[Bruce Allen]

Thanks man!

RE: Scarlet… you do know that its high speed modes are cropped, right? I mean, the promised 300fps 1K mode would basically be a 1024×512 tiny window in the middle of the sensor. Plus it’s a Bayer sensor, so it really wouldn’t be super-sharp.

I don’t think they offer any kind of 1080p scaled RGB mode. If they did, it would be awesome, even at 24fps, let alone 300fps!

The big question is how much it would cost to upgrade Scarlet to the Dragon sensor (Epic will cost $6000 and RED has stated Scarlet will cost more) – and if RED will then raise the price of new Scarlet bodies by the same amount like it did with the RED ONE. They did announce a deal where if you spend $50K on an Epic package, you get the Dragon upgrade for free… so I am already kinda thinking that the cost of a Scarlet Dragon package in 2013 may be less than the cost of buying a Scarlet package in 2012, then upgrading to Dragon in 2013… but there quite likely won’t be much of a difference. It all depends on whether you want to get going with the camera and workflow on current projects now.

With the FS700: it’s cheap compared to Scarlet and has scaled 1080p slow-mo, which is awesome. You could just get the FS700, then hold off on buying the 4K recorder and only rent it as needed. Seems sensible to me. I wouldn’t bet on clients being willing to pay much extra for 4K at all in the next 2-3 years and that way you don’t take the risk of investing in 4K prematurely – but you have the option to offer it in case they’re willing to pay for the rental. And the post production expense. Depends on your clients though!

However it’s all up in the air. I’m leery of buying anything that has an “upgrade path” to 4K because usually by the time the upgrade path is released, there are other solutions available that do more for less than the price of original camera plus upgrade path.

So I’d only buy if I really needed a cam now. And I’d consider second hand.

It does seem to me that since the maximum speed out of a single HD-SDI port is 3gbit/sec, Sony will probably target the mid-range S25 SSD line for RAW recording – eg the 2.5gbit/sec S25 that costs like $6000 for 1TB. If the cheap FS700 requires the most expensive S55 media, it’ll just be crazy, especially if F65 can record 24p to the S25 media. So I think that’s out.

Personally, of course I hope that they open it up to 3rd parties.

Also, is there any official word on whether it will even record 4K without some stupid “software upgrade” you have to buy?

In addition, there is presumably a Sony F5 coming. What if they offer a nice bundle of F5 + 4K recorder? Or a bundle of FS700 + 4K recorder + “software unlock” free?

Personally I am not buying a damn thing – but then I’m kinda swamped doing movie trailer work at the moment and just raising funds for my next short film. So it makes the decision easy for me.

If you have $25K though and need to spend it *now* on filmmaking gear, here’s what I’d get: a ton of second-hand stuff that doesn’t depreciate. So that you could sell it and buy the right 4K solution when the smoke clears and your clients are actually demanding 4K.

Because then you can sell that in a few years’ time and not take too much of a loss – and get a real, mature 4K camera package – Scarlet Dragon or F5 package or FS700 4K unlock special. Or an old Scarlet really cheaply.

RE: compression and image quality:
It depends on how complex your scene is. Check out this:
https://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?78418-Epic-Compression-Test
Anything at 4:1 compression, 3:1 etc should be fine. Beyond that, you get a certain (small) scene-dependent quality loss.

RE: compression and its effect on playback:
– REDCODE is tricky to play back. It is not GPU accelerated. For the online stage, either you do a non-realtime decode beforehand or you need a Rocket. Though even our rocket can’t play back 5K smoothly. I think you need 2 for that! So then you have to shoot in cropped 4K or Quad HD mode. Or like, I said, plan ahead. Not too big a problem, especially if you’re doing a lot of short-form stuff.
– ArriRAW is apparently easier to decode (just a debayer, no decompression)… but when we shoot broadcast stuff we just use it in ProRes mode because it makes editorial super-simple and we’ve never had a client request for “sharper”! This is pretty much our go-to camera at the moment, although we shoot RED on occasion.
The only time I’ve dealt with footage from an ArriRAW shoot was for The Avengers – and then I got DPX files from Technicolor – they had already debayered it and done a one-light. We actually delivered back 2.1K DPX files. Seeing as how The Avengers is doing pretty well at the box office, I do kinda have reservations about the short-term necessity of 4K for even feature films. But that’s another story.
– the F65 codec is apparently GPU accelerated. Supposedly it can play back in realtime although I haven’t ever tested it.

To be honest, I don’t know where the FS700 will fit in here.

OK – good night!

Bruce Allen
https://www.boacinema.com

[Bruce Allen]

Um, the main question is whether FS700 will output compressed RAW or uncompressed RAW. And what frame rates you shoot.

This will affect your choice of media and make it either more or less expensive than RED.

We don’t know the answer to this yet. We also don’t know if Sony will want to go out to this format or will allow 3rd party options, like Canon does.

Anyway, prices…

– RED’s 256gb SSD (which if you use Scarlet. maxes out at 55MB/sec sustained write speed) is $3200.
– if you use Epic, its max data rate is 225MB/sec.

– Sony’s SRMedia 256gb S15 with 192MB/sec sustained write speed is $1400.

– Sony’s SRMedia 256gb S55 with 700MB/sec sustained write speed is $4300.

OR

– RED’s price on 1TB of SSD media is $9950 for a 256GB 4-pack.

– Sony’s price on 1TB fof SSD media is $5700 for a 320MB/sec SSD (can write full 18 megapixel 3.2:1 compressed RAW files at 24fps from a F65.

Bruce Allen
https://www.boacinema.com

[Bruce Allen]

“I can’t help wondering: if FCPX had actually been nothing more than a 64-bit rewrite of FCP7 (i.e. no substantive new features), would there still be as many people shouting that they’re going to abandon ship?”

Personally, no, I wouldn’t be abandoning ship in that case.

The big change for me the surprise that Apple told us that they don’t intend to add full support for loading old projects.

This was a real shock because with software, generally if the software has the same name, it can load the old projects. Heck they even strung us along at NAB – “Here’s our old project in FCP 7 – and here it is in FCP X. Look how neat it is!”

So, a month ago, folks were working in FCP 7, assuming that any new projects they started in it would migrate. Now that changed.

My particular projects go on for a *long time*. There is no way in hell I am starting a new project that might go on for years in an editing software that got EOL’ed.

If OS X wasn’t able to read anything created in OS 9, then the same thing would have happened – folks would have jumped ship to Windows / Linux. You couldn’t have responsibly started new projects in OS 9 if you know that your stuff isn’t going to load.

I think that if Apple had said at NAB “hey we’re releasing a new app that has no plans to load your old FCP projects” folks would have looked into jumping ship then. But instead they kept this secret until now – and now that folks have found out, they’re jumping ship.

Bruce Allen
https://www.boacinema.com