HD For Indies

Theory of RED

The proposed specs on the Red camera are all very exciting, and it should be very interesting to see how it all plays out.

But one thing I want to come back to is WHY this camera exists, and what it is trying to do.

One of the first conversations I had with someone about this project involved dicsussion of film vs. video. Disregarding all the quality differences, it was a discussion of the two completely different approaches that the two types of products were produced with.

Film cameras were really about buying a body, and putting different lenses on the front and different media (film stocks) on the back.

But with video cameras, it is very, very different. If you buy a nice enough video camera, you can swap out lenses on the front end. And that is a very good thing. But what you can't do is swap out media on the back end. The closest thing you can do to it is plug different decks into the back of it, but that is an incredibly limiting choice - you're tethered to that huge blob to capture it's data, which is itself tethered more often than not to an AC power outlet.

If you want to record to a different media and still be mobile, you have to go out and buy an ENTIRELY NEW CAMERA. I'm not aware of film stocks that come out that you have to buy a whole new camera for as long as it is still the same basic format - 16mm vs 35mm, Super or not.

One of the goals of Red, in my opinion, is to be closer to the film camera kind of model - you buy a camera body with a lot of capabilities, but you can put different lenses on the front and put different recording media on the back. You can buy new lenses or recording media to suit the needs of your project.

Need 720p or 1080p or 1080i or 2K? You can do that now with the built in recording to RED-DRIVE.

Don't want to subject it to heavy g-loadings for fear of crashing the heads? Use REDFLASH.

Want uncompressed RAW? Use REDRAID. Need RAW and to be untethered? Use REDRAM.

"Well gee, what if something better than REDRAID comes out?" - there's a high speed port on the back of the camera that will connect to the REDRAID. At this time, they are talking about using something like Infiniband of multi-link fiber channel on an adaptor to go to the REDRAID. But since it is a port, it's possible that if some GooglePlug comes out in a couple of years, you could use that to connect to some new kind of storage technology.

Want a new image sensor? It is upgradeable.

Want to record to something else or new that comes out? The camera has built in HD-SDI single and dual link, 4:2:2, 4:4:4, even 4:4:4 RGB log output. Plug into these industry standard taps and away you go.

-mike

Labels: Red