredible this announcement will be. Call this hype… please. I am quite sure that the announcement will be called a “scam”. Should be a lot of fun to hear the reactions. I can’t wait.
Jarred is buying extra server bandwidth… we will post specs and renders for people to email around. This makes the RED ONE announcement seem small by comparison.”
Oh my. Suddenly Nikon’s medium format rumors looks a lot less exciting.
