Underwhelmed by RED
I feel distinctly underwhelmed by the
recent huge announcements by RED...
At first I thought I must be insane to not be feeling the love as they reeled off attention getting numbers like 28k when everyone is still wrestling with the idea of 4k. I thought to myself, perhaps Im just not getting it? Perhaps the hype is so high it can never be satisfied?
Perhaps my underwhelmed state (that even borders on disappointment) is driven by the view that RED turned right when they shouldve, mightve, couldve have gone left. Went for more pixels when more pixels arent what I wanted. Went for more options and complexity when I was craving simplicity. Went for more expensive when what I wanted was more accessible.
In any case, as I went about attempting to distill my underwhelment into blog-form I discovered that the always insightful Stu Maschwitz had done the distilling for me in his post entitled
Too Much is Not Enough.
Stus concern that I find myself in whole-herated head-nodding rhythm with, is that RED missed the sweet-spot. A Scarlet with 2/3 sensor has the big over crank of 100fps and the relative efficiency of 3k - which is 1k more than an efficient 2k post-poduction pipeline requires - but lacks the big image plane of a larger sensor. But if I step up to the S35 or FF35 which have the big sensors Im craving then Im forced out of my happy and (comparably) efficient 3k and into 5k/6k with bugger all overcrank (30fps)
To me this missed the (i would have thought obvious) middle ground that focused on the parts of the image gathering mechanism that are most import. With any camera Ill take Control and Sensor Size over Resolution any day of the week. Scarlet 2/3 gives me control (with B4 and C mount lenses and 1-100fps), efficiency with 3k but trades off a much smaller sensor.
This seems to position REDs conceptual perspective as heavily biased toward Resolution over Sensor size and Frame rate and I think this is wrong-headed thinking.
As Stu says -
The brain I'd be excited about would be a S35 or FF35 sensor at 3K, with up to 120fps. The pixels would be huge, the dynamic range would be great, and the 3K bayer would downsample to a lovely 2K image, which would be more than sharp enough to show me that I'd miss-focussed, or that my lead actress had an unfortunate allergy to her makeup..... By aiming for a piece of the stills market, RED has encumbered the sweet spot of their movie making product line with unnecessary pixel counts, sacrificing much more important things along the way
What all this means is that as I make plans for my next small-form indie production camera system for the next couple of years Im drawn much more readily to what Canon and Nikon may do than by what RED is doing. The reasoning is simple; Canon and Nikon will put in my hands a HD capable camera shooting to a big, fat 35mm sized sensor with superb inexpensive DSLR lens options in a package costing just a couple of grand..! If Canon and Nikon continue their trajectory there is no doubt that variable frame rates will be next for these hybrid DSLRs (perhaps not 100fps but perhaps up to 50 in bursts) At which point I will have a camera with strengths in the most important areas - control and sensor - and which dispenses with raw resolution that I simply don't need.
If I went down the Scarlet route I would have to fork out $2500 for a brain only and a significantly smaller sensor. And then spend several more thousand dollars at least just get an viewfinder and lenses, not to mention a handle grip just to hold the bloody thing.
I love the idea of Scarlet but I feel somehow let down but REDs apparent pursuit of Resolution over everything else.
Posted at 12:00AM Nov 17, 2008
by Mike Jones in video |
