Tuesday, November 18, 2008

10 (+1) Reasons Revisited: is Scarlet Still Even a Prosumer Product?

Economies of Scope

Six months ago I posted an article here with 10 reasons (and a bonus speculation, which now seems way off) why Scarlet would “change the game in 2009.” At that time, Scarlet was RED’s “entry level” camera, explicitly designed to capture indy filmmakers and “soccer moms” alike. When I posted the article, Scarlet had received far less press than the “bigger is better” Epic announcement; RED was announcing one camera that would eclipse the RED One, another which would significantly underprice all but the lowest end of the fixed-lens video camera market.

The game has indeed been changed - by RED themselves, and only halfway to the finish line. The media seems to have a fondness recently for the phrase “we were all wrong” given world events of late, and now that the middle of the Scarlet line is now powerful enough to obsolete the RED One, it’s worth looking at whether there’s anything to get excited about at the prosumer end of the spectrum.

Let’s take a quick look at my top ten from back then:

1) Sensor size - clearly this will be the salient characteristic of the initial RED line forevermore; with its latest announcement RED makes it clear that the Mysterium chip can scale to previously unheard of resolutions, and Jim Jannard has offered insight that resolution-wise, RED uses rules none of us was even considering.

2) Price - the phrase 3K for $3K may not be gone but it is certainly forgotten. $3K now buys you a “brain” - no viewfinder, no grip, no recording device - in short all of the “sold separately” limitations Mike Curtis pointed out apply equally well to this humblest entry as they do to the truly configurable REDs.

3) High-speed framerates - RED clearly maintains an advantage here, coupled with…

4) Redcode which also delivers what looks to be vastly improved dynamic range. This is the part of the announcement that took me the longest to notice: 13 stops, which may mean you can shoot without clipping even on a bright contrasty location and retain color in the low midrange.

An aside before I move on - in the previous article, I mentioned Redcode RAW and soccer mom in the same point. There you have the use that has been abandoned; instead of giving the DSLR-like option of shooting low-end compressed for users who don’t need RAW all the time, RED remains firmly The Post-Production Camera - NOT for use by the novice until a drastic revamp of the pipeline occurs.

5) RGB via HDMI - It’s hard to believe I considered this worthy of the top ten, but at that time it did seem notable that RED would provide an easy way to pipe video straight out of the camera. Again, I no longer see this as a priority - until it is.

6) Plug and play - yeah, well, no. This is tbe big downer to the crowd who was hoping for the $3K camera that would actually eclipse everything else at that price; the price has effectively gone way up, because while $3K may still end up buying you 3K, you won’t have the viewfinder to see it, the device to record or transfer it, or even the grip to hold it without adding extra dough. Or so it seems.

7) Fixed lens - what was an acceptable and even enticing trade-off - a fixed lens with optics that Jim Jannard would accept - now just looks like you’re a chump if you end up with the one and only RED that doesn’t have the ability to mount just about any lens you would ever want, leaving you to fumble with your Brevis or Letus for customization. Likewise, the 2/3 sensor to match this lens now sounds like it will cause you to miss the proverbial boat, not of image fidelity but of cinematic quality, especially compared with the almost-good-enough DSLR’s now learning to do this stuff.

8) Customization - good lord, this one now belongs at number one with a bullet.

9) Controls. Who can say? The controls for the previous camera certainly looked enticingly ground-breaking, and Jim has not lost his affinity for posting enticing renderings of physical interfaces. Just because all we get to see right now is a brain in a box and some lovely renderings (see above) doesn’t mean that Scarlet won’t innovate this area significantly, especially when you think of actually shooting a movie with a DSLR.

10) Fearless market position. Well, yes. Some things never change because they are fundamental. It’s notable that RED is willing to roll out these sweeping changes months ahead of even the earliest arrivals. It’s almost as if Jim Jannard, who clearly isn’t in this just to make a buck, is challenging the Japanese camera manufacturers to come up with viable competition - and thereby compete with their own obsolete product lines as well.

Still, lovers of cameras like the Sony EX-1 have lost a dream with this announcement - the dream of heading down to the Apple store (my now ludicrous sounding +1 point) and for less than ten grand, picking up the entry-level post-production camera and a system built to finish film-quality images.

So the RED is dead to consumers. Long live the RED! I for one welcome our Mysterium overlords; they have given ample room to the Sonys, Canons and even Nikons of the world to answer the challenge for the prosumer while remaining well in reach as an easily rentable, astounding, game-changing imaging device. My +1 guess that RED would need the Apple Store to distribute it is no longer viable; RED no longer has to solve this problem, because for the time being it is no longer most interested in getting tens of thousands of cameras into the hands of non-professionals, a game to the bottom of which these other companies race one another. RED appears smarter than that.

Now if they’d just standardize the workflow.

