RED Leader Jim Jannard today announced a new version of RedCine that they hope to be shipping sometime in August called REDCINE-X. For those of you who have used, or attempted to use, RedCine then you might have watched the video (see the embeded clip after the jump {sorry about the autoplay} or watch the full-rez version here) with quite a bit of shock and awe as it really looks and feels nothing like RedCine. And this is a good thing.

RedCine has always been hampered by both a lack if usability in how to exactly do things in the application as well as overall bugginess. Most people I have talked to who use RedCine on a regular basis have figured out how to make the application behave in a somewhat reasonable manner but for many it was a quick move away from RedCine once the Red SDK finally allowed a lot of 3rd party application to work with the R3Ds. And work well many of these apps do.

So what is REDCINE-X? No one really knows for sure at this early stage but the consensus around Twitter is that in sort of looks like Adobe Lightroom for video or R3Ds. If that’s the case then that would be cool indeed. Jim lets a few hits out about the app:

R-X™ will support Build 20, RED Rocket and be Mac and PC compatible. We also think it will be more solid and user friendly… should be or we are wasting our time.
1st version will have the basics, then we will add features over time.
Please do NOT ask us to make this an app that replaces every application you know of or have dreamed about. That’s what you pay the other guys a lot of money to do.

Couple that last statement with the “no to EDL” that was answered in a REDUser post and that says to me that this app will probably have limited functionality for high end conform and finishing. But if you watch through the video you do see some basic editing going on including a Back to editing button that brings up a window configuration with a timeline. It’s quite a nice looking interface that will probably really take advantage of your computer’s graphics card as the interface itself is performing quite a dance in the video. Of course it’s too early to really speculate on anything (so I won’t mention the limited Output Formats that are shown in the Output Control Settings :cheese: ) since it’s “just a rough” of where they are today with the application.

But Jim also says this: “supports stills (as will Adobe), working hard to prepare for the future of DSMC.” I hope that means the Scarlet is still churning along in development. There seems to be a bit less Scarlet discussion these days what with the Canon 5D Mark II mania all around. Red knows it, they’ve talked about it. As someone who has to deal with the Canon’s compressed H.264 format on a regular basis I can’t wait for the day when there is a similar camera without the limitations of such a compressed codec. Red’s “Problem Solver” Graeme Nattress addressed this best in the REDUser forums himself. But until we get the Scarlet and whatever RED does with its DSMC system, the Canon will continue to produce beautiful, if somewhat limited, images.