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Red cameras

Filed in Photo business - April 16, 2007

No, I’m not talking about Soviet era cameras, but this.

60 frames per second of 12 megapixel 12 bit raw images. Option for Canon lens mount. About the price of a two body 1Ds outfit. Goodbye sports photography as an occupation. Hello editing jobs.

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9 Comments

  1. photoburner says:

    That price is deceptive. I saw a post by a videographer on those cameras, and he was impressed, but the unit is modular and by the time you add on the required modules to actually do something you are over $50,000 and heading towards a $100,000

    April 16, 2007 @ 10:18 pm

  2. Colin says:

    photoburner,

    Yeah, the price looked a bit like they were going to say ‘oh, and you need a ….’, but even so USD 50,000 doesn’t buy a lot of person time, and 50k this year, is 30k next year and 20k the year after.

    These will change the way that sport is photographed. Not this summer, maybe, but soon, for sure.

    April 16, 2007 @ 10:23 pm

  3. Barry S says:

    Completely ridiculous. You can get the works for $35K and many filmmakers I know are putting together basic packages in the 20’s. Red is a real revolution in filmmaking and the output is just plain beautiful. From looking at some stills, the tonality is smooth and rich and the images are clear and detailed. The Red codecs are nothing short of brilliant. You will literally not be able to tell the difference between a film shot on Red and one shot on a million dollar 35mm Panavision camera–except that the Red film may look better. The modularity gives filmmakers with different needs the option to put together a package tailored to their needs–you don’t need to buy every option.

    April 17, 2007 @ 2:52 am

  4. Colin says:

    Barry S,

    See, the prices are coming down already :-)

    This machine is definitely going to be important.

    April 17, 2007 @ 9:49 am

  5. matt says:

    Even if you can get the cost down to 20K, you still gotta get it through post somehow. I didn’t see a mention on their site anywhere about what the data rate is, but unless there doing serious in camera compression, some quick math suggests a data rate 3 to 4 times that of 1080i. You might be looking at 600MB/sec, which puts you in the land of fiber channel arrays. Not even that super fancy double quad core Xeon mac pro comes with fiber channel. For that you are going to a rack full of real data center servers. $$$$

    April 17, 2007 @ 2:26 pm

  6. matt says:

    Hmm, I lied. You can get a fiber channel card for the new mac pro. But even the x serve raid only does 400MB/sec, so you would need to hook it up to something else. You’d probably want some SAN like fiber channel switches.

    April 17, 2007 @ 2:57 pm

  7. Barry S says:

    Matt — The codec Graeme Nattress developed is at least as amazing as the camera. I haven’t been keeping up with all the codec flavors, but 4K Redcode Raw is 27 MB/sec. Now pick your jaw up from the floor. :)

    http://www.hdforindies.com/2006/09/amsterdam-ibc-2006-red-news-redcode-4k.html

    April 17, 2007 @ 8:10 pm

  8. matt says:

    That’s pretty impressive. So is the stated RAW data rate.

    “They’ve also talked about 323 MB/sec for 24fps 4K RAW – this would imply about 800 MB/sec for 4K @ 60fps…while I saw several RAID systems capable of this at NAB, they certainly weren’t cheap, small, readily portable, cool, or battery powerable.”

    I’m impressed that they can get that down to 27MB/sec with on camera processing, but that also means you are doing about 30 to 1 compression ratio. That can’t be even close to lossless. You have to wonder if it is even worth capturing all that data if you are going to compress it that much.

    It’s interesting though, and I think Colin’s original point stands; goodbye stills sports photography. Although I’d hate to see the edit suite you would need if you were responsible for selecting stills for an event that had multiple cameras going. Maybe that’s why Sun released that data center in a shipping crate thing.

    April 17, 2007 @ 10:19 pm

  9. Barry S says:

    The codec is very very good and you can capture the raw data stream if you have the hardware. I remember Graeme posting stills at 1:100 compression that looked fantastic. Everything about the camera is modular, so there are also going to be some different codecs released. You can also downconvert to 2K, 1024p, or 720p in-camera.

    I have to agree about the sport shooters. Even I might be able to “hose down” a key play with Red and pull some great stills.

    April 18, 2007 @ 2:24 am

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