Who is competing with RED?

[tj williams]

SI2K Camera: http://www.siliconimaging.com
ArriD20 camera: http://www.arri.com/prod/cam/d_20/d_20_images.htm
ViperCamera: http://www.thomsongrassvalley.com/products/cameras/viper/
Dalsa Camera:http://www.dalsa.com/dc/index.asp or this http://www.studiodaily.com/main/news/7953.html
Sony F23Camera: http://www.netribution.co.uk/2/content/view/1159/182/
AbleCineTechPhantom http://www.abelcine.com/articles/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=122&Itemid=32
are there others?
Have people on this frorum investigated these offerings. What are the strengths and weaknesses of them?

[Don Woods]

Are they really competing or are they trying....

I only see one working camera that is 4K.

[tj williams]

In digital cinema is 4K the only strength. Company market penetration, fps high speed, images in 2K which are 444 color space or processed 14bit or 12bit??? quite a few posts here about 2K workflows in the immediate future... 2K is not that much bigger pixel wise than HD????

[Graeme Nattress]

4k gives you a lot of reframing choice, and looks blinkin amazing. It could be used as a unique selling feature for a project, or open you up to really big screen work.

Our sensor is 12bit, but the processing is done in a higher depth, whether in camera or in REDCINE though.

Graeme

[Michael Schrengohst]

4k gives you a lot of reframing choice, and looks blinkin amazing. It could be used as a unique selling feature for a project, or open you up to really big screen work.Our sensor is 12bit, but the processing is done in a higher depth, whether in camera or in REDCINE though.

Graeme

Thats what many of us are banking on!

[Graeme Nattress]

But another thing, is if you do see 4k on a smaller screen, is just the look that says to me "walk right in". How about the ability to extract print-worthy stills too?

Graeme

[Bruce Allen]

All of the other cameras seem to fall down with a mighty thump on price / performance. It's their greatest weakness, greater than lack of 4K, IMHO. For example, if the Silicon Imaging camera were being sold for $6000 or rented for an equivalent price, I'd consider buying / renting it. At $12k for just the head, I'd rather get a Red. I like the images from the Dalsa camera but am not convinced that they'll be significantly better than the Red's. If the new Dalsa cameras were priced the same as the Red, I'd check it out, but I'm sure they'll be stupidly expensive. The Viper is cute. If someone wanted to sell me a complete package for $5000 or more less than a complete Red package, or if they wanted to rent it to me for super-cheap. I'd check it out too.

But then, you know me - my day job is doing studio movie trailers at 2K / HD and hence am not convinced that 4K is at all necessary for what I do - eg directing music videos, narrative, etc. It's the price which makes Red compelling to me, not 4K. If the Ocean's 13 teaser (the only thing I've done gfx for at 4K) looked crisper than all of the other trailers, I would care more, but it didn't look that different to me. The frame rate options of the Red are very nice too and a lot better than all of the other cameras so far. And I trust and believe in the people making the camera.

Other things? One strength of the SI camera versus the Red is that you can record directly to a Cineform file and take that file straight into Premiere (and maybe FCP soon?) and edit without going through any RedCine-like process. That's nice, but Red might have that function in the future if they make a Quicktime codec that can read Red files directly.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

[LighthouseMEdia]

I agree Bruce the price point is what is really separating Red from the competition. Apples to apples yeah some cameras "may" come out with some better feature sets but as far as ROI it will be pretty hard to beat Red One as far as initial investment required to get into the game. For me ROI is a huge factor thats driving my decision towards Red. I can actually own and pay for a camera that normally I would have to rent. And as always if I can further invest in myself rather than some "rental gear" I'll increase my equity and profits as opposed to theirs, then I'll do it.

[laguun]

the audience certainly won´t notice 4k or 2k projection, even 1080p vs 4k is pretty hard to spot for experts.

motionblur and depth of field will give you perceivable 4k in few areas of the image anyhow.

i, and many other employees of laguun here, have often compared 4k and 2k side by side, since years, i think since 4k projectors were screening for the first time in europe. with our own film & 1080p footage, with scanned 65, 35mm and with computergenerated testcharts.
even with still images side by side you have to be in the first rows of perfectly installed cinemas to see the difference between 2k and 4k.

but, and this is a BIG but...

