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Filed under: Business •Cameras •Hardware •Production •

RED Visit, 21 September: EPIC!

As we head out, I see Jarred twiddling bolts with a hex key; he’s swapping the lens mount on the EPIC.  I ask if I can photograph this process after lunch, and Jim says, “do it now.” I grab my camera and capture a few shots:

EPIC without a lens mount. Observe the fans: the camera is still powered up!

The lens mounts attach with four hex-socket bolts. The machined silver areas are the “landing pads” for the mounts, precision-ground to ensure accurate spacing of the mount from the body. A row of pogo pins couples the camera to the mount electronically; there are no ribbon cables to fuss with.

PL mount on the left; Canon EOS mount on the right, face down.

Swapping mounts is a trivial exercise, easily done in the field. The Canon mount carries full EOS data and control, and has a breech-lock collar that clamps down the lens’s bayonet mount for added security. Back-focus / flange back setting is performed in the “brain” module itself, by turning an adjustment screw.

Four screws is all it takes…

...to secure the mount…

...add a 17-50mm T2.8 PL-mount lens…

...retighten that screw again; it’s a bit loose…

...and there we are, lovely PL-mount camera!

Deanan says that the TIFFs are transferred, and we return to the screening area to watch a fire engine in Vegas drive by, again and again and again… we spend probably ten minutes watching that clip on the big screen, all of us seeing it forty feet across for the first time, and trying to dissect it visually in every way possible. I get more and more distressed as time goes by; I’m simply unable to detect the “Magic Motion” look while the clip is playing. It should look worse than normal photography, with more staccato stutter, but it doesn’t. If anything it looks better: smoother than it should, more like a film capture than a digital capture. Is it just me? In the twenty-four hours following my visit, others will see this same demo (or another, rendered out at the full 5K resolution) and post similar comments on reduser.net; it’s not just me at all.

This “Magic Motion” stuff may be an important step in emulating the look of a mechanical shutter’s penumbral sweep (or at least triggering a similar response in the brain); if so, then another key differentiator separating the “feel” of film from that of digital has been overcome. Jim talked earlier about getting that “feel”, and he didn’t know then just how right he may turn out to be.

The more I watch, the more excited I get. The EPIC itself is exciting in the manner of any whizzy new hardware, but it’s an everyday sort of excitement. As I watch this clip I have the same sort of feeling I had when I first saw HD in 1982, or played back a DV tape in 1995: an Important Milestone sort of excitement; the impression that Something Is Happening Here. Again, congratulations are due the RED team, and I offer them.

We walk back to the “office” side of the stage, and I proceed with a few more photographs:

EPIC atop a pro RED RAY player, with a RED focus collimator and a hard-used Scarlet body beside it.

Jim is proud of the RED RAY player. He says the that they’ve decided to up the bitrate to a staggering 15 Mbps from the 10 Mbps originally expected; still, this is less than half the data rate of Blu-Ray, despite having four times the image information to compress.

LCD menu display, with Deanan working away in the background.

Jim apologizes that the f-stop readout isn’t working (My guess is that it’s because this prototype PL mount lacks data pins; it was probably working when the Canon mount was attached). I observe that the menu item selector is positioned over “AF/AE”, something the Canon EOS lenses make possible.

Dual-battery module, which would snap directly onto the EPIC… except that it’s upside-down in this picture.

Note that the PWR LED is red in this picture: that means the onboard battery has enough juice to turn the camera on. I ask Jim how quickly that handy status indicator depletes the battery; he says it’s a tiny drain, and the camera will go for days with no appreciable loss.

Assorted rigging bits on a cart: the chaps in the machine shop have been busy.

While I’m shooting these photos, Greg Williams (of yesterday’s tiger shoot, and Kate Beckinsale fame) strolls in to chat with Jim and Jarred.

“I pushed this button, and strange things happened.”

“Oh, yeah, don’t push that button, it doesn’t work in this release.”

“I had to reset things, and before it was version mumble mumble fifty, and when it reset it said it was mumble mumble thirty?”

