I’m never shooting video again.

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Shane Ross] “Personally I am amazed that RED is trying to tout Scarlet as a $3000 camera. Sure, if you don’t want to see what you are shooting. They have to add the basic accessories, THEN announce the price…like you just did. $6000 or so. Rivals EX1 and Panasonic P2 at that point…so many people might replace them or get the Scarlet instead.”

Remember that these are the people who announced Red 1 for $17,500. And so long as you didn’t need audio, lenses, storage, batteries, viewfinder, tripod mount, or anything else that would actually make it work, then yes you could argue that it does cost only $17,500.

That’s not Red’s style. Their thing is to announce the price of the stripped down widget, and let the smarter of us figure out the real cost of owning & using it.

To be fair, when you’ve added on all the stuff you need to make it work, the price is still remarkably low, but it’s at least 3X the “official” price of a Red 1, and like you, I’d expect it to be at least double the price of a Red Scarlet.

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog

[Ben Holmes]

[Shane Ross] “Personally I am amazed that RED is trying to tout Scarlet as a $3000 camera. Sure, if you don’t want to see what you are shooting. They have to add the basic accessories, THEN announce the price…like you just did. $6000 or so”

RED have made it clear the $3,000 includes the LCD monitor (I think 4.8″). It’s more unclear if it will include a battery, but tangentially comments about ‘shooting right out of the box’ and ‘soccer mom’s’ suggest it will. RED have not yet decided if they will bundle a CF card with it – my guess is they may include one as prices will probably have fallen enough by next year to make it irrelevent, you just have to guess the size.

So you really only need to up the costs a lot if you want handles, matte boxes etc – and last time I looked they weren’t free on other rival cameras. I would expect SCARLET’s fixed 8x lens to be good – RED know glass, and so far their lenses have been great value and quality.

Hope that clears things up a little. I think you may well be right about $6k for some users, but I don’t think students or DV shooters looking to trade up will have to go anywhere near this figure – if RED deliver again. This is a very different market for them to approach than RED ONE, and my guess is manufacturing scales will be the biggest hurdle. Preorder early!

Ben

[Ben Holmes]

[Emma McNeill] “Looks like a lot of proprietary equipment, un-proven equipment at that, that provides a small amount of image benefit over the EX1/EX3 or a dozen other cameras.
“

Sorry Emma, you mean proprietory like XDCAM or P2 or DVCPRO? I suppose. And anyone seeing RED ONE pictures would expect considerable image benefits over the EX1 – which is an excellent camera, but doesn’t shoot at 120fps.

[Emma McNeill] “$250 for a “red-grip”. If one of our guys said we needed that we would certainly be telling them to get a grip all right! “

red-grip for the RED one? Ever bought an ARRI matte box? $250 is not a lot on a $17,500 camera. The accessories are all pretty fairly priced by pro standards.

[Emma McNeill] “Filming is like stills photography, it’s not the gear, it’s the shooter and until Red get some kit on the ground that everybody can buy/rent and test then it might as well be vaporware. “

They have got gear on the ground. Go rent a RED ONE. Scarlet? Still vaporware alright, but at least RED have a track record now, with kit everyone can buy/rent.

Not trying to be smart, but there’s a lot of FUD around RED – some of it from RED. Be happy to answer any other queries you have.

Kind regards,

Ben

[Ben Holmes]

Oh – A Jobsian ‘one more last thing’!

I forgot to say something. Don’t get hung up on the whole resolution thing. You know – 4K? Why?

It’s not about the resolution, not for me anyway. It’s about the look. Well shot footage looks like film. It’s even a little nicer. The images have a creamy, glossy, (any yeah) expensive look about them that you can’t replicate, even with a Pro35 adapter and the right glass. No need to fake it – it’s the only time I’ve added Sapphire’s excellent film filter and it didn’t improve the footage. Clients can’t believe what they got from one camera and a couple of Kinoflows – and then I hand them stills they can use for print advertising. It blows their mind!

Really, that’s the best thing about it – not the technology. Working with the footage tends to smooth away any complaints you may have about the workflow….

Ben

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Jerry Hofmann] “I was honored to talk to the RED user group at NAB, and to introduce Ted Schilowitz at the FCP Supermeet in front of (count ’em) 1500+ FCP users. Apple announced over a MILLION FCP registered FCP users. Man, at the first of these meets I think there was about 50 people… LOL, we’ve come a long way baby!”

Yes, it is funny how things have changed over the years, Jerry. I can remember when the FCP forum here at the COW (and before that when we ran the WWUG) was a small peripheral community on the fringes of what our site was then all about. If we got a few hundred people in a month (back in the days of the WWUG), we were doing fine. With the COW, it grew to thousands but was still very much a peripheral forum.