4k makes really sense anyhow!

you want reserves and headroom for postproduction
you want -fine- noise, 2k noise is still visible, downsampled or pure 4k noise much less.
you want to pan and scan
in cc, banding occurs much later if you have oversampled images.
mulistage postproduction is usual today, and which every step in the pipeline imageinformation is lost. so it is a huge benefit to start in a much higher resolution and bitdepth than you plan to master later on.
most important advantage of 4k for me is cinemascope. classic "cropped 2k/1080p" cinemascope gets down to ~850 lines resolution, that becomes visible. its not terrible but its not optimal. starting in 4k leaves enough reserves for cinemascope.

the sound & music industry btw already demonstrated all this years ago.
even when most customers buy cd or mp3, which is typically 16bit@44khz, most studioproductions are done 20/24bit@88khz/96khz.

however, most producer i recommed red for their upcoming movies will go 2k with a bit of 4k here and there, as 4k still has severe problems in postproduction, beginning with the lack of having monitoring below a sony srx.

and finalyy, let me say one thing. red one would still be a fantastic product, near to revolutionary, if it would only be 1080p444. we own and operate sony hdcam and arri 35mm (and several other cameras), and in 17 years in the industry i never saw such a quantum leap as red is - and almost in any area. price, performance, quality - and last but not least, business model.

sony and arri have implemented less customer feedback since 1999/2000 than red did since 2006. and sony and arri shared less knowledge in those 8 years than red did within a year.

[laguun]

SI2K Camera: are there others?
Have people on this frorum investigated these offerings. What are the strengths and weaknesses of them?

hello mr. williams,

red has strong competition in many fields. price/performance wise, that is for sure, red is by far the best offering on the market.

however, there are many applications where red isn´t up to the competition, simply because its to good, overkill or its missing basic features or the workflow isn´t suitable.

for full feature, red is fantastic. for clips & commercials - great.
for eng/live however, its missing intercom, a ccu and other live & realtimefeatures which are necessary in multicamera live productions.

Also, as most broadcasters are still tapebasing and moving very slowly, a VTR inside the camera ist still a requirement for many buyers. sony and panasonic have to face the same problems with xdcam and p2.
i think what might help red extremly in this aspect would be a realtime playback device with hd-sdi out for the memorycards/drives with a vtr protocol emulation.

[Chris Gearhart]

Great post, Bruce. I fully agree that the price and quality and feature set put it at near unreachable proportions, at least as things stand now. ROI becomes incredible--I'm with you, Kendall. To have this camera and be able to pay for itself let's say in the first year for most people. . . wow.

As a business model, Red is indeed revolutionary. Laguun, you stated it well. Red has a proven knack for innovation, invention, and cool. But the potential for Red's long term viability as a company and as a product also makes this an extremely competitive investment over the long term--competition can only fuel that.

And besides, my camera company president can beat up your camera company president. (In a pinch, Jarred can just step on him.)

(And O.K., if she's a her, Kelly can whack her with a snowboard.)

[Paul Hazlett]

hello mr. williams,

i think what might help red extremly in this aspect would be a realtime playback device with hd-sdi out for the memorycards/drives with a vtr protocol emulation.


I think what maybe possible is for the short term to bring out a portable
deck and use Reds sdi port for instant tape based aquisition.

Whether this is possible or not remains to be seen.

[Paul Hazlett]

Great post, Bruce. I fully agree that

(And O.K., if she's a her, Kelly can whack her with a snowboard.)

Kelly is far too sweet a girl to whack anyone....unless of course she has been
watching alot of Sopranos lately.

[Chris Gearhart]

True. Well then, she can email them a nicely worded memo explaining how long they'll have to wait until their Red is shipped. :biggrin:

[Zakaree Sandberg]

so in theory.. if u shoot 4k and downsize to 1080.. u can do some pretty cool digitally smooth pans yah?

[Jaime Vallés]

so in theory.. if u shoot 4k and downsize to 1080.. u can do some pretty cool digitally smooth pans yah?
Well, you can, but they'll look unnatural. Like a pan-&-scan movie on TV. The perspective doesn't change if you do an electronic pan (the foreground and background will all move at the same rate), and it won't have the right motion blur either. It can be done, but it'll look weird.

[tj williams]

Jaime. In a 20 degree pan with a camera which is mounted near the nodal point and nothing within about 10 feet on a 35mm lens. What is the maximum offset change between foreground and background that will give it away? Are you also saying that you cannot put in motion blur digitally?

I agree pan n scan looks mostly "weird" reframing a 4K image in cuts won't and smaller movements can be done well, the pan n scan guys are just too cheap and unimaginative to doe it well JMHO...

[Sanjin Jukic]

TJ, as you know very well, don't forget to mention that only the RED give us 4K in the REDCINE on a flash drive that we could using the REDCODE to encode in what ever we need. With that WORKFLOW VALUE simply at the moment the RED doesn't HAVE any serious competition in 4K. Not even the new Dalsa can compete with overall RED 4K workflow value. All others still have to LEARN from the RED. We can see something new from them but maybe at the next NAB in 2008. But then will be too late. Then the RED will already rule the 4K market.

[Jaime Vallés]

Jaime. In a 20 degree pan with a camera which is mounted near the nodal point and nothing within about 10 feet on a 35mm lens. What is the maximum offset change between foreground and background that will give it away? Are you also saying that you cannot put in motion blur digitally?

