Benji Wade wrote:This is the stuff that annoys me about the RED:
http://www.red.com/pages/soderberghYeah, that sounds really exciting, doesn't it? Two of the world's most prominent filmmakers have access to prototypes. That doesn't exactly scream "consumer" market, now does it...
I'm not annoyed, per se, by the fact that soderbergh or jackson or whoever might be the first to get their hands on it, I just find it annoying that people are under the impression that it's a $17,000 camera and that the $17,000 indie HDV filmmaker was somehow led to believe that for $17k they'd have a full working RED package.
Everytime somebody repeats that "$17,000 revolution" mantra, another group of listeners gets convinced that they're going to be able to spend $17k and get a setup that will allow them to shoot something that it the quality level of any major multi-million dollar production. They think "Wow, for the price of just two XLH1s, I could have a RedOne and be able to shoot unbelievable quality moving images" and it's simply not true.
This thread is a perfect example of that confusion. The whole point of the original post is that buying/marketing an HDPro JVC camera with a lens adapter is a riduculous proposition because you can get a RedOne and do so much more for less money! Hogwash.
Red's original fan base seems to be made up of scrappy independent filmmakers with limited budgets. Those are the people who have been touting the $17,000 RedOne far and wide for the last couple years. Those are the people I meet who can't stop talking about the Red and how no other camera will be able to hold a candle to it.... and 99% of those people will never ever own a Red One because, in the end, it's NOT a consumer priced camera. They have, for whatever reason, come to believe things that aren't completely true.
Whether that's because they "wanted to believe" or because they drank the purple koolaid or just never read the fine print, I don't know, but there are hundreds if not thousands of indie filmmaking wannabes who saw the RedOne as their holy grail. It's the freaking iPhone of the DV/HDV world that's going to change their filmmaking lives.... except to get a working package costs much more than a $600 iPhone or the $17k pricetag that they have burned into their brains.
I have no doubt that a full $40,000+ RedOne package will be able to shoot some great pictures. I have no doubt that it will be "revolutionary" in the fact that it's less expensive than its predecessors and can make prettier pictures than they could. But you know what? That's exactly how technology works and I can show you reciepts for 4MB sticks of RAM from the 90s to prove it.
