Thursday, November 13, 2008

My Take on Red's Announcements

Very cool. The higher the bit-rates and the higher the resolution goes, the even greater need for high performance compressed digital immediate for post, mezzanine and long term archive, i.e. CineForm. And for anyone wishing to produce their own compressed RAW video cameras, Red and SI are not going to be in that business alone; CineForm RAW is ready when you are.


Anyone notice how the whole Red "Brain" line-up looks like chunker versions of Silicon Imaging dockable SI-2K Mini? Red continues to confirm SI's vision. :)

6 comments:

worleyworks said...

too bad RED still envisions a closed platform as the future of their cameras. Ofcourse, the cinema world is so used to a camera being closed, but once you start using the SI2K you realize the advantage of seperating the head from the body, and basing the brains on standard laptops running Windows XP embedded.

Jack Kelly said...

"And for anyone wishing to produce their own compressed RAW video cameras, Red and SI are not going to be in that business alone; CineForm RAW is ready when you are."

Are you listening, Nikon and Canon?!?

David - seriously - if you haven't done so already then maybe now would be the time to approach Nikon / Canon to talk about implementing CineformRAW in their next dSLRs?!?

Like many people, I was very excited about the RED announcement. The announcement contained some amazing products. Products which I may end up hiring once or twice a year. But none that would be of interest to me for purchase.

I'd like 2-3k resolution (bayer photosites); compressed RAW recording; S35 or FF35 sensor size; Nikon mount; low noise; high DNR; high sensitivity; about $5k for the whole camera. High frame rates would be absolutely awesome but are not as important to me as the list above. Yes, the Scarlet S35 comes close in all departments except price (it'll probably be more like $20k once all the add-ons are priced into the equation).

The D90 and mkII come very close to the mark too. If the D400 records compressed RAW, had a respectable performance in the rolling shutter arena, had full manual controls and could continue to record for long periods without the sensor overheating then I'd buy it literally without hesitation.

RED have missed a big chunk of the market (those for whoe buying an HVX + 35mm adapter was a financial stretch). It's time for Nikon to get into bed with Cineform to fill the gap.

Anonymous said...

Yep, my first observation was, the brains look veru much like SI2K. It seems SI has had great ideas but have not been lucky.

Anonymous said...

But if "CineForm on a chip" was done, we may have seen a differing new breed of cameras today.

David said...

We're ready when the camera guys are.

Jack Kelly said...

I'd absolutely love to see Cineform running on my next Nikon camera! There's little I can do I encourage Nikon except to write to them. I've drafted a letter that I'm planning to send to Nikon next week. Here's the letter - please comment if you have time!

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/photo-hd-video-d-slr-others/137810-open-letter-nikon-begging-pro-video-mode.html#post964028

Best of luck getting implemented by a camera manufacturer.