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

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

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56 pointsbgentry52 comments

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?

I'm pretty sure the whole point of RED is to disrupt companies like Panavision. I suspect people still use their cameras because that's what they were trained on, and there is significant brand loyalty in the business.

The Genesis is a digital camera that pretends to be a film camera, just like Avid is a NLE that pretends to be a film cutter.

Genesis filmography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_(camera)#Filmography

RED filmography: http://www.imdb.com/company/co0203252/

I actually have a lot of experience with Panavision and I can tell you that price isn't even close to what someone will pay there. Genesis are almost 7 years old and that certainly isn;t their breadwinner anymore (imagine a camera THAT good 7 years ago). That being said, Panavision is still very expensive.

People don't pay just for the technology at Panavision though, they pay for service and lenses. True you can buy a 10k camera, but as soon as it breaks, production stops and you are losing money trying to find a new camera. Your PV camera goes down and I can guarantee they have a new camera on set or a technician fixing it very soon. You probably even have a backup on set for free. Generally though, PV cameras just work, and I didn't see a digital cinema camera that was as easy to use and similar to a film camera as the Genesis until Arri's Alexa came out last year.

PVs lenses are also spectacular and you generally can't rent them without renting a PV camera. Most cinematographers that wan't the PV look will use any camera, just as long as they are using the PV lenses.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Exactly. I'm sure the New Zealand taxpayer will cover the difference.

http://tvnz.co.nz/business-news/20m-rebate-hobbit-in-first-y...

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).

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

so we are shooting a $500M movie, $star$ is costing us $250M of that and the advertising budget is another $300M

Can we see if we can get a deal on the camera rental?

$500M movie? The most expensive movies ever made top out at $300M (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films ). Your average major studio film is more likely to be under $50 million.

And $4000 a day can add up pretty quick. 50 days is approximately the average number of days for filming. That's $200,000 per camera. Since you frequently want to do shoot from a few angles, you're talking a half million or more just for cameras.

Now, for a normal Hollywood blockbuster, at $50M, that's significant but not too bad. For an independent film, which will likely have a budget under $10M, and sometimes even under $1M, that's a pretty substantial portion of your costs.

So cameras that cost $10K to buy outright will make a big difference in this space. All of a sudden, things that were prohibitively expensive to independent filmmakers are within reach. Independent films allow people to have more artistic creativity given that there's less at stake; they can also be the "long tail" of filmmaking, covering more niche interests than a big blockbuster is going to have to. So this could be a fairly significant disruptive innovation, if these turn out to be worth it.

Of course, it's not quite as good a deal as it might seem at first, since I believe the price quoted is just for the very core of the camera, containing the sensor, and not lenses, which are where some of the real cost is. But still, these will allow people to do 4K filming who never have been able to do so before.

We can look forward to better looking independent films and pornography, at least.

A lot of which are already shot on things like the Canon 5d - but yes it's good news

Canon 5d doesn't autofocus during a video shoot, so you need to hire someone to pull focus. Not very practical for indie films. Ironically, it works better for big productions where they have a guy to do that already.

It's also part of crazy Hollywood acounting. The more you can charge against the film the better, that's why flops like Titanic and Empire strikes back still haven't made a profit

You don't want the film company to actually own anything because then the people owed money might have something to go after

That only makes sense if you have a stake in Panavision. There are tons of film makers who don't have an interest in spending more money.

I might not have understood properly, but the idea is for these companies to basically always be "losing" money on paper. Many popular movies are "flops" on paper because of accounting reasons. If these companies have 100 RED cameras lying around, creditors will have something to come after.

The studio could be standing between the filmmakers and the camera providers, pointing the filmmaker to the public rate sheets while actually paying much less.

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...

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

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...

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.

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

The Wikipedia page of REDCODE claims that it contains the Bayer-patterned subpixel data, so it's more comparable to RAW images than rendered RGB images. But according to that page, it's also lossy format, which makes it quite interesting technically.

I'm pleased to be corrected by somebody who knows what they're talking about :-)

> impossible proprietary workflow

Speaking from experience, the workflow isn't hard at all. Do you have to know what you're doing? Sure. But the same could be said for just about anything.

> [...] and why dSLRs are used on ads--1080p [...] out of camera is much better for post

Agreed. If your final delivery format is 1080p, it's a lot easier not to have to mess with transcoding.

impossible proprietary workflow

I know this wasn't your comment, but what exactly is impossible and proprietary about their workflow? AFAIK Redcode RAW is supported by Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Avid, etc..

Reading up a bit on REDCODE (simply by hitting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDCODE) the fact that the audio is uncompressed amused me. With the bandwidth spent on the video content, I guess 4 channels of 24-bit PCM at 48 kHz just doesn't matter. :)

The REDCODE format is proprietary - any of the above need to have the Red quicktime or AMA plugin to access the content.

For amusement, see 'Baselight Kompressor' for what a linux-based grading system has to do to handle red content.

You don't need to use a Kompressor (Mac Pro) to decode RED on a Baselight. Baselight supports RED natively on Linux (including RED Rocket support).

Kompressor is only there for handling codecs for which there is no (official) Linux implementation (ie ProRes), or connecting to storage systems that don't have native Linux drivers (like Avid Unity).

Disclaimer: I'm one of the Baselight developers.

Ah, apologies, I'll eat my hat (or buy you a beer sometime - you folks Covent Garden based?).

I had assumed Kompressor also handled REDCODE with its hardware requirements, as well the Avid Connection Manager and other Quicktime codecs.

Hey Jermy, no worries ;-) We're in Soho, so within spitting distance. Beer sounds good!

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.

Of course, when we're talking cost, you'll most likely have the Scarlet on a support system, so it's an easy matter to add a Ki Pro Mini on the back, attach with HD-SDI, and record ProRes 422 (at 1080p) onto CF cards at a wide variety of bitrates.

Extra cost ($3k). Compared to $50k+ for Alexa, it's still a great price/deal.

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?

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.

Most canon lenses can only be used in manual focus mode, the motors make way too much noise. That's why good cinematic lenses are so expensive.

Well, that's the way they would be used with this rig, as it doesn't support AF.

According to the announcement, Scarlet does support autofocus on the Canon mount:

"Price for Scarlet-X, including Brain, Side SSD and Canon aluminum mount (auto-focus support) is $9,750" http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?65760-SCARLET-AN...

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

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

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)

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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

How should I learn to use one of these?

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

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