RED's New Digital Stills and Motion Camera Pushing the Limits

rallymatte writes to mention that camera maker RED has announced a new digital stills and motion camera system that includes one model that can shoot up to 28K at 25 fps. The new system will come in three tiers: Scarlet, Epic, and their top of line model which won't be out until possibly 2010. Still image capture will range anywhere from 4.9 megapixels to an insane 261 megapixels. In addition to some impressive 'traditional' hardware, RED also announced a 3D camera.

Comments

Actual Red URL

[xmas2003]

Here's the actual info & specs from Red themselves - be sure to scroll down to the bottom where they have the "Oh ... by the way - 3D" teaser. Crazy stuff (makes my Canon 40D look pokey) - we'll see if they deliver.

Re:Actual Red URL

[sith]

Wow. That's ... wrong.

The RED has a CMOS sensor, as do a number of other fancy-pants video cameras these days.

Re:Actual Red URL

[nattt]

RED sensors are very, very fast, being designed for moving images. That means any skew is reduced to very low levels, and hence no jellocam. Stills cameras use physical shutters, and hence didn't worry about the rolling shutter speed - it just wasn't an issue for them until now.

Of course, film using a spinning shutter that also suffers from skew, but like the RED, it's hardly visible most of the time.

Re:28K what?

[nattt]

28,000 x 9,334 or 261mp.
28k is the horizontal resolution, which is typically how frame sizes are measured in digital cinema.

Insane is the word

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Quick glance through the article did not mention anything about dynamic range. These pixel counts mean nothing if the range is still the same old three orders of magnitude. At least if they come up with an image sensor with better range, we could upgrade to that. So the idea of modularized camera system makes sense. But it is high time sensor makers quit the stupid megapixel race and concentrate on things like color correctness, dynamic range etc.

Re:Meaningless numbers

[Xest]

Lawyers or Marketing people hopefully.

Anything that can shoot 28k of them at any rate is good enough for me.

Re:Could someone tell me...

[Hankenstein]

    Well with a standard 3:2 format the dimensions would roughly be 18360x12240 which at 300 dpi printing (somewhat standard high quality printing) would equal ~ 60x40 right out of the camera.

Mind boggling indeed.

Re:Meaningless numbers

[pluther]

28 Kelvin.

The superconductors used in the camera only work when it's really, really cold outside.

If you buy one of the first 1000, though, they give you a free pair of gloves.

Re:The Upper Limits.

[m3rck]

Actually cinema film cameras go for $65,000 and up. Add film and film editing to get that analog film into digital ($100K), Red looks pretty cheap.

What about the "traditional" camera companies?

[wandazulu]

Red makes a big splash here in the tech world, but I'm curious to know how their cameras stack up against anything from Arri or Panavision; they're theoretically the "big dogs" when it comes to filming motion pictures. Do they see an upstart like Red as a threat? Do they have similar products? Yes, Googling is my friend and I could find out models, prices, etc., but what I'm really trying to get at is whether or not these companies are feeling in any way threatened by this announcement, and whether filmmakers see Red's cameras as a way of making blockbuster-quality movies cheaper, better quality, etc.

More precisely, why would anyone continue to shoot film in this day and age? Especially since programs like Avid and Final Cut are likely going to be the tools to edit the movie, regardless of origin. Seems a pure-digital workflow would be the way to go.

Re:What about the "traditional" camera companies?

[Franklin Brauner]

Steven Soderbergh's latest film, Ché, was shot on RED cameras. They regularly overheated on set, and the solution was to keep two cameras so that when one overheated they would pull the other one out. Issues like this will get ironed out, but for conditions of extreme heat and extreme cold these cameras simply don't cut it alongside robust 100 year old technology like celluloid. Which brings us to the second part of your question, why doesn't everyone switch to digital, and the answer is bandwidth. The pipeline for all of this deep-bit goodness simply ramps up the cost of posting a production to astronomical levels. Film is cheap, and you can run film in any cinema in the world. Digital still has a way to go. Don't get me started on the proprietary codecs involved. Film is the ultimate open source medium -- free as in free. Digital isn't. Period.

Re:What about the "traditional" camera companies?

[hamiltondaniel]

Here we go, my first Slashdot post...been reading forever, and now I am finally fool enough to open myself to the torrent of humiliation which accompanies any opinion stated here...oh well, here goes:

