RED CAMERA Prelim. Specs

Flintstone said:
So, what's the price range on this "little" baby? A quarter of a million dollar? I think it's a tad above all of our budgets combined?
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Well, that's the real question. I'm sure the Viper, Dalsa, and Arri D20 all provide stunning imagery, but their cost is simply prohibitive. Might as well shoot on 35mm film to begin with.

I think what'll make this a winner will be an extremely lowball price. Say $15,000 or so. They're gonna throw this camera into the ring with the HVX, XL-H1, HD100 and Z1, and blow them all to smithereens (sp?).
 
If we're talking features, a feature I'd love to see is a realtime framerate adjustment.

For example, starting at start 24P, then shifting to 60p smoothly, so that when it was played back, it would result in a nice slow motion transition.

That's a feature I wish they'd have put on the HVX. Why not on the RED?
 
It's making me drool, that's for sure, but I want to see an actual camera, and actual footage- as of now, it is all hype ..... exciting indeed, but hype none the less.
 
what is that icon on their site a shape of? Is that hinting at the shape of the camera?

I rike RED.
 
Can I get a Follow Focus built in? Or what?

Can I get the Magical Gamma of the DVX?

Can it feel like a movie camera?

Damn it
 
Not a joke. This is the ultimate digital cinema camera being designed by a serious enthusiast who also happens to be a billionaire so he can afford to do it right.

Now, we have no indication of what the price might be -- might be $250,000; might be $100,000; we don't know. But it sounds like they're definitely doing it right, and the fact that they're reaching out to the users to get input on what they need to design into it is also most promising.
 
John Moore, rack framerates aren't easy. You need to open the aperture at the same rate you shift up the framerate, so you'd need an extra stop to shoot 48fps, and maybe a stop and a half to shoot 60fps. Plus, programming the camera to do that can't be simple, either.

You'd have to open the aperture AS you overcrank so either the camera has to automatically do that, or you have to use a follow focus but attatch the gear to the aperture ring...except that only PL mount lenses let you do that. So it makes sense they left out this feature. Plus, you can totally fake it in post anyhow.

Oh, and my magic price fairies tell me they're shooting for between $25,000-$75,000.
 
I love it!

I love it!

Barry_Green said:
Not a joke. This is the ultimate digital cinema camera being designed by a serious enthusiast who also happens to be a billionaire so he can afford to do it right.
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Yup.

In most of these cameras, there is about $100 of integrated circuits. Heck, maybe $200 in circuits. And hundreds of thousands of engineering hours getting it to work just right. If you spread those engineering hours out a lot of units, the cost can come down.

If there are a million people who want to buy this camera, it can be cheap (relatively speaking). But if it is going to be a rental house mostly camera, the number of units sold will many orders of magnitude lower and the price will be many orders of magnitude higher. You need to pay for those R * D hours somehow.

One of the design 'nodes' for video cameras has been tape transport. They have been organized around multiples of 25 Mbps. The HVX200 steps past that to offer recording to memory and Focus is offering harddisk recording via Firewire. Now that RAID is more common, the bandwidth that was available only on 100+ Mbps tape transport systems for big bucks is available for a lot less money.

Being a EE, I would like to know more about that Mysterium sensor. This is the interesting part. Other people have taken a shot at this stuff. Carver Mead (google that name) did the Foveon project and it hasn't taken off yet.

But more power to you, Mr. Jannard. While I think this camera will be out of my price range for the kind of shooting I do, I hope you pull it off.
 
DanielG said:
But if it is going to be a rental house mostly camera, the number of units sold will many orders of magnitude lower and the price will be many orders of magnitude higher.
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This camera will not be a 'rental house' camera.
At least it seems clear so far that that is not the intention.
 
Barry_Green said:
-- might be $250,000; might be $100,000
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Well don;t ruin the fantasy. I thought this would be for people like us.

That's be like pimping the new 2006 Porshe in the Hyundai forum.
 
It's times like these in which minimum wage is really a drag.

I was just calculating how long it would take me to get an HVX alone on my current hours, and then this info starts popping up, and i see prices higher than both the varicam and the cinealta.

Looks like it's time to start doing things robert rodriguez style: Sell myself to science!
 
Here is the $100,000 question:

How much would you be willing to pay for this camera?

Body?

Good zoom lens start around $15,000. This guy is taking all the risk of doing a camera body and enabling a new generation of media capture, but if the body goes for $5,000, most of the reward will go to the lens maker. So, does that push the body out to $20,000? I hope not.

