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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

In Red's case I don't think it's quite that simple. One of the foundations of Red has always been that the founders interact with the customers continuously through social media; that's how Red built their fanboy army. But that kind of aggressive social media presence always creates an equal and opposite backlash, and it's pretty much impossible to expose yourself only to one side.

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That sounds like a fascinating model. Is there any explication of this online that you know of? Tricky to Google due to generic name of company.

It really is fascinating. Professional equipment combined with consumer luxury marketing to sell a dream of overnight success to aspiring filmmakers. A super-secretive company whose marketing is founded on "transparency". Over-promising and under-delivering seen as a feature. Industrial espionage. Patent lawsuits. You can't make this stuff up; it's better than fiction.

Its the apple model.

You put out a reasonably good product to the rumor mill. Stoke the rumors, and then refuse to answer anything specific by saying "its a secret"

For example, the REDray, you ask how its connected to the TV, "its a secret"(looks like HDMI to me), what is the colour depth "its a secret".

whats not a secret? its 4k. Its great for the press as there is a hint of mystery and controversy, shit for anyone that has to use it for a living.

Yeah that's fine but instead of getting angry at bad comments, try to engage them. If that fails, move on, big deal.

It's not personal. It may be for them, but it shouldn't be for you. At the end of the day, their negative social interaction is based around your product, and you as a founder, have to mitigate that.

Nobody is out there digging up personal facts about the guys life and giving him a hard time for it, then its personal.

If the negativity is based around your product, then it's business as usual and should be treated as such.

Never give up.

Its exceptionally hard to not get pissed off. If you work hard on a product, put your money on the line and people get all huffy about the shape and size of screw holes, or the wrong coloured button.

That's why you get paid. Plenty of people build cool stuff in their garages and never distribute it to the world. Lots of people worked hard for the money they pay to these companies, too. That's no excuse for incivility though.

I think the bits of negativity are more about their methods than their products. There aren't many people who find much to fault in the actual cameras, but the way they are marketed and supported is maddening to people used to dealing with the older-school cinema companies like Arri and Panavision.

The attitude is even evident in this last post:

"In 2005, I could see that the powers that be (Sony, Arri, Panavision) were going to attempt to persuade the film industry that 1080P was going to be the digital replacement for film." - for fifteen years years people have been aware that 4k was a sensible equivalent resolution. The first digitally restored film was done at 4k in 1993! The Panavision Genesis (with a Sony sensor) had a 6k horizontal sensor pixel count! The Arri D20 had a 2.8k sensor!

"Sony's digital cinema cameras were $200k+" - cinema cameras are always rented, not bought. Very few people care or even know about their list price. At the time it was bizarre to market a camera like this to the public rather than to rental houses.

"The only way we could do that was through incredible compression technology" - they use JPEG2000. Not even something more specialised like CineForm, which already existed.

"I should mention here that there were many color science and feature upgrades... for free. Again, what company ever offered that?" - cameras rented from a rental house have always had regular firmware upgrades, doing the kind of things Red's upgrades did.

Compare the technical documentation from Red to that of Arri - Arri will shower you with whitepapers full of numbers and graphs, and tell you exactly what is going on in their cameras. The Red colour science is still secret. What are the primaries of the sensor? It's secret. What do the F-LUT controls do? It's secret.

Enough moaning. Red were the first cinema company with a real marketing budget and it was all very strange to people who were all about the right tool for the job, most of those tools being made in limited runs in extremely practical packaging without shiny logos on every corner...

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