The Day of the RED Announcement, 5:08 PM PDT
And here we are, once again, finding the bar raised even higher. Red has announced a few amazing innovations that I will attempt to summarize. From Red’s inception, their moniker of making “Obsolescence Obsolete” seemed funny, since anything digital is a year behind as soon as you buy it. But they have managed to find a way, at both the Scarlet and Epic price points. Both “cameras” are now released only as camera “brains.”
This way, since you have to buy all of the peripherals to put your dream camera together, those peripherals never become useless. As the tech advances, you will simply swap out the brain for the more advanced one. If that wasn’t enough for you, the brain can be used for both your cinema camera and your high resolution still camera! Current Red One owners will be allowed to return their camera body for a full refund credit towards the Epic brain, which is amazing. No word as of yet if the credit will continue to push forward as the 6k-9k-28k brains are released.
With 3k Scarlet brains starting at $2500, and 5k Epic brains starting at $28,000, it’s definitely an interesting time. Oh, and by the way, their dual brain set up also allows for true 3D.
Seven Days after the RED Announcement, 6:08 PM PDT
Without adding any conjecture, it has come to my attention that Dalsa has decided to get out of the digital camera business. They are in the midst of selling their camera development division to ARRI, which should help them get back into the digital race. Will Canon and Sony be able to step up their game even more? Will the Nikon D20 (a DSLR that also sports video capture technology) prove to be a useable tool for microbudget filmmakers? In the digital game, anything can change. The good news is, it only gets better for filmmakers like us.
A.J. Wedding is a graduate of Western Michigan University and has won festival awards for his first feature film, "Pop Fiction". As a writer/director, he has won several awards for his short films, and recently garnered worldwide distribution for a feature film titled “The Disappearance of Jenna Matheson” releasing this year. His hit web series, “Infamous” created an instant fanbase, and spawned interest from networks to create a tv series based on it. A.J. currently works with The Production Green, directing and editing commercials as well as developing his next feature film, "Junior Crew."