I'm thinking that $5,000 for the body, $3,000 for a RAID system based on laptop disks are about right. He could charge more than that, but it would reduce the number of buyers. The lens is the troublesome part. If he can get a usable zoom lens for $2,000, then he would get a lot of buyers.
 
Speculation on the price is really just meaningless right now without any details on the camera (which hasn't been designed as of yet).

Why not discuss what options/features you'd like to see on it?
I'm assuming that if Jim is willing to take the time to post in here, he'd be willing to listen to whatever feedback they might get from potential users.
 
$5000.00

Damn it.

This may be comical but I'm thinking of every low budget wannabe guerilla filmmaker out there. I'm thinking of every HVX and DVX owner.
 
John, I'm wishing the same thing, but it's clear that this isn't the same thing as the dvx. With a 35mm sensor and especially with 4k resolution, you need a whole camera crew to keep the thing in focus as well as an expensive monitor and a great lens. If it's five grand that's great, but that doesn't change the fact that a set of lenses for it is 20 grand for only decent glass.

The thing is, though, it will probably cost less than the varicam (and lenses will be cheaper) so SOME people will be able to afford it, and rental houses will be able to buy them like crazy.

Sure, I'm not going to be able to buy one (not for a long while yet at least), but I will be able to afford to rent one, and if they go for a few thousand a week with lenses, that means that you can shoot a feature with 35mm quality (better, since you can do a digital intermediate at 4k resolution) in a couple weeks with a smaller crew for 10-20 thousand dollars. You could make a short film in a weekend for a couple thousand. Sure that's not dirt cheap, but it's so ridiculously much less than the current cost, that it's next to nothing by comparison.

Still, I want to be proved wrong. If this thing is under 5 grand I'll take two.
 
I don't need a camera crew to focus a DSLR - who says you have to use the whole sensor or use the lowest f-stop? Glass - should be no more expensive than decent top end SLR glass for primes, a bit more for zooms. I'd say it's easier to make good glass for a big sensor than a small one!

Graeme
 
I don't need a camera crew to focus my dSLR either, however:
•It has autofocus, although I often don't use it.
•I can spend more than 1/24th of a second setting focus as things move and I typically shoot stationary objects.
•The camera itself is never in motion while I shoot.
•It has an optical viewfinder.
•Even with an optical viewfinder and a few seconds to set up focus, I still can't get precise focus at f1.4 100% of the time.

You AT LEAST need a focus puller and an external monitor. With fancy camera moves, you need an electronically controlled remote control focus thingy.

Also, I'm not going to argue that cinema lenses SHOULD be as cheap as SLR glass, but they are not. Furthermore, they're just bigger, are made in much smaller quantities, and must have focus rings and geared aperture rings, etc. which make them special order items and thus higher profit margins are needed and thus the absurd prices.
 
Luis Caffesse said:
Speculation on the price is really just meaningless right now without any details on the camera (which hasn't been designed as of yet).

Why not discuss what options/features you'd like to see on it?
I'm assuming that if Jim is willing to take the time to post in here, he'd be willing to listen to whatever feedback they might get from potential users.
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I design microprocessor based systems, so looking at the cost/price issues is something I do. I look at what they are trying to do and see that it could be done in two custom circuits in addition to the sensor. I look at it in terms of a transistor budget.

As for options, since it will be a microprocessor based system, they can implement features very cheaply. What will they do? That is hard to say. Common business practices are to try to feature grade the market (good - better - best) to build in a desire to upgrade to the more expensive model. The truth is that they all cost the same to make. Are they going recognize that we understand how things are made and not try to move us up market from the CE to the LX, or from the LX to the LXE?

The one feature I would like is the abilty to set up the camera with a laptop. Trying to manage all of the set up items via the menu/joystick interface on the DVX100 was a pain. I was always clicking the thing the wrong way. I used the remote some times, but the ability to see such a small set of options at any one time was a limitation. I liked the 6 saved setups with the DVX100, but I would like to manage it from a laptop. I would like to have advanced logging to a laptop. I would like to have the information about a particular shot pulled into my NLE as additonal information.

I was at NAB a couple of years ago and mentioned the desire to have logging available via Bluetooth and the Panasonic guy said "Why would you want that?" Some of these companies are more concerned with selling what they have than listening to what people want to buy. And if you have already invested in the R * D for a product, you had better be selling what you have today, not what you may build tomorrow (see Adam Osborne)
 
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