Today, the COW’s Final Cut forum alone does well over 120,000 totally unique users a month (of our monthly 750,000+ totally unique users, according to Google Analytics).

In fact, we just had to add three more servers — one, another quad Opteron, along with two spanking new Xserve servers on Leopard OSX — to handle the traffic increases which just keep going up and up. In fact, we hit the 750,000 monthly uniques marker just about a month and a half ago, and we are already well onto our way towards breaking the 800,000 total monthly uniques marker shortly.

A large part of our growth has been right here in FCP, which is now the Number One forum in the COW, even slightly ahead of our After Effects forum (which as many know has been the cornerstone of our site since we started it back in 2001).

It’s good to see FC grow with things like the new Final Cut Server, something that many users have been waiting for and which will add value to the FC ecosystem. With FC’s RED capabilities, the ecosystem is expanded even further and the number and experiential breadth of users using Final Cut will no doubt continue to accelerate in the days ahead. (And we’ll have to buy even more servers to help support that growth.) ;o)

Thanks for your contributions here, Jerry, and for your report. This has been a fascinating read to hear of your experience and what you have learned. Very interesting comments and perspective.

You are the man, man! ;o)

Best always,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Jeremy Garchow]

Thanks for this, Jerry & Ben. Jerry, it was nice to meet you in person!

We are constantly looking for ways to upgrade our projects in terms of quality and have held off on purchasing an HD camera to own. The ioHD has allowed us to capture direct which has been a great quality booster for us, avoiding any in-camera compression and also a time saver as at the end of the shoot, we are ready to edit. No log and transfer, no p2 logging, no deck capturing, nothing. We are editing the minute the shoot is done. Red is an obvious choice for us in terms of price and performance, but I am still unsure if I can recommend it for our workflow, so I have some questions.

Recently, we just completed a very intense project that was to be shot and edited in about 3 weeks. That includes travel, 2.5 day shoot, transcripts for interviews, paper cuts and all the broll. This project also included a handful of WWII era stock and a bit of archival stills processed in AE.

The edit session was totally client attended (which I will admit is a rarity thee days) but nonetheless it still happens. We shot on Varicam @ 720p24 and edited in ProResHQ.

Are client attended edit sessions a reality with 2K/4K? I know I spent a lot of time rendering many still shots, up-converting SD stock (all shot on film so the quality actually held up fairly decently), editing the content and of course color correction and output. There was some time spent rendering with the client there and working @ 720p24 allowed us to be pretty efficient, meaning I could render out two to three different versions and make any necessary changes in a matter of minutes, or tens of minutes. If we were to have done this with a Red, could the client sit there and watch and make changes or is this something that is not yet possible with a tight turn around? Granted, all of our projects aren’t like this but with our schedule lately, it is a luxury to have a month or more of production & post time. In your opinion, do you think this project workflow could have been done with a Red, including trying to find stock footage of high enough quality?

What about creating graphics @ 4K/2K? That has to be a time suck. A lot of our work incorporates a bunch of design and also a fair amount of composting/green screen. How does Red handle keying?

Also, how is audio being handled by Red these days, or is it still an outboard process?

Thanks.

Jeremy

[Michael Sacci]

To be fair, every professional level camera is that way, Panasonic advertises the HPX500 as a 15K camera but before you can shoot with it you will be spending at least $25K. I will grant you that everything is an extra but I think anyone that prices cameras should find this too strange.

I’m totally looking forward to seeing a Scarlet when it comes out.

[Jerry Hofmann]

I’d say that for a first run at RED, you not choose a must be done tomorrow project Jeremy until you’ve done at least one project. Or done a bit of testing and learning first.

Audio does come in in some of the shooting formats, and that question would be best answered in the RED forum here for sure. My work was picture only for the show, and 2:1 4k footage using log and transfer to ProRes works I believe… but not clear on that issue. Once it’s ProRes, it feels the same as HD. With a card that cross converts 2k to HD (Kona 3 will) you’re workflow would be just as it is now.

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer

Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here

Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D

[Jerry Hofmann]

Wow, there’s a lot of new FCP users out there… more and more each year for sure… Been a heck of a ride, and it just keeps on keepin’ on.

Thanks for the kind words Ron.

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer

Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here

Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Jerry Hofmann] “I’d say that for a first run at RED, you not choose a must be done tomorrow project Jeremy until you’ve done at least one project. Or done a bit of testing and learning first.”

Oh, but of course and thanks for the answer. I was just wondering on a more general level with editing 2K and a client attended session. For instance, I would imagine you are rendering every dissolve and every repo @ 2K, no?

Heard of anything with green/blue screen with it?