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I guess it depends on whether or not his investment was for purely financial gain. From what I've read, it sounds like he was in it for the love of film. He i

I guess it depends on whether or not his investment was for purely financial gain. From what I've read, it sounds like he was in it for the love of film. He is directly responsible for revolutionizing the film and TV industries. That's a pretty good ROI if you ask me.

bsder 11y ago
> From what I've read, it sounds like he was in it for the love of film. Ayup, he's a big photography/movie buff. > He is directly responsible for revolutionizing the film and TV industries. That's a pretty good ROI if you ask me. It's not clear he did revolutionize the industry. Digital was obvious to everyone. The question wasn't whether it was going to happen, it was when it was going to happen. By doing it when RED did, they had a LOT of problems that the companies doing it now don't. They were developing sensors in VLSI technologies that really weren't up to the task. They had gigantic cables leading to a refrigerator cabinet of disk drives because storage technology wasn't up to the task (small disks, slow transfer rates, no SSD's). They were continuously swapping batteries because battery and power management technology wasn't up to the task. All of these things improved simply with time. VLSI nodes changed to 12" wafers. Disks got way bigger and then switched to SSD's as well as developed faster versions of SATA. Lithium batteries came online and lots of power management technologies improved. I remember talking to the folks at RED at one of the NAB shows. I had a very nice technical conversation with the engineers as everybody else was drooling over the booth bunnies (some inconsequential Hollywood actresses). My first question was simply: "Every engineering student has effectively been required to purchase a personal computer since about 1995. Why aren't film majors required to outright purchase one of these cameras are part of their tuition?" After they both broke up in laughter, they explained to me that the yield on the sensors was so bad that it completely gated their ability to ship cameras. They were estimating that it was going to take 2 more VLSI process nodes to clear the backlog of orders. It looks like they were about right.
- stephen_g 11y ago
  > They had gigantic cables leading to a refrigerator cabinet of disk drives because storage technology wasn't up to the task (small disks, slow transfer rates, no SSD's) This was only at the very early prototype stage, of course. By the time they shipped, the cameras could record to hard drives and Compact Flash cards using their wavelet-based raw codec. Later the cameras were upgradable with a module swap to use SSDs. 4K onto CF cards was a huge thing at the time - at this stage, a lot of people were still using HDCAM SR tape and only a few cameras recorded onto file based media, like the Panasonic HVX200 that recorded 720p to PCMCIA cards!

bsder 11y ago

> From what I've read, it sounds like he was in it for the love of film. Ayup, he's a big photography/movie buff. > He is directly responsible for revolutionizing the film and TV industries. That's a pretty good ROI if you ask me. It's not clear he did revolutionize the industry. Digital was obvious to everyone. The question wasn't whether it was going to happen, it was when it was going to happen. By doing it when RED did, they had a LOT of problems that the companies doing it now don't. They were developing sensors in VLSI technologies that really weren't up to the task. They had gigantic cables leading to a refrigerator cabinet of disk drives because storage technology wasn't up to the task (small disks, slow transfer rates, no SSD's). They were continuously swapping batteries because battery and power management technology wasn't up to the task. All of these things improved simply with time. VLSI nodes changed to 12" wafers. Disks got way bigger and then switched to SSD's as well as developed faster versions of SATA. Lithium batteries came online and lots of power management technologies improved. I remember talking to the folks at RED at one of the NAB shows. I had a very nice technical conversation with the engineers as everybody else was drooling over the booth bunnies (some inconsequential Hollywood actresses). My first question was simply: "Every engineering student has effectively been required to purchase a personal computer since about 1995. Why aren't film majors required to outright purchase one of these cameras are part of their tuition?" After they both broke up in laughter, they explained to me that the yield on the sensors was so bad that it completely gated their ability to ship cameras. They were estimating that it was going to take 2 more VLSI process nodes to clear the backlog of orders. It looks like they were about right.

stephen_g 11y ago
> They had gigantic cables leading to a refrigerator cabinet of disk drives because storage technology wasn't up to the task (small disks, slow transfer rates, no SSD's) This was only at the very early prototype stage, of course. By the time they shipped, the cameras could record to hard drives and Compact Flash cards using their wavelet-based raw codec. Later the cameras were upgradable with a module swap to use SSDs. 4K onto CF cards was a huge thing at the time - at this stage, a lot of people were still using HDCAM SR tape and only a few cameras recorded onto file based media, like the Panasonic HVX200 that recorded 720p to PCMCIA cards!