6 ms·

Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks

56 points by bgentry 15y ago

rakkhi 15y ago
"They were going to publish all this information on their website, but they’re apparently under attack". What's that about?
- wmf 15y ago
  The site is (barely) working now; maybe it just couldn't handle all the fanboys.
- bgentry 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
Titanous 15y ago
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.
- stephen_g 15y ago
  Ummm... The RED ONE MX was $25K for the body only... It was more like $30K for a shootable package...
- bgentry 15y ago
  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.
winestock 15y ago
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?
- wmf 15y ago
  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?
  - Anti-Ratfish 15y ago
    Exactly. I'm sure the New Zealand taxpayer will cover the difference. http://tvnz.co.nz/business-news/20m-rebate-hobbit-in-first-year-production-4491897 http://tvnz.co.nz/business-news/20m-rebate-hobbit-in-first-y...
  - Aqua_Geek 15y ago
    I think there are a number of tiers in the market. Peter Jackson probably doesn't care about the difference in price, but there are a number of student and indie directors/producers who certainly feel the difference between $4k/day and $400/day.
  - forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
    I think Peter Jackson care about the creative possibilities of his tools, as a creative worker he is. In fact, Peter Jackson IS one of the main supporters of RED, making the first videos and shorts with it. Peter Jackson will also care about having to move to strange places to rent a camera and return it, and not being able to broke it in the field if he wants.
  - archangel_one 15y ago
    I bet Peter Jackson cared about $3600/day when he filmed Bad Taste. Or even for LOTR, that would have cost $1.5m over the trilogy, which is about 0.5% of their budget (or possibly more since they would have needed more than one camera) - so not that significant, but money that could be better spent elsewhere.
davidjohnstone 15y ago
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.msg41081.html#msg41081 http://www.canonrumors.com/forum/index.php/topic,2059.msg410... In other news, all these $10k-$20k cameras, zooms from $45k and primes for $7k make still photography look really cheap.
- protomyth 15y ago
  I think Canon Rumors is a little disingenuous (much like MacRumors). The workflow isn't that bad, and the skin tones look good with HDRx. Canon has some fun with formats, not giving a true RAW for video. Neither camera has the true killer feature for a lot of productions: on camera ProRes recording like the Alexa. If Canon had come out with a camera with a good RAW format and on camera ProRes, then I would say Canon is the clear winner. As is, I think Red is a better value.
  - davidjohnstone 15y ago
    I should clarify that the comment was by a forum member, not Canon Rumors themselves. How much does a $10k price difference matter when you live in a world where lenses can cost >$40k?
    - protomyth 15y ago
      Not much, but both cameras can use the cheaper Canon lenses, and these cameras aren't the ones you are putting $40k lenses on unless you are renting. If you are buying the $40k lense you are buying an Epic, Alexa, or high end Sony. $15k for a complete Red rig is pretty good and can be used to do some serious work.
protomyth 15y ago
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.
JabavuAdams 15y ago
How should I learn to use one of these?
- protomyth 15y ago
  Fxphd has some traing material on the Epic that would work for e Scarlet probably.
bgentry 15y ago
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 http://www.red.com/press/scarlet-all-grown-up
ck2 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 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!

56 points by bgentry 15y ago

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

wmf 15y ago
The site is (barely) working now; maybe it just couldn't handle all the fanboys.
bgentry 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.

Titanous 15y ago

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.

stephen_g 15y ago
Ummm... The RED ONE MX was $25K for the body only... It was more like $30K for a shootable package...
bgentry 15y ago
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.

winestock 15y ago

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?

wmf 15y ago
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?
- Anti-Ratfish 15y ago
  Exactly. I'm sure the New Zealand taxpayer will cover the difference. http://tvnz.co.nz/business-news/20m-rebate-hobbit-in-first-year-production-4491897 http://tvnz.co.nz/business-news/20m-rebate-hobbit-in-first-y...
- Aqua_Geek 15y ago
  I think there are a number of tiers in the market. Peter Jackson probably doesn't care about the difference in price, but there are a number of student and indie directors/producers who certainly feel the difference between $4k/day and $400/day.
- forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
  I think Peter Jackson care about the creative possibilities of his tools, as a creative worker he is. In fact, Peter Jackson IS one of the main supporters of RED, making the first videos and shorts with it. Peter Jackson will also care about having to move to strange places to rent a camera and return it, and not being able to broke it in the field if he wants.
- archangel_one 15y ago
  I bet Peter Jackson cared about $3600/day when he filmed Bad Taste. Or even for LOTR, that would have cost $1.5m over the trilogy, which is about 0.5% of their budget (or possibly more since they would have needed more than one camera) - so not that significant, but money that could be better spent elsewhere.

davidjohnstone 15y ago

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.msg41081.html#msg41081 http://www.canonrumors.com/forum/index.php/topic,2059.msg410... In other news, all these $10k-$20k cameras, zooms from $45k and primes for $7k make still photography look really cheap.

protomyth 15y ago
I think Canon Rumors is a little disingenuous (much like MacRumors). The workflow isn't that bad, and the skin tones look good with HDRx. Canon has some fun with formats, not giving a true RAW for video. Neither camera has the true killer feature for a lot of productions: on camera ProRes recording like the Alexa. If Canon had come out with a camera with a good RAW format and on camera ProRes, then I would say Canon is the clear winner. As is, I think Red is a better value.
- davidjohnstone 15y ago
  I should clarify that the comment was by a forum member, not Canon Rumors themselves. How much does a $10k price difference matter when you live in a world where lenses can cost >$40k?
  - protomyth 15y ago
    Not much, but both cameras can use the cheaper Canon lenses, and these cameras aren't the ones you are putting $40k lenses on unless you are renting. If you are buying the $40k lense you are buying an Epic, Alexa, or high end Sony. $15k for a complete Red rig is pretty good and can be used to do some serious work.

protomyth 15y ago

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.

JabavuAdams 15y ago

How should I learn to use one of these?

protomyth 15y ago
Fxphd has some traing material on the Epic that would work for e Scarlet probably.

bgentry 15y ago

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 http://www.red.com/press/scarlet-all-grown-up

ck2 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 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!