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Monday, September 22, 2008

3D Objects from Photoshop in After Effects CS4

A short overview of what to expect with After Effects’ implementation of Photoshop 3D

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Tuesday, August 12, 2008

China, Spectacle, Fakery

Billions were fooled, but was any real harm done?

If the 21st Century, as I think it very well may, becomes known as the era of Things Are Not As They Seem (if the acronym TANATS catches on, you heard it here first), maybe we’ll look at one seemingly harmless moment in 2008 as a watershed.

Perhaps you were one of the billions worldwide who witnessed the Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics and was fooled by an aerial sequence of 29 giant pyrotechnic footprints leading to Beijing National Stadium, of which only one - the very last - actually occurred as depicted. The preceding 28, representing the Olympic events preceding this one, relied on our old friends the particle simulation, motion control and compositing (not to mention a glance at the Farmer’s Almanac for the likeliest weather conditions on the night of the event).

This of course is one more sense in which they would have been really screwed if it had rained that night (as it did all weekend) - and maybe you weren’t aware that Chinese officials are even trying to control that.

Not that there aren’t other precedents of misrepresentation in the name of controlled spectacle: these organizers evidently wouldn’t let the girl who sang the patriotic “Ode to the Motherland” appear as the singer, apparently because among 1.3 billion Chinese there are no sufficiently cute seven year olds with a set of pipes. It’s encourage to note the complaints among the Chinese about the message this sends to gifted singers with ordinary looks.

That substitution may lead to some serious need for therapy later in life - by comparison, the fireworks stunt seems harmless enough on the face of it. Sure, one could criticize that:

• even the nation that invented fireworks couldn’t pull this off (and it may be significant to note that they really did create firework footprints that night, they just didn’t photograph them, evidently due to the hazards of combining aerial photography and pyrotechnics)
• vfx work is reported to have taken a year, which seems to me bad P.R. for the nascent Chinese visual effects industry (yes I’m joking, but if you land a year’s budget for a sequence like that, call me)
• even though we’re used to computer graphics on our screens all the time, everywhere, this show was just one more big spectacle, so what’s a little alleged live TV fakery (hello David Copperfield!)

However, is there any doubt that in this Era of TANATS, something like this will cross the line? It’s easy to dismiss claims that the moon landing or Zapruder film were composited - we humans simply weren’t very good at that sort of thing in the 1960’s. That’s a pretty thin argument nowadays, when images continue to shape our lives despite how used we are to their fabrication. My kids routinely ask if fantastic images - including the real ones - are real or fake, and have done so since preschool.

So maybe the question is when will be the first time billions of people are fooled by a fake live transmission and it actually matters to what we think about justice, right and wrong, good or evil?

That sounds grandiose. But this being the Olympics, one need look no further than the athletes themselves, and the question as to whether they have faked their performance with chemistry, to glimpse what a mess is created when we hope the rules of the past will get us through the reality of today, and tomorrow.

NOTE: No less a filmmaker than Errol Morris has posted a thorough and thoughtful blog entry on a related topic.

(4) Comments • Most recent comments by: billS, Dylan Pank, Mark Christiansen, careyd, • Permalink

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Why QuickTime is the US Dollar of Digital Video

As the standard is devalued, the world undertakes a slow-motion search for an alternative. What can be done for QuickTime?

How bad are things for the US Dollar these days? So bad that, as reported by the BBC and mentioned recently on This Week in Tech, Gisele Bundchen no longer accepts modeling pay in dollars, nor apparently do many high-end boutiques in the capital of U.S. commerce, New York City. European travel is effectively twice as expensive as it was just a few years ago simply because of the exchange rate. So it may come as a surprise how familiar the situation of the world economy in regards to the dollar is if you’re a video professional using QuickTime.

I’m not actually joking.

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Tuesday, May 06, 2008

10 (+1) Reasons Scarlet Changes the Game in 2009

Don’t overlook the impact of RED’s entry-level camera, even for pros like you.

RED will not debut Scarlet, its entry-level camera, until early next year, which means that those who are already hype-weary with all things RED are already moving on to a different part of the site. Nontheless, there are solid reasons that Scarlet will change the entire landscape of low-budget digital video, assuming RED can get enough of them into the hands of the public (more about that at the end). Scarlet’s impact will be somewhere between that of the Canon 10D when it debuted and that of the iPhone. Here’s why.

