RED CAMERA Prelim. Specs

Policar said:
John, I'm wishing the same thing
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Reality tells me it will be fun to speculate about (See the HVX threads) but in the end the price tag is going to make about 1% of the persons on this site be able to afford it

Let's hope when Mr Billionaire says 'We' (See his opening statement) he does not mean 'We millionaires..............'

:lipsrseal
 
John_Hudson said:
Let's hope when Mr Billionaire says 'We' (See his opening statement) he does not mean 'We millionaires..............'
:lipsrseal
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Hahaha.

It's been said on this site that it will be 'affordable' and the goal is to hit a wide market, not just rental houses.

I think we might be surprised at the range which is eventually announced.
(though I think you can let go of the 5K dream John)
 
John,

Please call me Jim. Someone posted earlier that if this camera was not targeted to this group I wouldn't spend so much time here. If only 1% of this group could afford our camera then we have failed. As for the "....aire" part, I firmly believe that a person IS what he DOES... nothing more or less.

Jim
 
John_Hudson said:
That's be like pimping the new 2006 Porshe in the Hyundai forum.
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sometimes John you say something so smart that I dont think you know it when you are writing it.. this is one of them.
 
I'm pretty excited about this camera, but at the same time, I think I am going to boycott learning about it. I'm fairly certain that this camera is going to be WAY out of my price range, and therefore there's no point in drooling. It's like taking a steak that's tied to a pole and dangling it over a dog's head... it's a pointless chase.
 
I find it really funny that when the thing that so many of us have talked about
actually looks like it's happening all we seem to be able to do is talk about reasons why it WON'T happen.
Or won't happen for us anyhow.

For years it's been said that the only way the floodgates for the independents were going to open was for a new company,
one with no ties and no upper market to protect, to give us a viable and affordable high quality camera.

Now here we have a guy who is obviously serious, dedicated, and passionate about what he's doing.
He's got the resources to make it happen and he's made his mission clear.

My question is, when someone presents you with an opportunity like this, do you want to tell him why it won't work?
Or how you won't be able to afford it (when everything he's said negates that)?

Or do you want to throw in your two cents, support the effort,
and hopefully have some input in the design of what could eventually be
the most revolutionary camera since we moved away from celluloid?

I'm going with the second option.
 
Luis Caffesse said:
My question is, when someone presents you with an opportunity like this, do you want to tell him why it won't work?
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I don't recall seeing people say that it wouldn't work, just some apprehension about the probable price. Jim Jannand says
If only 1% of this group could afford our camera then we have failed.
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That's the right thing to say and I hope he can pull it off.

One of the things that he needs to know is how much are willing to pay for something. That is part of his due diligence process. What is the threshold for making a purchase? Is it $5,000, $8,000, $10,000, $15,000?

With the HVX-200 and two memory cards listing at $10,000, that is the price point at which I think this camera will be listed. Is that too much money for this group?
 
2005 was a good year for realistic pipedreams. A year ago no one thought we'd get the HVX featureset for under 10K. I hope 2006 yields some magic beanstalk beans. Go Jim go. :beer:
 
Well, everyone seems to keep suggesting that the lenses are going to be sooooo expensive for this camera... did everyone forget who is making this camera? It seemed to be pretty much a given that Mr. Jannard would be making lenses for this seeing as how he stated "We want to know that we can record to just about any media. And use the lenses we have. Plus design some new ones we wish were being built but aren't."
I'm not saying the lenses will be cheap to produce, but I'm sure that Red will be incurring less expense on lenses than other manufacturers who get their lenses from a third party company.
Anyway, there really shouldn't be so much worry about pricing since there is no way we're going to know a price range until at least NAB.

By the way - thanks a bunch, Mr. Jannard, not just for taking on such an incredible project, but for making yourself available enough to speak directly with us on this forum, and thanks for valuing our opinions... it means a lot to us that you would do that.

-pastywhiteboy
 
Well, sure, it looks to be a damn good camera. The specs are great. But how much does it cost? That's really the most important factor.

