A render of Scarlet with the clip on version of RED’s new mattebox
Ever since RED Digital Cinema’s new professional pocket camera was mentioned at last years NAB tradeshow, there has been wild speculation circulating around almost every camera and video forum and website around. Most people were expecting an HD or 2K camera for around $5000. When you take a look at the specifications of other cameras around the same price on the market, such as Panasonic’s HVX-200 and the Sony PMW-EX1, you can see that they were asking for a lot.
But in true RED style, the announcement at 9:00am at this year’s NAB shocked us all. The resolution that this camera shoots is not HD. It’s not 2K. It’s 3K. To put that in perspective, that’s two and a half times bigger than full HD. It can shoot at up to 120 frames per second, or even as fast as 180fps for a burst of a few seconds. That means that a one second action, when played back at the regular 24 frames per second, becomes seven seconds of action. Another significant aspect of this camera is that it shoots REDCODE RAW. This is a compression scheme that is much more efficient than traditional codecs. This is similar to RAW on a digital SLR camera, but it’s compressed using wavelets. This codec gives you very close to uncompressed quality, but with a relativity low data rate.
Now, judging from other cameras on the market, a camera with these specifications would run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be surprising to see it on the lower side of $50,000. But RED is targeting a price of three thousand dollars. They did it with the RED ONE (a 4K resolution, $17, 500 camera now on the market that outstrips cameras like the Sony F950 – which retails for around $115,000 ), and I have complete faith that they can do it again.
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