1) 3K native sensor. It’s easy to lose sight of how major a step forward 3,000 pixels of horizontal resolution is for a digital video camera when that camera is debuted alongside an existing 4K camera and a 5K camera due at the same time. So let’s try this with the hype language used by the digital still camera manufacturers: 8.5 megapixels. Per frame. And this is not cheating by calling a 1280 native sensor HD (yes I’m talking to you, HVX-200). 3k means you could cut this image down 35% to HD. You could sneak it onto an IMAX screen without anyone seeing pixilation. It will be years before Sony or Panasonic have anything like this at the price. Speaking of which…

(12) Comments • Most recent comments by: chucksav, Tim Sassoon, J. Matthew, J. Matthew, Rob, J. Matthew, Mike Curtis, Mark Christiansen, Scott Gentry, glennser, • Permalink

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

3D Display at NAB

Great strides are being made in 3D technology, which is great news for the few projects that need it.

Day One of NAB was 3D day in the Content Theater, and at the end of that day, I participated in a podcast discussion with Ron Brinkmann and Mike Seymour all about stereo imaging, which seems to have been a major official trend at NAB this year. At the end of the on-air discussion we did an informal poll and found that half the folks in the room felt that 3D display would be a bona fide new artistic medium within the next few years, and the other half - with whom I’m aligned - felt that stereoscopy remains the fringe curiosity it has always been, at least in regards to narrative filmmaking. U23D as an experience is hard to top - I even overheard other moviegoers express how preferable seeing that movie in IMAX was to actually attending a U2 show - but the legitimacy of 3D display for a mainstream Hollywood film is only being debated, it seems to me, because James Cameron has put the issue on the table.

My thought is that even if Avatar does revolutionize the use of 3D in tentpole Hollywood blockbusters, few (if any) other filmmakers will be able (or willing) to match, let alone top it. Also, as long as headgear is required to view images in 3D - and the polarized specs I received for U23D take the cake - we humans are really no further along technologically than when we started down this road (although the imaging technology itself for the price point is improving by leaps and bounds thanks to IMAX and high-frame-rate digital displays).

Until it’s a hologram, no goofy glasses required, any move toward 3D is going to look like what it’s always been - something cinemas grab onto when sales are under downward pressure. 3D can be fun - 10 year olds love the 3D films I worked on for Robert Rodriguez - and James Cameron will no doubt provide an amazing experience, with or without the extra dimension - but 3D on the projected screen is is a boon to immediacy and sensation, not emotion and story. U23D in IMAX is a fantastic spectacle - better in many ways than actually attending a U2 show - but if we see more of these in cinemas, it can only mean that substantial stories have headed for the more intimate home theater.

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Saturday, April 19, 2008

Apple: Does Denying a Rumor Only Validate It?

According to a highly reliable source, Apple emphatically denied in an NAB press meeting earlier this week any truth to the rumor that the Pro Apps are for sale.

Now, even if Apple sold Final Cut Studio and its brethren, I hardly imagine the buyer (and who might that be? Avid?) would do much to mess with its success, at least in the short term - but here is a company with a firm policy of not responding to rumors that is apparently issuing an emphatic denial and, well, one can’t help but think of analogous situations that have occurred in the recent past.

One thing that is certain, from speaking with a former Apple employee, is that the development team, once housed inside 1 Infinite Loop and very much on the radar, is now located far from the action. If you don’t think that matters, keep in mind that this is a company whose important decisions are all made by one guy. In that building. It may simply be that Pro Apps were important to Apple back when they needed to show that the Mac was not an inferior platform for high-performance, high-profile entertainment work, but that job has now been done, the app is mature and in no danger of leaving the platform, and the company has found other areas to, ahem, shake up. Like the multi-billion dollar mobile telecommunications industry, or the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry.

Anyhow that’s all just speculation. Beyond the denial, all I know for sure is that a) Final Cut Server looks great and b) attending NAB after losing my iPhone in the powder at Sugar Bowl was like living in L.A. without a car.

(14) Comments • Most recent comments by: Scott Gentry, Mark Christiansen, dd, Vincent Rice, Mark Christiansen, Bubba-Mac, Kevin Thomas, garret linn, Alex Shaykevich, Jerry Hofmann, • Permalink

Saturday, April 19, 2008

NAB 2008 Super Session: A Million Dollar Look on a Thousand Dollar Budget

At the show ruled by suits and dilberts, the rebels get their turn

With big exhibitions like The NAB Show falling out of favor, and some disappearing altogether in the 21st century, NAB struck back this year by offering more educational fare than in years past, featuring keynotes and panels of experts from the industry, as well as day-long classes. On Wednesday was “A Million Dollar Look on a Thousand Dollar Budget,” a keynote and panel on getting cinematic production values out of equipment you may already have sitting around your studio.

The session was kicked off with the Legend of Zelda fan trailer “linked” here (nerdy pun for gamers paying attention) which appeared on April Fool’s Day, followed by a keynote by Stu Maschwitz of The Orphanage (and author of a fantastic blog) and then a panel featuring Dave Basulto of Clarity Pictures, Alex Lindsay from Pixel Corps, D.P. Taylor Wigton (447 Productions) and moderated by Brian Valente from Redrock Micro.

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