Red Scarlet Announcement Info

oh man i can't wait for the hype, spec and banter to die down, its really getting under my skin lately
 
I feel like I have to preface this post with a different message, because I love shooting RED and I only want to shoot EPIC or ALEXA from now on and I'd hate to get "ousted" because I speak my mind.

I'm gonna go ahead and talk..

The speculation comes from 3K for 3K years ago. There are people, as strange as this sounds, that are RED cult members because they think that constantly hailing RED as the second coming is going to get them, and the rest of the world, the ultimate filmmaker's dream. Everything for no money. This happened when the first RED body was announced and it cost 17.5K just to get slightly started.

There were some pretty pissed people, all of whom thought they were about to get the original RED for like 8K or something crazy like that. Some of you may not remember it, but I do.

So, after taking a break from writing an outline and going over to REDUser to read some of the posts... and finding a RECON thread that basically reads like this to me:

"We are not making a camera for the guys who want to only spend 6K and get everything. You will be disappointed."

I have a soft prediction--or it could be a wish.

Me thinks that once everyone sees that RED isn't going to turn over your dream cam for the price of an AF100, and you have to spend F3/RED ONE money to get what today's working world considers firepower (F3, RED MX, EPIC, ALEXA, and whatever gold Canon poops out) they're going to either give up filmmaking altogether... because they will never get beyond the camera, or they'll finally realize the tools are already here to show your talent, and then they'll go out and pick up GH2's or the next alias/moire free 1080P DSLR offering...

..And then, they'll shoot. There won't be anymore speculation and hyper-chatter about the next big thing. At least never as much as there was the past two years. A lot of people will find out that they don't have what it takes and quit, some will stick to it and try to serve content to a content-starved globe and they'll probably get better, others will strike oil-and-or-gold and shoot up to the top of the dogpile and they'll look back and say...

Damn... I can't believe I didn't just grab a DSLR sooner and shoot...


And that'll be the end of it. Well, aside from the tech wars... you really can't get rid of those... or can you?







At least that would be a pretty awesome scenario.



Totally agree. There comes a point where your needs are met given the scale of your production capabilities. I have worked for the last year on a 30 min. film. If they think most of what we did was about the camera - 2 DSLR's, they are sadly mistaken. The real cost of doing a production is in human hours and no matter how much the price of cameras go down it cannot make up for the energy and devotion it takes to make an imaginative and coherent film.
 
Yep, I just did a budget breakdown with a producer last weekend.

The cost of rental for a Red MX package was dwarfed by the costs of crew and cast labor, locations and production design.

It always comes down to the human labor and passion - whether that cost is free (passion) or a union rate, it's people who make movies, not the latest technology.
 
...The speculation comes from 3K for 3K years ago.

Yup.

The moment RED made that announcement, it drew in a huge crowd of people who are interested in film making (aka hobbyists), but are not (and don't plan to be) paid filmmakers. So the whole "get a camera and pay it through paying jobs" is (and will remain) a foreign concept to them.

The "damage" was done 3 years ago and (maybe) won't go away until November 3rd.
 
Nov.3 is really really soon, getting all pushy and whiny at this point doesn't make much sense to me :)
 
Since the S35 Scarlet is now in the Epic family I assume (we'll see) the Scarlet will remain a 2/3" 3K camera. This is still great for certain special situtations (stop motion and helicopters come to mind), but if you've been shooting with some version of S35/APS-C sized sensor, would you really want to go back to 2/3"?

I'm not looking for a flame war, but my thinking is that resolution doesn't tell a story, but DOF and color do help tell stories. I want to see if the F3 with S-Log and November's v1.2 firmware with color indexing really does deliver 14.5 stops with the same test SCCE said Alexa delivers 14.5 steps, which it is purported to do.

After seeing the number of threads deleted and people banned "those two" sites, I really don't go there much anymore.
 
Canon got away with it because Canon didn't have a clue what they had. The "DSLR Craze" is the greatest mess up in digital cinema history as far as I'm concerned LOL, regardless of my opinions on what it's caused.

I wouldn't say "mess up"... maybe more "unpredicted sidestep" - and that's not a euphemism.

A lot of people put down the DSLR craze and I'm not sure why. I think it was best thing to happen to digital cinema history. It was a real grass roots movement that energized both new filmmakers and established DPs.

DSLRs changed the market radically and was the real driving force behind the quick development of affordable large sensor video cameras. The other manufacturers just couldn't ignore the threat from a camera that cost only $2,000, but more importantly, they saw that there was a market for that type of camera and money could be made!

Sure, the technology wasn't perfect. But it was first generation technology and that goes with the territory. But in time, things get refined and things get better.

I think what really irks RED and some RED fans is that DSLRs took away a lot of RED's limelight. DSLRs came onto the scene just as RED One was being deployed in 2008 and the attention suddenly shifted to DSLRs.

Totally agree!
 
Since the S35 Scarlet is now in the Epic family I assume (we'll see) the Scarlet will remain a 2/3" 3K camera.
That "the S35 Scarlet is now in the Epic family" is a subject of debate. About a year ago, Scarlet S35 became the Epic-S. More recently, Jim Jannard made two posts on RedUser about Red's forthcoming products that omitted reference to the Epic-S, seemingly intentionally. When asked about Epic-S, he cryptically replied, "The camera you want is at the end of the year." It may remain the Epic-S, be a Scarlet model, or end up some other, totally new model. That is what has sparked much of the speculation regarding Scarlet -- that is, will Red drop the 2/3-inch models in favor of an S35/APS-C Scarlet, keep them and add a large-sensor Scarlet, keep everything as was previously announced (including the Epic-S), or what? So it may not be as simple as "the S35 Scarlet is now in the Epic family."
 