Thought you all might like the opinion of a working 1st Assistant Cameraman (known as a Focus Puller in Britain) in Hollywood, which means I am effectively the guy in charge of the camera and its operation and maintenance on a film set. I work with all of the cameras out there today, from the top-tier film cameras like the Panavision XL2 and the Arri 435, to the RED ONE and even prosumers like the Panasonic HVX-200. The bulk of my work, and the part of it I enjoy the most, is working with the 35mm film cameras, so my opinion is admittedly biased, but as someone who has actually WORKED with the only RED camera which has so far been delivered...
RED does one thing extremely, extremely well: marketing. They have sold 4,000+ RED ONEs, and a large portion of those have been to semi-wealthy directors and would-be cinematographers who want to have an edge in getting their films made by being able to supply their own cameras. This is compared to the traditional model of all but the absolute lowest-end productions: you get your equipment from equipment rental houses, because only the VERY most wealthy and successful cinematographers can afford their own gear; an Arricam Studio does not really have a list price but let's say it would be very cheap at $150,000 (plus the extra $200,000-300,000 you need to invest in lenses, accessories, etc.). Compare this to the $35,000 you can spend to get a very well-equipped RED ONE package complete with lenses and all (if you get old, used lenses, or go for the Nikon lens mount), and the difference in image quality is hard to justify on low-budget productions. Film still looks way better; there's no contest. But the RED is the first video camera that you can project in a full-size movie theatre without heavy modification and go, "Damn, that's really quite good-looking." (Star Wars Episode II, famously shot on the Sony F-950, had to go through so much post-production to look decent on a big screen it's not quite fair to include it in comparisons).

The thing about the RED, however, is that while it does produce an amazing image for a video camera (which many on Slashdot and in the film world are, understandably, wowed by), it just does not work very well. It is a beta product at best, and when it was first being sold it would not have been unfair to say that it was in an alpha stage. It crashes left and right, it overheats, it has a million and one weird and generally unexplainable glitches. My favorite example: I was working with it in the mountains at one point, and the camera kept crashing in the middle of shots, which meant none of the footage in the take up to the point it crashed was even usable because of the peculiar way it records to disk, and every time this happened there was a two to three minute downtime while the camera rebooted. We tried three or four times with the same result, the same crash at the same point in the shot, before I called the rental house to get a new camera unit, assuming there was a glitch in the camera. They did their job and brought us a new RED. We shot again...and it crashed in the exact same place.

I called RED this time and talked to one of their techs. He asked me where I was, and I told him the mountains. He asked me what mountains. I told him. He asked if there were trees around. I said of course, we're in the mountains. He asked what kind of trees they were, and I started laughing.

Turns out trees with a lot of detail in their branches, especially pine trees, can cause the camera software to go so apeshit that it crashes and just turns off. Now, for computer users accustomed to the odd quirks off getting computers to do things well, this is not surprising or abnormal.

For a tool used in cinematography, however, it's completely unacceptable. The amount of money being spent on film productions necessi

Re:Vapor codewords...

[MoonBuggy]

Actually they've been shipping cameras for a while, these are just the next in the range. The Red One was considered vapour for a while by some people - they started taking pre-orders in April 2006 and actually shipped the first 25 units in August 2007. There is apparently still some wait time between ordering and receiving the camera, but they definitely exist.

They announced the Scarlet and the Epic in April this year, and announced today they they've somewhat revised the design of them.

partial debunking here

[Anonymous Coward]

http://rcjohnso.com/REDFACTS.html

Re:dynamic range

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The A/D converters full potential is never reached by most image sensors. They are limited by noise levels and such stuff. This just tells the maximum possible dynamic range, and it is not too different from the cameras already in the market.

I think Olympus was trying to get extra dynamic range. Something like each pixel having two sensing elements, one saturating slowly and another saturating rapidly. Properly done, you are essentially getting one under exposed and one overexposed pictures taken simultaneously. By changing the weights of blending, you could get much better pictures. Exported in RAW file format, one could do this processing completely offline using more powerful computer, memory intensive operations taking more CPU time. The work is based on earlier Fuji camera film. They were trying to get two sets of grains in the same negative (one at ASA24 and another at ASA400).

In chemical processing you can not really adjust the weights between under and over exposed pictures and the technology did not take off. But in digital cameras it should find more applications.

I wonder if it is possible to read the charge in the CCD without really erasing it. Thus a still image exposed for, say, 1/100 sec we could save a picture after 1/1000 exposure, and a 1/500, 1/200, and then the 1/100. Now we have four pictures and we blend them with different weights off line using RAW images! Don't know if it is really possible.

Re:Beyond limits

[pipatron]

If you shoot at the resolution you are tend to project at, you can't modify the frames in any non-trivial way other than colour/contrast adjustments. Anything else will in practice degrade the resolution. Shooting at a higher resolution gives you a lot of headroom that can be used to for example cut away areas that you don't want to use, and zoom in interesting areas. Similar to when music studios record and work with 192kHz audio signals to give some headroom for processing, then resample to whatever resolution the end user wants, 44.1 and 48kHz for example.

Other uses could be for reporters, journalists or nature photographers who can film at general areas of interest and then later cut out and scale up interesting areas.

CID detectors

[AliasMarlowe]

Turns out you can't read the charge without erasing it.

That's true for CCD and CMOS type detectors, but not true for CID detectors. CID detectors were designed for repeated reading without destroying the charge. In fact, the signal in any pixel can be read out repeatedly while accumulating photoelectrons without interrupting the exposure.

Alas, although silicon-based and employing the same photovoltaic principles as CCD or CMOS, CID requires more complicated chip construction and remains expensive. Indeed, it has been "tomorrow's technology" for a couple of decades already. However, they are used in some scientific and forensic imaging devices, where extremely high dynamic range must be recorded.