“Well, yes, it’s a brand-new release, and there are some bugs…”

Just another day in the shop with alpha code in the hands of testers, grin. Some folks might be perturbed hearing such things, but I’ve spent two decades working in software and embedded systems, and these exchanges are as common as the days are long… and sometimes the days are very long indeed.

Jim readily confirms that things aren’t fully baked yet: “if you want to shoot a feature on the EPIC, and shoot it on the stage next door, that’s something that can be done today. We’re here, and we can support it. But if you wanted to shoot a feature in Indonesia or the Philippines, or somewhere else far away? We’d have to turn you down.”

We’ve now worked through lunch; I apologize, but Jim says it’s probably better for him anyway.

“If you’ve got the time, I’d like to show you something else.” I readily agree, and we walk outside into the overcast daylight. “A lot of people say we’re just a branding exercise,” Jim says, “but it’s not true. Yes, we work with other companies, and we buy components, but we do our own engineering, and we’re increasingly doing our own manufacturing, too. We have labs in Lake Forest, Austin, and San Jose, and we have one here…” He waves his key fob past the electronic door lock on Stage 6, and we enter.

Stage 6 is the second-smallest stage at RED Studios, it’s “only” 70 feet wide and 160 feet long. Since there’s no black drape bisecting it, it feels larger than Stage 4; the entire, cavernous space (there’s 30 feet of headroom) is open. That’s room enough for nearly two basketball courts end-to-end.

The stage is crammed to bursting with laboratory workbenches in long, back-to-back rows. On average, there are two people per six-foot workbench, each perched on a lab stool and focused intently on his or her task. There’s a constant, muted buzz of conversation—techs and engineers are huddled in animated groups of two or three throughout the space—but the high ceiling and the absorptive soundstage wall treatments keep the noise at a minimum. Jim leads me up one aisle and down the next, talking quietly; nobody looks up from his or her work as we pass.

There are prototype circuit breadboards the size of, well, breadboards, crammed with discrete logic and FPGAs: proving grounds for the logic designs and firmware routines condensed down to ASICs on form-fitting boards for EPIC and Scarlet cameras. There are EPICs in various stages of assembly, with ribbon cables running to test and measurement equipment and in-circuit emulator pods. There’s a Canon still lens on a lens mount clamped in a vise; engineers are working on fine focus control through the EOS interface. There are board-rework stations for replacing surface-mount parts. There’s a gap in the benches along the north wall of the stage: room for a camera test setup, with lights and charts rigged and a fellow working on lens alignment procedures.

There are engineers rapidly paging through PDFs of board layout diagrams, discussing firmware changes, and poring over code listings. While there are plenty of young Asians, Stage 6 is no H-1B sweatshop: it’s a diverse crowd, including quite a few graybeards. There’s an electric intensity to the place, a sense of nervous energy. I know the feeling; I’ve felt it when I’ve worked at tech companies, in the weeks leading up to an NAB or IBC trade show or an initial product shipment.

Jim stops at one workspace to show me a naked EPIC. Its side is missing, and the density of its innards is apparent. It looks like there are three circuit cards layered in the front of the camera, snapped together with low-profile, high-density mezzanine connectors. The L-shaped cooling chimney runs behind these three boards; more boards stack up behind it, with no wasted space—and no clutter. There aren’t ribbon cables going everywhere, there aren’t a lot of green-wire fixes.

Jim explains, “when we did the RED ONE, we didn’t know what we were doing. We learned as we went, and made some mistakes. EPIC and Scarlet are new from the ground up; we started over on them. There’s nothing wrong with the RED ONE, but the new cameras are built to an entirely different level of integration and precision.” I mention one of the rules I learned early on about building complex software systems: “plan to throw the first one away”, meaning that you learn what you’re doing on version one, then do it over—from scratch—on version two, so that you don’t carry over any of the imperfections of the first one. Jim nods; we’re talking about the same thing. Indeed, there’s nothing hesitant, exploratory, half-baked, slapdash, or jury-rigged about anything I’ve seen; these folks have a good idea of where they’re going, and they now have the experience and skill set to get there.

