Nikon to acquire RED

Thing is ARRI pivoted and covered the new tech pretty well, and had the existing business links into the rental market allowed them to continue unflustered. Red got the layman hype because they seemed to make high quality available to more people at an achievable (but still high) price point. The industry didn't really care though. They rent cameras, not buy them and they were already affording the old stuff.

- They were once the "hot startup" promising acceptable resolution (filmic 4K when nobody needed it, everything was 2K at most). But they oversold resolution at the cost of bizarrely slow-to-decompress proprietary RAW format and some loss to image quality, and stayed true to that. Arri came to market later and they did the right thing - picked convenience and stability over super-duper-extra-super-high-res. - Their cameras would routinely overheat - Cameras would have severe reliability issues with software updates - Some haptics/controls felt wanky at times - They wanted hard to sell you "just the body", for "cheap cheap cheap", but it meant that to have something usable you would need the whole loadout - which would ship in pieces, with periods of delay for availability, and the quality of some components would be meh. Want an EVF? Wait 2 years for one to ship. Want functioning grip? Separate. Want etc. etc.? Separate. I.e. they were very inviting to "now you, as a DOP, can finally own a camera", but owning "the camera and the kit required for it - sans lenses" would be a painful proposition.

This was certainly the case in 2006-2010s, dunno if it has gotten much better lately. It does seem that RED kept to the theme of severely overselling their users extreme picture resolutions, at the cost of having the files super-painful to process, proprietary codecs, and lackings in other areas such as dynamic range.

Now its perfectly fine to dislike 'modern' approach, but in digital era that has absolutely nothing to do with some lens/sensor combo and everything how director decides given scene or whole movie should 'feel'.

It's really noticeable when you fire off a DPSS LASER at 532nm. You can see both the IR beam and the converted visible light beam, making the LASER appear a weird green-purple color.

I'm interested in this, do you have a link?

It’s 100% not the camera. Portrait of a Lady on Fire was shot on RED. You can do virtually anything with digital cameras these days. Steve Yedlin proved he could make digital look like film beyond anyone’s ability to distinguish them.

Netflix just rushes everything so it’s all a similar level of not good.

Isn't this confounded by who chooses to buck the trend? IMO, it's the very skilled DPs who are not only skilled, have earned enough social capital to experiment and have excellent reasons for using old soviet lenses, or lenses designed for use on the moon or some other exotic origin story. This self-selecting bunch are likely to produce outstanding work regardless of the equipment.

But, yes, they don't make dedicated camcorders...

Which looks like it's patenting debayering. However I'm not a patent lawyer so I don't know.

I suspect that Nikon were using something like jpeg2000 to store raw frames, and thats why RED were getting all pissy.

When looking at a patent check the "Claims" section. An infringing device would have to perform those steps in the order provided for the patent holder to have a claim.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I've had a lot of dealing with patents.

Plus, you get new business and a new product range you don't have yet. That alone justifies an acquisition.

My only point is that their hearts were in the right place, but they may have ultimately done their best work as instigators.

As well, despite my appreciation for their company, I never liked the images from their cameras.

I was acutely aware of it, shooting projects on horrible looking mini DV and expensive film stock.

No question they spurred progress, I'd just envisioned that they would continue to carry the torch with all of their piss and vinegar.

Now Black Magic Design produces ~$2000 cameras that produce consistently better images than RED to this day.

But the Red One was definitely still extraordinary because they managed to make a relative-cheap production 4K camera in 2007.

That said, the impact was muted because people didn’t really care about 4K as much in 2007. I don’t think ARRI even released a 4K camera until years later.

The Sony camera can only record up to 4K in-body, and only with h.265 or similar formats up to 10 bit.

The Nikon can record full-frame RAW with 12-bit log, which is far more useful for colorists to work with than anything the Sony can record.

Even the Nikon DX crop mode has more pixels and more HDR range than the Sony!

They’ve never shown an interest in competing outside of that.

However, from what I see, Canon is filling a very specific niche and they're good at it. RED is the same.

So, it will not level the big three "capability" wise, but Nikon will have a hand (and feet) in cine market, which will provide them great feedback, development avenues and some cash hopefully.

So, they'll be able to compete in one way or another.

Also, the TV and movie industry makes heavy use of Canon DSLR kit for their work.

It’s an interesting acquisition, and I wish them luck. The rub will be cultural clash. I don’t know anything about RED’s culture, but I know a bit about Nikon’s. They are … less-than-flexible. Culture clash has been the fly in the ointment, for most of Nikon’s partnerships.

JPEG is in perceptual (~log) light. Out of the tap, terrible.

It's also compressed.

There are lossless and lossy compressed RAW formats.

In Still cameras, it usually means pre-debayering.

On film cameras, it is a little more muddled but usually just means linear colourspace and higher bit depth.

I realize it's not apples to apples, but I first heard about the Red One 4k in 2008, about 16 years ago, but it doesn't feel like prices have dropped in the same way that computer prices have. In fact, it's hard to even get a used one from 2008 for less than a grand right now.

I'm not even claiming that it's overpriced, not everything can drop to near-zero-margins like computer hardware can and make up for it in scale. I just really want to use a pro-grade camera and I don't want to spend $10+k to do it.

New servers are also super expensive, and don't directly market to consumer, but their used value is basically nothing. You can buy a used server on eBay, even with relatively nice specs for a consumer, for less than a grand, often substantially less than a grand (mine was $150 for 128gb of RAM and 24 cores).

It doesn't appear that pro-grade cameras fall the same way though.

That’s where my analogy with servers falls apart; it’s not weird for large companies like Amazon or Apple to purchase thousands of servers, which they periodically need to upgrade, and thus liquidate the old ones. Simple supply and demand dictates that the more supply we have, the lower the price (generally speaking).

I agree that if intel didn’t sell millions and millions of CPUs the price would definitely be much higher.