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Filed under: Cameras •NAB 09 •

NAB 2009 - Wednesday RedUser Party

The GearNex folks were there with their $4000 (NAB price) to $6000 (regular price) gear heads [side note: for an example of how not to design a website, turn off Flash (In Safari, disable plug-ins) and visit http://www.gearnex.com/. “Fail” is indeed the word!]

A RED ONE on a GearNex gear head.

The same RED ONE on the same GearNex gear head.

CMOCOS had what was quite possibly the coolest-looking thing at the whole show: a German, 7-axis, carbon-fiber robot arm adapted for cine motion control work. The image isn’t detailed enough to show it, but this arm was finished in pearlescent tangerine metalflake paint. When you have one of these babies on your sticks (it appears to have a Mitchell base), any other fluid or gear head seems like yesterday’s news, eh?

The CMOCOS Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (with apologies to Tom Wolfe).

Additionally, Zeiss was showing off their line of lenses, including the Compact Primes; 1 Beyond demoed their ruggedized data wrangling stations; Gamma & Density showed off their 3cP location grading and color control system; and other vendors strutted their stuff—I apologize for not having the full list.

In the theater, various folks showed off post workflows for data wrangling (1 Beyond), editing (Avid, FCP, and Adobe), and grading RED footage (Iridas and Assimilate). In a welcome break from the usual product pitches, those talks that I saw were driven as much by actual users as by vendors, so there was at least a modicum of real-world sanity-checking involved.

RED Ted then ran two RED demo reels, the 2009 version followed by the 2008 version. Only after the reels had run did Ted reveal that while the 2009 show played from an uncompressed 4K source (that must have involved many dozens of fast drives!), the 2008 reel screened from a prototype RED RAY player with a data rate of only 10 Megabit/sec—that’s just 40% the data rate of standard-def DV.

Now, I was seated far enough back that the screen subtended an arc such that I could resolve somewhere between standard-def and 720p levels of detail, and the demo reel was all fast cuts of flashy stuff with hard-driving music (and I’d averaged four hours of sleep for each of the preceding three nights), so it wasn’t exactly an optimal setup for critical evaluation of picture quality. Still, from where I sat, it looked pretty good. It will be most interesting to see how RED RAY develops, as currently the distribution of 4K content (other than via stacks of hard disks) is a rather gnarly problem.

Ted also announced REDucation—RED-sponsored and endorsed training courses for RED production and post. Each course runs 3 days and costs US$1400 (or $2500 for both courses at once).  Check out the about page; might be worth looking into if you need to get up to speed.

After the demo, the raffle: as the raffle at the SuperMeet the night before reportedly ran an hour and a half, and all I’d had to eat was relish-on-a-bun, I dragged myself off, first to a proper dinner, then to bed.

I’ll post a full NAB wrap-up article in a day or two. Stay tuned…

If you clicked on the SuperMeet link, you might have noticed the “In Loving Memory” picture of Michael Vitti. Michael was a New York-based Final Cut Pro user and community leader, an energetic and friendly fellow I had the privilege and pleasure of corresponding with over the years and meeting at trade shows in NYC. He died suddenly of a heart attack while at NAB. He will be missed.

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I got the impression that the nearest one, at least, was a dual battery carrier; the other ones appear to be a CF card module, an I/O module, and two slabs of indeterminate function… but you may be right.

And of course it could all change radically before anything ships!

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  04/24  at  12:51 AM

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On a side note, that’s my ‘camera cozy’ (our custom made RED camera cover) in the pictures of GearNex new geared head!

Posted by mikeburton  on  04/27  at  11:16 PM

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Thanks for the note, Mike; I was wondering about that cover. Is that a one-off you made for yourself, or are you selling the things?

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  04/27  at  11:21 PM

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Hey Adam!

Erik Espera of Silverado Studios and myself have been collaborating the last 3 months now on this Custom cover we call “Camera Cozy”. 

We are going to be packaging the camera cover, LCD cover w/velcro hoodman and EVF Cover together hopefully shipping by June. Final prototypes are being finished and we have a few demo units in the field as we speak on a feature film in Aspen CO, Utah and soon in Toronto.  We have been getting great feedback so far as we did at the reduser event as well.  When we are ready to ship you will have the option to order the 2mm Black Neoprene version at first followed up shortly by the thinner gauge, summer version which doesn’t trap the heat (which we are working on now).  Pricing info is yet to be determined but in true RED fashion will be quite reasonable.

Here is our thread on reduser to keep up with the latest info on the cover.  http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=27333

If you have any other questions feel free to contact me
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Posted by mikeburton  on  04/28  at  12:11 AM

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Oh, and we will be designing for Epic and Scarlet as well

Posted by mikeburton  on  04/28  at  12:12 AM

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