He leads me down the last half of the last row of benches. “This is our prototype assembly line,” he says. “We’re building EPICs by hand, so we can see what works and what doesn’t work in the assembly and test process. That way we can work out our manufacturing bugs before we set up our real production line.”

We walk back to Stage 4, and I’m trying to find the right image for what I’ve just witnessed: the scene in a Bond film where the supervillain reveals his vast army of mad scientists building killer robots / atomic spaceships / flying submarines? A stealth Santa’s Workshop, where highly educated elves engineer digital cinema toys for an upcoming Christmas?

Note: Jim did not say, nor did I ask, when Christmas is likely to come.

We talk a bit more:

I ask about the BOMB EVF, and Jim digs one out to show me. It’s crisp and clear, and very nice looking, though I wish the eyepiece magnified the image a bit more.

Is the BOMB shipping? No, not yet; it’s done, but it’s still going through final FCC RF/EMI testing and certification, and that’s also the reason the RED Station (a modular stack of CF card and hard drive / SSD docking bays) hasn’t shipped yet.

What about the older EVF: it’s not being built any more, but can existing ones be repaired (we have one that’s acting a bit wonky)? Yes, no problem; send it in.

I ask if EPIC will let me expand the image while the camera is rolling; Jim says it will, and that different outputs can be magnified independently (so the operator can see the whole frame even while the 1st AC zooms in tight to check focus).

Jim says EPIC has twice as fast a CMOS reset time as the RED ONE: that means it has half the rolling-shutter “jellocam” of the earlier camera.

At 3pm, Jim’s next visitor arrives, and Jim needs to let me go, for which he apologizes. On the contrary, I say, I’ve pestered him and Jarred and Deanan an hour longer than planned, and made them miss lunch as well. I thank them for their time and hospitality, and I depart.

This EPIC thing? Even in its current state, it’s a lot more usable than I expected it to be. I think it’s going to be pretty darned cool once it gets done.

FTC Disclaimer: No material connection exists between me and RED, other than as a customer.  My employer, Meets The Eye LLC, purchased three RED ONEs two years ago on my recommendation, and we have since purchased two M-X upgrades (soon to be three), three RED ROCKET hardware decoders, two 18-85mm zoom lenses, and a selection of accessories. We are in line for EPIC-X upgrades, which we applied for several weeks ago.  I do not personally own any RED products nor do I have any financial interest in the company. I paid my own way to Los Angeles ($182.95 airfare and rental car) and received no material compensation from RED, other than a Starbucks Coffee Frappuchino from the company fridge: retail value about $2.50.

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Hi Adam, have been following and reading what you’ve written already well before the time of ProVideoCoalition. Have always enjoyed the highly professional attitude behind your text. Jim made an excellent choice in inviting you to Red Studios. Thank you very much for these reports.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/27  at  01:16 PM

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Great article Adam.  Your DV FAQ, where I first ‘found’ you online, seems like the stone age even though it’s only been a handful of years.  Amazing how quickly things have changed in such a relatively short time.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/27  at  01:25 PM

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“gobsmacked” ... just the right word for what I’m feeling after reading this. Please let it be an Epic and a Scarlet Christmas!

Posted by Rob  on  09/27  at  02:14 PM

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Wow. An amazing glimpse into the Red BORG.

I appreciate both your factual notes and your impressions based on years of experience in the industry. Both are valuable to gauge the future.

I’d only argue against your rant that “horizontal handgrips cease to be handholdable much above the four-pound point.”

Take your two hands and lift them in front of your face, presumably holding, say, a 7 pound object. Are your palms facing each other and slightly up- the natural position for your wrist? Is the weight of that item transferred directly to the bottom of your wrist & the top of your forarm- allowing your bigger stronger arm muscles to bear the weight?

Or did your right hand instinctively crane itself sideways so the fingers are forward to wrap around a DSLR grip? Are you holding half of that 7 pound weight with just four fingers? If so, how long do you think that grip will be comfortable without your left hand really doing the majority of lifting? (Carpel tunnel anyone?)

