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.
