Stephen Gentle

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.

The resolution that Scarlet shoots at is huge – and it’s RED’s lowest resolution camera!

I’m really looking forward to this camera’s release in early 2009, and I am very happy that RED have finally released a camera that I can afford.

Other RED Products Announced

Aside from Scarlet, there were two other big things from RED this NAB. The first was a new 4K video player and distribution format called RED RAY, which can fit two hours of 4K footage on a standard dual layer DVD. Like the other big announcements, it’s being released in early 2009, and will cost under $1000. This looks like an amazing product, and could help speed up digital cinema adoption, as well as be a format that could be used in the home. It can downscale 4K to HD if only one of the HDMI ports are plugged in, or deliver full 4K resolution if all four are hooked up. This would be a very well future-proofed format – when you get a bigger TV or higher resolution projector in your home theater, you could just plug in more cables, and all of your movies would suddenly be 4.5 times higher resolution! No needing to replace your movie collection yet again to fit your new TV.

Another product announced was EPIC, a 5K camera that is smaller, lighter, and faster than the RED ONE, but twice the price. It’s a little impractical right now, as a quad- or eight-core workstation is recommended for working with 4K footage, and 5K is an extra 4.7 million pixels in every frame than that. So it looks like this camera will definitely be used (at least initially) only on high-budget movies.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Digital Cinema. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.