Just as you support the Epic with your left hand, you support bigger handheld handycams with your left hand.

We’ve both also worked with big on-shoulder camcorders and had more than 4-pounds of camera weight pushing down on our right arms for hours. By letting that weight rest on the base of the palm and transfer directly to the forearm, you are wasting zero grip strength trying to hold up the camera and actually- that lets all of your fingers work while shooting (thumb starts & stops, index & middle on zoom rocker duty all day, ring finger flicks the iris slider switch, and the pinky taps the iris button when needed.)

You simply can’t use your all right hand fingers to adjust settings with a vertical grip- they’re too busy squeezing hard all the time to avoid dropping the camera. Unless of course you are not shooting and shifting the camera weight to your left hand so you can adjust the right menu buttons.

If you want to shoot from waist level, then fine, a vertical grip is a natural for the wrist. But that can be enabled with a camcorder grip that swivels, like the original JVC HDV camcorder.

But all this goes by the wayside because these things will most likely end up with rails all over them to hold lens hoods and various other accessories. And they’ll be used handheld for brief moments, but not all day. And the vertical grip will be fine.

But if you had to handhold a fully-rigged and powered Epic at eye level for hours at a time, without a monopod or other support, you wouldn’t be using your right hand the next day and you’d demand that this had a horizontal grip to rest the weight directly on the arm, not in the fingers.

Posted by IEBA  on  09/28  at  12:28 PM

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“Take your two hands and lift them in front of your face, presumably holding, say, a 7 pound object.” Sure, but that’s not how I use a camera. My right hand hold the body (by whatever means is provided) and operates the record trigger, possibly a zoom rocker, and possibly an EXPAND FOCUS function of some sort or a momentary-auto-iris button. The other hand is up under the lens, running focus and (possibly) zoom and/or iris. If I’m a one-man-band, that’s how I have to work; if my left hand is under the body (the only way to really keep a fat handycam level), I can’t pull focus or fiddle the zoom or iris.

Handycam-style horizontal grips on heavy, fat cameras don’t work because any grip is “weakest” (provides the least resistance to rotation) along the grip axis, and I find that HVX200s and Z1s and EX1s tend to sag laterally, along the “weakest” roll axis, when I handhold them without some other means of support (shoulder rig, beltpod, etc.).

(If the camera is skinny, then the base of the hand sits close to the camera’s lateral center of gravity and roll-inducing torque isn’t a big deal; a PD150 or HPX170 is tolerable this way. But fatter cameras, like the Z1, HVX200, EX1—or the upcoming AF-100 or the Sony EX-recording interchangeable lens handycam—are too laterally unbalanced for one hand to adequately support the camera laterally).

I’ve used both the HVX200 and the HVR-Z1 for long-take handheld docco work, and I find the wrist strain from trying to keep ‘em level on the roll axis is every bit as bad as the wrist strain from holding a Canon 5D with a 2- or 3-pound lens at eye-level for a comparable time.

SLR-style grips are weakest around the pan / yaw axis, but that is the axis least affected by gravity (and by the bouncing induced by walking, running, or vehicular travel), and besides, the left hand is out front, supporting and stabilizing the lens, so it can easily keep pan (or yaw) under control). True, the angle of the grip is highly unergonomic; from the human factors standpoint it’s unpleasant and rapidly tiring. I wouldn’t want to handhold a Canon 5D Mk II or an EPIC, unaided, for much more than a five-minute shot (the 30-minute runtime of the handgrip battery in the EPIC mercifully limits excessively-extended takes, grin). But from the camera-stability standpoint a vertical SLR grip works very well, much better in my experience than a horizontal grip on a four-pound-plus camcorder, because with the long axis of the grip vertical, I can better control the camera in both pitch (tilt) and roll axes.

Of course this only works for a relatively light package (under ten pounds) and one with a fairly short body. The EPIC pushes the SLR form factor about as far as it can go—but the important thing is that it works at all. When you’re a one-man band, especially in tight quarters, this is a killer configuration.