I agree pan n scan looks mostly "weird" reframing a 4K image in cuts won't and smaller movements can be done well, the pan n scan guys are just too cheap and unimaginative to doe it well JMHO...
Well, I probably should have added "with a lot of work and under the right circumstances it can be done". I just figured that by "pretty cool digitally smooth pans" he meant the David Fincher type of MoCo dolly with large objects in the foreground whizzing by super smooth. If you're just panning a short ammount, and it's a mountain range landscape far away with no trees in the foreground, and you play around with motion blurr settings in post, you can do it digitally.

But of course, it'll just be easier and way faster to just go on location, put the camera on a fluid-head tripod, and pan the sucker instead of just doing a static shot.

Not to mention that your wide angle mountain landscape in 4K will look a lot more telephoto once you crop it to 1080 in order to do the digital pan. Plus, you'll lose all the benefits of oversampling the image. It just seems like an awful lot of compromise, when all you need is a good tripod head and a steady hand in the first place.

But, yes, it can be done. :biggrin:

[Hrvoje Simic]

Jaime. In a 20 degree pan with a camera which is mounted near the nodal point and nothing within about 10 feet on a 35mm lens. What is the maximum offset change between foreground and background that will give it away? Are you also saying that you cannot put in motion blur digitally?

I agree pan n scan looks mostly "weird" reframing a 4K image in cuts won't and smaller movements can be done well, the pan n scan guys are just too cheap and unimaginative to doe it well JMHO...


As long as you have a foreground and a background object most of the artificial panning is going to be noticed, it just depends on who's watching.
You could pan distant scenery, though - and that's as long as you avoid showing the ground as much as possible, because if the ground from the background to the camera is shown the pan is going to look like a pan through a picture. You can forget a meadow/field pan.
You want to get the background flat as much as you can in order to make the pan realistic.

If you really need that pan and it has to be realistic...the foreground has to be cut out and composited with the faster pan than the background. For that you have to use cloning to redraw missing pixels of the background and a whole new set of problems appear...
For example, if you want a room pan, with a dining table in the foreground, with a couch and a coffee table behind it and a wall in the background - you have a major challenge ahead. If there's a painting on the wall partially covered with the bottle on the dining table...be really patient and become good friends with the compositor.

[tj williams]

Hi Jaime.


But of course, it'll just be easier and way faster to just go on location, put the camera on a fluid-head tripod, and pan the sucker instead of just doing a static shot.

Can I get free airplane tickets too?? then I could go back.

Actually with care a lot more foreground than you may think. We had a wide shot on a recent jazz concert. The guy was inexperienced and stayed too wide too much. We shot HD but the product was released SD On several shots we pushed in quite nicely, over the heads of audience fg which looks like a crane in over their heads.

[Jim Arthurs]

I agree pan n scan looks mostly "weird" reframing a 4K image in cuts won't and smaller movements can be done well, the pan n scan guys are just too cheap and unimaginative to doe it well JMHO...

One of the new abilities of the 3D motion tracking software SynthEyes is the ability to do true nodal pan/tilt with keystone correction on an existing shot... basically overcoming the "slide across the still" feel of a traditional pan&scan technique.

This is not a turnkey "push a single button" solution, but does go to show the amount of research into this area...

http://www.ssontech.com/content/stabwht.htm

Regards,

[Bruce Allen]

I totally agree that the best way is to cut out the foreground and do it in multiplane.

I must admit, I know of a lot of trailers with straight 2D zooms, etc done on shots though... if it's subtle you don't notice it that much, especially if there is already a track in and you are just accentuating it.

By the way, have you guys ever tried sticking optics distortion on top of your slides / zooms? I find it helps quite a lot sometimes... gives you a bit more of that wrap-around turning / tracking feeling.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

[Jim Arthurs]

Well, the theory behind the SynthEyes technique, and the way I do it in a 3D package, is to project the footage on a virtual dome, then "re-photograph" it with a camera from nodal position with the tighter focal length's pan/tilt.

If the camera is in motion you can then do other interesting things like "re-targeting" the virtual camera to other interesting points in the shot and have a very realistic feel to the motion.

[tj williams]

Eventually I just need my SLR and you post guys will be able to restore the rustle in the bushes and make the 3D animals enter on cue!

[Bruce Allen]

Damn, TJ, you found out!

Or we could just shoot the animals at the zoo and I will use a matte painting and some stock footage to make it look like they are in their natural habitat instead :) If we can somehow chuck a green screen into the critters' pens, we would be golden.

Actually, the broadcast guys sitting next to me today were working on something with a ton of roto-ed panthers, dolphins, etc. Again, no green screen! Someone seriously needs to paint some big dolphin pools green and shoot some 4k dolphin greenscreen stock ;)

I am just kidding. I hate zoos. I'm from SA, what did you expect?

Happy weekend!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com