How will Panasonic, JVC, Sony, Thomson, Etc.. Respond?

I don't think the others will be as affected much as people think.

Red is a digital cinema camera, and the digital cinema market is a sliver of the overall professional market, it just has a higher profile.

I can't see DOF being a big deal for industrials, tv sitcoms, news shows, documentaries, or just about anything that is going to be shown on broadcast.

DOF is more of an issue for features films that desire a cinematic look.

I do forsee price drops on the higher end HD cameras.

That also depends on how many people decide to rent or buy. I can see RED being in high demand for rentals.

Demand for RED will drop prices on other camera rentals that will collect dust, which in turn will make them more appealing to the budget conscious filmmaker.


Even for films aiming for a theatrical release, I think productions costing somewhere between 1 to 20 million will be using RED the most.

I wouldn't be surprised if RED becames the camera of choice in India, which produces more films yearly than anywhere else in the world.
 
I think that that the argument for Red is that if you could get a real digital cinema camera for the same price as an ENG camera wouldn't you want to go with digital cinema? The Sony HD XD cam is considered a dedicated Cine Alta camera but I bet a lot of ENG departments will buy the camera. And I bet that some ENG departments will shoot in the progressive mode because it looks so good on a progressive flat panel display but they will probably choose 30p over 24p.

In this day and age of flat panel displays having a cinema style camera that can shoot real progressive is a big plus for any application especially if it can handle higher frame rates. And for fast action sports broadcasting Red's ability to shoot 120 frames per second is a real plus for awesome slow motion playback. No doubt that Red raises the bar.
 
also you gotta realize that broadcast isn't what it used to be.. Sure shows are leaving the 35mm space but they are migrating to 24p delivery... and alot of Dramatic (like it or not that is half of broadcast material) episode television would love to have a narrow DOF.
 
True, broadcast isn't what it used to be, in fact, I see it ranging from HDTV all the way down to iPods and other handhelds.

RED will definitely have it's place on set of higher end shows like Lost, 24, Deadwood, Sopranos etc. Any of these shows that have cinematic looks will want to take advantage of RED.

But that doesn't mean that every production will find RED useful, especially having to use a tapeless workflow.

There are those that find tape to be cheap, easy to use and proven to work in production.

Their anxiety will grow with having to use a new camera AND a new workflow that may or not be fully supported in their current workflow

I'm sure Sony and the others will exploit this fact as much as they can.

When FCP came out, people were floored at how well it worked. It gave Adobe and Avid some heavy competition. It didn't kill either of them, but made them realize they couldn't do business as usual, and forced them to revise their strategies.

I see RED doing the same thing. Sony, JVC, and the others probably have some great technology they been sitting on because they don't see the need to undermine their revenue sources.

I bet RED will change their thinking and force them to bring to market whatever goodies they have in the back room, assuming we still want it.

Even if I never use a RED camera, I will definitely benefit from the fallout.
 
First of all I find that tape was a wonderful solution for the early adopters who shot high definition during the first half of this decade. With tape HD VCR's people could watch HD on their home theatres and they did not have to wait for Blu-Ray. And people who bought HDV camcorders did not have to wait for other technologies to develop. However I find tape will be more and more limiting for the second half of this decade. First of all you cannot just hand over a HDV tape to a client because the format is totally incompatible not just with other formats but even the HDV formats are incompatible with themselves. You must render it to a hard drive or burn the high definition files to a DVD or render to a tape format that your client uses. Second P-2 cards, hard drive recording and cameras that can burn high definition files to a DVD disc are the future and will sooner or later will supplant tape recording. So the sooner we adopt these new workflows the more prepared we are for the future.
 
They will sit on their high chairs, and look down and say that is not a real camera, they are not a real camera company. How can you trust to buy a camera from a company that has never made a camera before. But they will see that RED is an inavative company and that film, television, and other content creators look for inavation, and picture for price point. not for the good ole boy name. So I think they will look down for a little while but then I think we will se high end camera solutions from the big guys at a cheeper price point.
 
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Tape always had it's limitations. Linear access and having to digitize in realtime is always annoying in a time crunch.


When it comes to clients, regardless of using tape or a tapless workflow, you still need to give them what they want, be it tape, hard drives, or some data media.

Like William Goldman said, "No one knows anything". All we can do is guess what the future will be like based on what we see now.

There has always been good technology that should have become part of the future but hasn't for one reason or another.

I see adopting any technology like the traditiona bell curve model, you have the early adopters at the beginning of the slope up, the majority of adopters at the highest point and the die hard holdouts at the very tail.

Early adopters are willing to take the risk because the gains are worth it.

If you have a proven workflow that works well, it's harder to change that.

There isn't a standard yet for a tapeless workflow. I'm not even if SMPTE has a standard in development either. So at the moment it's up to the developers and users to figure it out.

Film has keycode, tape has timecode. What do you have for a camera that produces pure data? Will each camera manufacturer do it differenty?

What about archiving? If you had a tape and a hard drive with identical media, put in storage for 10 years, can that media be brought back online from each?

The engineers I talked to, say it's a slim chance the hard drive will come back up.

This isn't to say that tape is perfect, tape has a tendency to degrade over time too, but it does have a long life space if kept under proper conditions.

Currently film is the only proven media that has lasted 100 years.

A tapeless workflow isn't a new thing. It's been a big part of visual effects, animation and DI work for years now. But a lot of those workflows are custom developed for particular needs and very expensive to impliment.

It's just now trickling down to the prosumer/indie level, and there needs to be affordable off the shelf solutions.
 
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