By the way, how do the specs compare to those of the HD cameras used on the Star Wars films or Collateral? I've read the camera used on Collateral has uncompressed footage.

And when is NAB 2006 (and don't say "in 2006"), because I can't wait to see what this camera is all about.
 
NAB: April 24 - 27, 2006 Las Vegas

Collateral was shot with a Thomson Viper Filmstream camera. Quick specs: 4:4:4 uncompressed 10 bit, max. 1080p at 25 fps.

Star Wars was shot on Sony CineAlta F900 & F950. 4:4:4 (2/3"), max. 1080p 30 fps.

The RED camera will have bigger (better) sensors (35mm), a higher resultion (2540p) and a higher framerate (60 fps).
 
pastywhiteboy said:
Well, everyone seems to keep suggesting that the lenses are going to be sooooo expensive for this camera... did everyone forget who is making this camera? It seemed to be pretty much a given that Mr. Jannard would be making lenses for this seeing as how he stated "We want to know that we can record to just about any media. And use the lenses we have. Plus design some new ones we wish were being built but aren't."
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Jim Jannand is a marketeer, not a researcher/inventor. I don't think that he is going to set up a factory to make lenses. There are a lot of companies making lens already and the factor that was a differentiator for lens making, precision, is far easier to attain these days than it was 40 years ago. I don't think that he has invented a new CMOS process for making chips. I don't think that he has invented a new sensor.

Jim Jannand is good at what is called "execution play" in the venture capital business. I think he will qualify a vendor for the lens, subcontract out the making of the chips (IBM had 100 engineers working on the CPU for the XBOX 360; I don't think that Jim Jannand is going to ramp up to that head count to make the chips). I think that he is looking at the packaging and ergonomics because that is the kind of thing he understands. The record shows that he is a "hands on" kind of guy.

The big design hurdle for this camera is the circuit design, and getting it down to a low power (battery) application. It takes a certain amount of transistors to do an encoder. I-frame only encoder takes fewer transistors than IBBP of MPEG2. The amount of data in a frame is substantial. 4520x2540x4 bytes is 45 Mbytes per frame. Crunching that amount of data takes a lot of bus cycles. The Foveon chip uses analog circuitry to perform a kind of compression and could halve that inital read to around 25 Mbytes per frame. Getting it down to 4:2:2 is pretty easy to do, but the Red codec? Dunno there. If they are rolling a new codec, something like a full frame wavelet encoder, they might get something that runs off a battery. I haven't kept up on wavelet based encoder silicon. Analog Devices has some chips that do that, but I don't know if anyone else has done work in this area. I think that running 25 Mbytes of data through a DCT based encoder is going to draw a lot more power than most camera batteries provide.

This project is doable, and I wish him the utmost of success. Depending on how many chips they do, the start up cost of this venture can easily top $15 million. If this turns into a $50 million / year business, that is a good investment. At $10,000, that is 5,000 cameras per year. How many units has the DVX100 sold? How big is this market? He understands how to reach the sweet spot in the market. Before Oakley, sunglasses were cheap and price was a point of competition. The Oakley glasses were expensive for the day, but people took better care of them because they were expensive and now $100 for sunglasses is not uncommon.

I hope that he pulls this off and makes an affordable, highly capable camera.
 
Hi to all,

Not long ago I found out about Kinetta cam, got very exited, and later got to know that their project is in works for some time now and nothing is out yet.
Though I like the concept of pure eCinema cam very much and looking forward for RED cam as it fits in to that concept very well and it might be actually affordable..

As for a sencors: germans made one -

http://www.ehd.de/products/announcements/si1920hd.htm

It does all we need except its 2/3" sencor, though the price for that head is - EUR 4.558,00 - that price can put us in the perspective of how much can RED cam cost adding the rest of gear like other electronics and etc.

[its my thirst post so it got a bit messy, I promise in future Ill be more clear]
 
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