I think we'll have to wait before we can say anything for certain - fortunately that wait is a short one.

And I think we can pretty fairly surmise that within a couple of weeks we will have much more news about at least two great new options for digital cinematography.
 
That "the S35 Scarlet is now in the Epic family" is a subject of debate. About a year ago, Scarlet S35 became the Epic-S. More recently, Jim Jannard made two posts on RedUser about Red's forthcoming products that omitted reference to the Epic-S, seemingly intentionally. When asked about Epic-S, he cryptically replied, "The camera you want is at the end of the year." It may remain the Epic-S, be a Scarlet model, or end up some other, totally new model. That is what has sparked much of the speculation regarding Scarlet -- that is, will Red drop the 2/3-inch models in favor of an S35/APS-C Scarlet, keep them and add a large-sensor Scarlet, keep everything as was previously announced (including the Epic-S), or what? So it may not be as simple as "the S35 Scarlet is now in the Epic family."

Yeah, but the S35 Scarlet chassis probably never existed. They only ever showed prototypes of 2/3" fixed and 2/3" interchangeable (shown back in 2009). In all these years they never ever showed an S35 Scarlet and info in it has always been TBD. RED is not known for being able to keep a secret. If they had it working, they would have shown it. So IMO, there is no S35 Scarlet.

All they can do is de-feature an Epic and make it Epic-S, but lately there has been a lot of doubt as to whether they can do that (even Jannard admitted this in one of his post). The problem is how can they take out over $15K in cost ($28K Epic vs. $13K Epic-S) if they're using the same chassis and more or less same boards. I don't think it's realistic unless they're willing to make a much smaller profit margin, but not a loss because Jannard has said he will not sell cameras at a loss. But then this Epic-S could cannibalize Epic sales or anger Epic owners so again, it might not be a wise business decision. I guess we'll find out on the 3rd.
 
At some point, whether now or later, RED will make a low end S35 camera regardless of what they wind up calling it. It is now and always has been part of the modular system road map. No it won't be Epic, probably 4k not 5k max resolution with about half the processing power of Epic.
The only question is where price will fall. It won't likely be consumer priced under $3k though. I would expect more like F3 price range.
 
Lookie here

Lookie here

This is a HUGE tease. A Red Light Field (Lytros) camera??? Selectable focus in post. Holy.... wow.

One thing I will say is that we are working on multiple focus and depth map (think Lytros) but with wicked high resolution... The prototype is incredible. Don't tell Gizmodo or Engadget. :-)

Jim
 
I was there at 9am the first day of NAB in line at the RED tent the year they announced 3k for 3k (was that 08 or 09?). You know the only thing I think they were able to succeed in doing that day? Turning all filmmaking forums into a place for tech nerds to get off. I hope once all those people hear the announcement on the 3rd and are dissapointed, which they will be, will either leave or just sit back and talk about filmmaking again.

This place was different before then.
 
I was there at 9am the first day of NAB in line at the RED tent the year they announced 3k for 3k (was that 08 or 09?). You know the only thing I think they were able to succeed in doing that day? Turning all filmmaking forums into a place for tech nerds to get off. I hope once all those people hear the announcement on the 3rd and are dissapointed, which they will be, will either leave or just sit back and talk about filmmaking again.

This place was different before then.

+10
 
I was there at 9am the first day of NAB in line at the RED tent the year they announced 3k for 3k (was that 08 or 09?). You know the only thing I think they were able to succeed in doing that day? Turning all filmmaking forums into a place for tech nerds to get off. I hope once all those people hear the announcement on the 3rd and are dissapointed, which they will be, will either leave or just sit back and talk about filmmaking again.

This place was different before then.

I think we should all applaud Red and declare that we're joining their back order list -- for the sole and exclusive purpose of pushing Panasonic, Sony, Canon, JVC, and whoever else to compete -- to offer better products at better prices.


The Sony F3 was a response to the Red One, and to a limited extent the Panasonic AF-100 was, in part, a response to the then-anticipated Scarlet.


If this new Scarlet turns in to the sensation of the online forums -- we may end up with better, cheaper cameras with superior codecs released to compete with Red.
 
The thing is that Jim Jannard caves in. Since JVC is threatening to introduce a consumer 4K camera for less than $10,000 Jim will be under a lot of pressure to be the first.
 
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JVC has a track record of being first in the consumer market with these type of advancements but they certainly have their own issues in the initial implementation. Trust me I know I got a very early HD100u... lots of issues. Not to say that they didn't and won't produce a decent camera with great new advancements I just don't expect them to have a rock solid implementation of 4k. The multiple SD cards recording the data already worries me but who knows it could be a home run I guess we just have to wait and see when all the cameras are out and in the field being tested.
 
In 2004 I bought the JVC JY-HD10 in 2004 and my only complaint was that it did not support 720p at 60 frames per second. But other than that I had very few complaints and never had a problem with split screens and chromatic aberrations. Remember JVC will introduce a consumer 4K camera so don't expect professional features like interchangeable lenses.
 
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