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/pr...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/ind...=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.