Stephen Gentle

As it is, people are having enough trouble doing post production with 4K digital video from the RED ONE. But RED Digital Cinema don’t seem to care, announcing a slew of bigger and far better cameras just an hour ago. Now you can build a camera with a 3K, 5K, 6K, 9K or 28K sensor! For those who don’t know, the nK measurement is a way of expressing digital cinema resolutions, with n being the number of pixels horizontally. This means that 2K is a little more than full HD video.

The new RED DSMC system (that’s Digital Still and Motion) is based around the idea of ‘making obsolescence obsolete’ – meaning that your camera is built up of multiple modules, all which can be switched out to upgrade the system. The center of the system is the ‘brain’, which includes the sensor module, lens mount and processing circuitry. There are seven different ‘brains’ available – from a 3K Scarlet with a fixed lens (much like the originally announced Scarlet), a 3K Scarlet with a B4, C or proprietary Mini-Red mount, and 5K and 6K Scarlets with Nikon, Canon or PL mounts and an S35 or full frame 35mm sensor respectively. On the Epic side, there are 5K, 6K and 9K versions with various mounts, and the incredible (and completely ridiculous) 28K Epic.

The ‘brain’ can then be coupled with any of a large number of optional extra modules, from break out boxes, to flash and hard drive recording modules, a module containing two extra batteries, remote controls, electronic view finders, LCD displays, and so on. You can build the camera to be as big, or as small as you want, and even swap out lens mounts and sensor modules in the field!

This is really a great system – and even though the price can add up pretty quickly, it is still quite incredibly cheap compared to cameras even in the prosumer market (let alone the professional market that this system directly competes with!). This is a very exciting camera system, and I expect that we will certainly buy a small Scarlet system – maybe with the fixed lens, or with the Mini-Red mount. While some of the prices are already posted over at Reduser, the prices for much of the system remains to be seen.

Check out the full anouncement, with pricing information over at RedUser. Some of the new equipment is really quite incredible.

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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