
Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks - bgentry
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/03/reds-scarlet-gets-official-4k-for-under-10k/
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winestock
I did a little searching and found that Panavision _rents_ its Genesis line of
digital cameras for $4,000 _per day_. Granted "no one pays book rate," and
that price includes accessories, and the two cameras may not be equivalent.
Nevertheless, why hasn't Panavision been disrupted a long time ago? Are their
cameras really that good?

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wmf
In some sense the Genesis and its ilk were already disrupted by the Red One,
although I question how price-sensitive this market is. Does Peter Jackson
care about the difference between $4K per day and $400 per day?

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stephen_g
Well, Peter Jackson has something like 36 epics (18 3D setups) on The Hobbit
so I think he'd care a little about that if they were renting (they aren't
though, as far as I know).

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dcminter
He certainly seems quite enthusiastic about them in this making-of promo:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apD2CFEJ0MY>

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davidjohnstone
As desirable as the specs are, this comment on Canon Rumors balances things
up:

"To those fawning after the Red...sure, it looks nice, but the poor color
rendering, impossible proprietary workflow, and constantly-in-need-of-updates
software make the camera a nightmare, imo, to use. Canon's footage has nicer
skin tones than I've ever seen out of a Red. There's a reason so much tv is
shot with the Alexa, rather than the red, and why dSLRs are used on ads--1080p
with nice and standardized colors out of camera is much better for post. Red
is cool, but what you get in terms of extra tech you pay for in having to
figure out how to use it efficiently. Canon's cine camera does seem overpriced
for what you get, though--in that no man's land the AF100 and F3 already
inhabit except even more expensive..."

From
[http://www.canonrumors.com/forum/index.php/topic,2059.msg410...](http://www.canonrumors.com/forum/index.php/topic,2059.msg41081.html#msg41081)

In other news, all these $10k-$20k cameras, zooms from $45k and primes for $7k
make still photography look really cheap.

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stephen_g
From someone who has processed and edited a lot of RED footage, this is pretty
much complete hogwash.

RED cameras use a RAW codec called REDCODE, which records the raw sensor data
with lossless compression. Almost every other camera records RGB data that has
been through gamma correction, a colour curve, sharpening (ugh..), and a whole
lot of other image processing. These other cameras therefore give you very
little flexibility in post production for grading and so on.

This gives the _illusion_ that RED cameras have worse colour rendering -
because it is not doing much image processing in camera, the un-processed
image looks very flat - and it requires some skill to actually expose the
image when you're shooting it, and properly process it in post production
(this is a professional camera, remember). The amount of crap you see because
of errors on set and in processing... But footage from somebody who knows how
to shoot it properly is easily on par with the Alexa (which produces lovely
skin tones but is very low resolution) and miles better than DSLR cameras with
their aliasing and moire that comes from the line skipping and pixel binning
that they need to do to get a decent frame rate out of a still camera sensor -
not to mention the 8 bit low bitrate RGB codecs they use which are hopelessly
lacking as an acquisition format.

And the workflow is sooo hard - I mean, it's such a battle to get RED footage
into Premiere for example (File -> Import -> OK). And only pretty much _every
single grading package, every single non-linear editor and compositing
package_ supports RED footage...

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jermy
As only a minor nitpick (my excuse is that this is my day job), you've got it
the wrong way round - REDCODE is actually storing data as RGB, whereas 'every
other camera' is almost certainly using a MPEG-based codec and storing it as
YUV with chroma subsampling - somewhere between 4:1:1/4:2:0 to 4:2:2 depending
on the camera in use.

As with any lossless compression, it's a compromise between having almost all
of the data shot to work with versus pretty much having to always do a full
grade on any content you get and the additional online storage space needed in
post-production.

~~~
stephen_g
Are all the MPEG codecs YUV? I know MPEG2 is but I thought MPEG4/H.264 wasn't.
Now that I think about it, you're probably right about that part (as for other
codecs, I know the ProRes codec that the Alexa typically shoots (unless you
use the ArriRAW recorder but hardly anyone does yet) definitely is YUV, but
the HDCAM tapes that some of the more expensive Sony cameras shoot isn't).

But the point still stands that RGB and YUV codecs aren't RAW like REDCODE is.

REDCODE itself isn't exactly RGB. It actually is pretty interesting - it does
store the red, green and blue pixels separably, but it's not usually
classified as RGB since it stores two green channels for every red and blue
channel (because of the way the bayer filter on the sensor is arranged -
there's twice as many green pixels as red and blue), and because those
channels haven't been demosaiced/debayered[1].

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing>

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rakkhi
"They were going to publish all this information on their website, but they’re
apparently under attack". What's that about?

~~~
bgentry
it was either a DDoS or just the fact that >25,000 fans were constantly
hammering the site trying to get an update. Probably also due in large part to
poor infrastructure planning on their part and inefficient software (the
announcement was supposed to be made on reduser.net, a site runs that runs
their PHP user forum)

~~~
stephen_g
Given that there have been similar announcements in the past on RedUser which
have not shut the forum down, and the fact that the servers were apparently
upgraded a few weeks ago in preparation for this one, a DDOS sounds likely to
me.

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ck2
How large is a two hour 4K datastream?

Hmm 50 megabytes per second x 7200 seconds = 352 gigabytes

That actually seems manageable these days with a RAID10 of 2TB drives?

I guess you could have up to ten hours of footage cut down to two.

~~~
vilya
I'm not sure where the article got that 50 Mb/sec figure from, but it sounds a
bit low. Uncompressed, it's more like 50 Mb per _frame_ \- 1.5 Gb/sec
(4096x2160, 3 channels, each channel is 16 bits, up to 30 frames/sec).

According to their tech specs page* there are two compression options: 18:1
and 3:1. The former gets it down to about 84 Mb/sec, but it's difficult to
know what kind of a quality hit you'll be taking. With the latter it's still
500 Mb/sec.

Film-makers generally want to capture source footage at the highest quality
possible so I'd guess most will film at the 3:1 compression level. If that
assumption holds, 2 hours of footage is approximately 3.5 Tb of data.

That is still a fairly manageable amount of data though. For comparison, The
Tale of Despereaux - an animated movie which came out in 2008 and started
production several years before that - filled up a 192 Tb disk cluster.

* <http://www.red.com/products/scarlet#product-tech-specs>

Edit: I think I might have made some incorrect assumptions about the REDCODE
raw format, so my figures above are probably wrong. Sorry for any confusion!

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protomyth
This announcement puts a tad bit of a damper on Canon's earlier in the day.
Your cost for the Scarlet will be around $15k in shooting form. This is still
cheaper than the new Canon. Canon uses cheaper media, but Scarlet has a better
recording format.

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bgentry
Only now did I get a link to the official press release since Red's site was
down for several hours starting at 6PM: <http://www.red.com/press/scarlet-all-
grown-up>

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Titanous
I was really hoping they'd deliver on the original fixed-lens "3K for $3k"
version, but that was obviously too good to be true.

Now you can build a usable RED rig for $15k instead of $25k.

~~~
bgentry
I'm still holding out hope that they do target a lower market with a future
model. But, since they no longer plan on announcing products before they're
done, we'll have to wait and see.

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JabavuAdams
How should I learn to use one of these?

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protomyth
Fxphd has some traing material on the Epic that would work for e Scarlet
probably.

