The blogs were inundated yesterday with news of the new RED Scarlet and other equipment, and it’s a pretty impressive piece of kit. The Scarlet itself looks to be available in the May-June timeframe, both the fixed and interchangeable lens versions. But the Scarlet wasn’t the only announcement:
This includes the announcement of RED RAY Pro, a laser based hardware unit that looks to be the high-end, rack mount big brother to the previously announced RED RAY disc player. The Pro model will have more professional I/O and has been moved ahead of the consumer model to January/February 2010 schedule. RED says this unit can decode .R3D files up to 5K at 30 fps. And it can also decode .RRD files, which is the RED RAY distribution format, “4:4:4 files up to 4K @ 30 fps.” I could see this unit making its way into a lot of post houses but my question has always been how do you get your finished film back out to a RED RAY since you can’t write new .R3D files. Looks like the .RRD file is the answer.
Details abound so I’ll let you dig around, but here’s a quick roundup of some good places to start:
- Studio Daily Blog » RED delivers Scarlet announcement and then some.
- FreshDV – RED’s Nov 30th Scarlet Announcement (great pricing breakdown)
- RedUser.net Forum – Scarlet 2/3″ – Great details, but all images
- Paul Del Vecchio’s Homepage, with some great insight from an indie director, including:
I’m NOT dissing RED here, trust me. What they’re doing is amazing. But guys, at the level us indies are at, we don’t need 6, 12, 18, 123432K footage in order to make a good film. Get your grimy little hands on a Canon 7D, a 5D, or the 1D MK4 if you’re willing to spend that much, and GO OUT AND MAKE A MOVIE NOW! Why wait until next summer.
So go read up and let us know what you think about the new RED Offerings.
