HD For Indies

Here's a quickie update while I'm working on some other stuff for your benefit -

First off, the Red One has been DELAYED. They are on an engineering hold, and the latest info I can find indicates that we'll get a revised SCHEDULE in about 5 weeks. OUCH.

My take on it - well, I'm dissapointed, but I'm not surprised. My biggest concern all along has been what I dubbed the Space Shuttle Problem - if you're used to making parts with a 1 in 100,000 failure rate, you're doing great. But the Space Shuttle has 2 million moving parts....all of a sudden, it is a whole new ballgame. I think it is basically just the complexity and scope of this endeavor that is holding them up - given how many parts, from how many vendors are involved; and how many new technologies are being folded into this thing, just from a project management perspective it starts to get fairly inevitable that SOME piece of all this (when there are so many pieces) will get delayed for SOME reason...just based on simple math and odds. And we've arrived at that point. I'm bummed that this pushes back my early tests with Mark & Aldey in NYC and Steve Gibby in SoCal, but that's the nature of bleeding edge product development.

I have to say I'm also a little relieved for my own reasons - I have PLENTY to do right now, testing Red, whilst super fun, would cut a little deep right now in terms of what I'd have to give up to do it...

If you want the full skinny, you can read this thread: News... - Reduser.net (this was posted Friday).

The salient details: Jim said in part, in the above linked thread (snippets from a number of posts in that thread):

As you know, we are on an engineering hold. What that means is that the last 10% is harder than we thought. We got so far so fast that we were sure we could finish without problems. Wrong.

We have encountered a ton of detail issues.
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We are working as fast as we can. I hope that we can share specific news/delivery schedule shortly.
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I'm not real happy right now... but I understand the reality of product development. The good news is that the project is not compromised, just delayed.

I also recognize that our customers deserve the straight scoop. Always.
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...the schedule could change at any minute becuase this is such a difficult trick. Given that, everyone should naturally have a contingency plan for their projects... and hope they don't need them.
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All the problems are completely solvable... whew!
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I expect (with all the tradional precautions) that we will be able to give a locked down schedule in 5 weeks (your number). But, remember that things can change... :-)
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REDCINE works. REDCODE is supported in FCP and the conversion to ProRes works fine. Scratch supports REDCODE natively. Plenty of proven choices. Our delay is caused by several hardware issues... that we are working on.


This post by Haakon nails the prevailing response and attitude pretty well.

Next up - at least some Good News - 4K Redcode RAW...to Compact Flash?!?!?!?

Yep, they've got it working - see the pic and the thread here.

Pretty amazing to think about 4K footage of this quality level...in the palm of your hand. Let's see, some napkin math...if 4K@24p is 24 MB/sec (that was quoted at NAB, differs from the 27.5 MB/sec # from IBC), and 8GB card formats to 7.4GB usable, therefore about 4 1/2 minutes of 4K footage in a tiny chip in the palm of your hand...pretty amazing...

OH - and those 8GB cards can be as little as $200 (the ones that are fast enough, anyway). Take THAT, P2!

: )

Bonus round - you can see the on-camera UI running in the picture, too.


THIRD ITEM - A NEW SMALL CONFIG OF THE RED ONE

For those worried about how to configure a Red One as small as possible, Jim posted up NEW design to chew on... - Reduser.net. Same Red One body, but smallest possible handle & shoulder pad (that are included in the revised packages that you can see in the Red Online Store).

OK, that's our Red News for now...I've been looking into this whole CMOS smear thing folks were getting on about, I'll have a report on that when I feel I have a comfortable grip on it all, but so far it doesn't seem to be a deal killer in any way.

-mike

UPDATE Wednesday - there's been some questioning and debate about the nature of the delay. I've pulled my original off-the-cuff comments until I can collect some more facts.

Labels: Red