Request: Backward Compatibility: SD

Jay A. Kelley

Jay A. Kelley

Well-known member
Yesterday a friend asked me over to inquire about my SDX900 and if it was a good camera. We spoke about it for a while and the subject of the HDX900 came up. Well the details of the cameras aside, this talk gave rise to another subject that causes many camerapeople a lot of grief.

There are no legacy cameras of a professional grade. I own an SDX900 and it's a thing of beauty. However, many production companies for stations like Bravo, Discovery, etc. Still ask me to dub my material to MiniDV before shipping it out... MINIDV!!!

Like it or not, SD is still a major player in the industry and will be for a few years to come.

My request: Please, oh God please consider allowing the firewire ports the ability to output a 16:9 and/or 4:3 signal at 480p 60i or 30p or 24p so that we can continue to service these clients until they make the transition to HD.

There are so few broadcast/professional grade cameras out there that support this, I have no doubt people like my friend from yesterday would be JUMPING at the camera is they knew it supported both sides of the fence.

I am already aware that REDCine will output 480p. I am asking that these features be included on a live feed situation so that I can plug a firestore into the camera and then hand it to my clients at the end of the day.

This suggestion may be a bit late. Or perhaps you have all already thought of it.. I hope so.

Jay Kelley
 
Im sure this is a far too late request, but I think many would make use of a standard SD output on the camera too. Ok, maybe not great for resolution or focus but as LCD doesnt give the best contrast/colour rendition it'd be cool to be able to see the light levels on an SD CRT.
 
There are no analogue video outputs on RED. There are no SD outputs on RED. If you need them, you'll need to get a little converter box, for instance: http://www.aja.com/html/products_converters_HD10MD3.html

We can't let you plug in a firestore because we don't do DV. The firestore only undestands DV and we don't have any DV compression chips inside the camera! I don't think there is a firewire on the camera anyway, only on the RED DRIVE, and that's for connection to your NLE to get data off the drive.

It would be lovely to make RED work like a DV camera, but really, it's hard enough making a 4K Digital Cinema camera work in the HD world, never mind SD.

You could shoot a lot of 720p to the RED DRIVE though, and give that to the client.

Graeme
 
If you want SD DV to connect to a firestore there is also the Miranda DVC-802/822
It will convert HD-SDI directly to SD DV25 over Firewire, and makes the Red one hell of a DV camera...that's actually pretty sick :-(

It also outputs uncompressed: HD-SDI, SDI, Composite, YC, Analog stereo out (If the Red embeds audio on the HD-SDI)

Only downside is the Price: $9.500,-
 
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Graeme - wasn't there supposed to be Firewire 800 on the camera? I'm assuming you were referring to FW400 in your post?
 
In that case, how would one get data off of the camera's internal flash drive? Would that require the external drive to pipe data through to a computer? Or am I completely missing something?
 
And is it too late to record to mini DV cassette ?

I know you're talking about a tapeless workflow, but mini DV cassette is going to be around for a few years, so it'd be cool if it was included.
 
I don't know why anyone sees this as an issue, there's HD SDI to SD SDI and firewire converters.
I can understand the need to hand something to the client at the end of the day. Clients are what clients are, they're the ones holding your dollars so it pays to march to their drum.
However it'd seem pretty dumb to just be recording to what the client wants at the end of the day. The power of RED is that you can give the client what they want but if they come back and want it in a higher res you've already got it. You don't have to go back and shoot it again at some outrageous cost.
The really big question will be what will the client pay for the 4K image, I'll bet nothing like what they'd have paid to go back and shoot it on 35mm!
 
The inbuilt FlashRAM slot is new, and I'm not sure what connectors or form factor the FLASH will have, so can't get you a quick answer on that one!

Graeme
 
Oh - and Graeme... Can I get a SIM-slot for the RED and a built-in 3GP encoder so I can instantly send MMS video-messages to my friends' mobilephones straight out of the RED? 15 fps at 176 x 128 pixels in a lousy compression so it doesn't take up too much bandwidth? Thanks!

;-) ;-) ;-)
 
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