Nothing’s stopping you from building the EPIC into a long-body camera (dual-well battery holder, IO modules, storage modules) and putting it on a shoulder pad or a shoulder rig, if that’s what you want to do (and shoulder-mount cameras tend to be both comfortable and stable; I’m not arguing that they aren’t). I fully expect that I’ll be using EPICs in shoulder-mount mode at least as much as in SLR-style handheld mode (in such cases I’ll usually have a 1st AC to pull focus for me, or I’ll be the 1st AC assisting another operator). But what the EPIC does is give me the option of going solo with a comparatively light (for a big camera), off-the-shoulder configuration that actually works and is reasonably steady in a purely handheld mode, with my left hand free to focus.

And yes, of course, if I’m going for hours at a time, you can count on my using a DVRig JR or something similar to take the weight off!

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  09/28  at  01:49 PM

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“True, the angle of the grip is highly unergonomic; from the human factors standpoint it’s unpleasant and rapidly tiring.”

Ah, okay. By your rant, I was left with the impression that the vertical grip was so much better in all respects.

I agree with you that a fat handheld camcorder does have too much torque to easily keep stable with one hand. There’s no reason with today’s technology that they can’t move the grip well “into” the body of the camera and build around it. But they don’t.

However, in as much as I acquiesce that the vertical grip does give you more control over pitch and roll, if forced to operate handheld wth one hand, if I’m using two hands (solving pitch and roll) I would prefer a grip that lets me use all the fingers on my right hand too. The vertical grip does not.

Or, as you related in a paragraph of caveats right after the rant, the vertical grip presents a whole OTHER set of operational challenges to which we have yet to build up our annoyances. It’s new, it seems better, but time will tell.

Posted by IEBA  on  09/28  at  02:06 PM

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My first video camera was the Hi8 Canon L2, with it’s combination of both the SLR-style grip and the standard handle-next-to-the-lens sported by most other video cameras. Having a very front-heavy lens, I don’t recall using the SLR-style grip much, if ever, for hand-held shots. Still it was a lovely camera.

I think Red intends the SLR-style grip to be used for shooting still pictures, but I don’t know what they expect for shooting hand-held video. There’s no reason then can’t build another bolt-on handle with the more typical video-style handle, I suppose. Or maybe a third-party add-on.

Posted by Rob  on  09/28  at  02:21 PM

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Maybe by the time it ships, there’ll be quite a few more mounting holes on the camera pieces. Then you can mount whatever grip you’d like, and extra arms, etc.

Posted by IEBA  on  09/29  at  09:26 AM

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I just don’t understand why the DSLR design. Anyone who has worked with a DSLR in any capacity understands the problems inherent in the design. This design was not meant for the capturing of motion pictures, its not ergonomically correct and will result in the same unbearably shaky handheld of all the DSLRs.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  10/14  at  11:29 PM

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“I just don’t understand why the DSLR design.” The DSLR design evolved from 35mm SLR design as a compact, handheld, eye-level still camera. There is no a priori reason it should work for motion capture; it was based on making a portable package built around a feed spool, a take-up spool, a mirror box, and a finder, with no overt nod to ergonomics.

Yet I found, somewhat to my surprise (despite having used SLRs and then DSLRs for stills since the mid-‘70s), that the form factor works quite well for single-person run-and-gun work—at least as well as a “handycam” form factor, and in many ways better once the size and weight of the camera exceed those of, say, a DVX100 or an NX5. If anything it is less prone to unbearable shakiness than a handycam—at least in the hands of a competent operator striving for stability.

Quite aside from solo-op handheld usability (which I admit is a limited ENG/EFP/docco niche), the form factor is one that reduces the camera to a functional minimum: a sensor, a lens mount, a minimalist handgrip affording directional control, and as little other gumpf as possible. Nothing stops you from making it a shoulder-mount camera, a rig camera, or a tripod-mounted box if you wish.

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  10/15  at  11:30 PM

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Thanks Adam ... very interesting to get a bit of an inside view of what’s happening at RED.  Like many others out here in the wilderness, I await the release of Epic and Scarlet.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  11/17  at  05:43 AM

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