It seems it was like this with the original red also...

lots of marketing hype, lots of promises...

Imagine if Sony, Panasonic, Canon etc., were to employ this type of strategy! sell a cam thats not fully functional! a work in progress!...

Has there been another product in history that has used this strategy & been successful?...

Vaporware is common in software, and marginally common in hardware....Can't fault RED for showing a prototype and announcing it, what makes it comical is that they're still not delivering working RED cameras, either. In a different forum, I had a really nasty debate with one of the RED team about the Scarlet, and had commented on April 12 that I would believe the Scarlet was a real product when everyman could shoot with one vs it being a boutique product. I also commented that I believed a shipping Scarlet might be seen by 2010. It was kinda funny to read Jim Jannard's post yesterday morning, I literally spewed coffee on my monitor, I was laughing so hard.
RED products are a great concept, yet I suspect that Jannard has discovered the hard way what Sony, Canon, Ikegami, Grass Valley have known for years; it just *ain't* that easy.
Now...you've got Canon seriously treading into the arena of video cameras with the 5DMKII, the footage I've seen from that camera is stunning, even if it's not long recording times. It might well be, one day, and then they mostly have to overcome the form factor and a few other less important things.

I think the most exciting new product is the Panasonic HMC-150 camera.

1. AVCHD multiple codec profiles & bitrates (up to 24mbps)
2. Many 1080 and 720 formats
3. Tapeless to SDHC cards
4. Possibly best low light in its $3,500 price category
5. The AVCHD to HDV comparisons alone show substancial improvement over HDV.

If Vegas will edit the footage (doubtful) Im gonna try one out for a while and compare it to my XH-A1s. I want to go tapeless after much thought , and Im tired of the HDV codec.

I hope Red actually produces a product some day, but there is just a ton of new cameras already out there.

The Scarlet/Epic announcement is set for 6 am PST on the 13th.

You can use free "Beta" Redcine to down-rez 3K to 1080p so you can edit in Vegas.

I'm interested but am taking a watch and see approach. The 5DMkII has been on my want list for a couple years since I got my 30D. The video capability is just an added bonus. I plan to get one and see what happens in the camcorder wars.

Once Scarlet ships Sony and Panasonic will either try to go head to head on features or I'm guessing just undercut Scarlet pricing with existing models like the HMC150.

If someone can figure out a way to make lenses as good as Cooke or Arri for 10% of the price that'd be something to get excited about.

Well, there has been progress with electronic compensation of chromatic aberration, in the top Sony and Panny prosumer cameras already. Makes a big difference at the telephoto end of the zoom at least.

Same goes for lights. We just paid $7,500 for two 200W Joker Bugs.

I'm appreciating more and more what you get when you pay a bit more. I can't justify HMIs yet, but I've been looking at fluorescents. Diva-Lite 400 is my choice for many specific reasons, including that they are not much more expensive than Flolight's dimmable fixtures, but they are far more robust, the light is much better (higher output, CRI 95 makes for way more beautiful light than CRI 90), and they have excellent accessories. Everything is so incredibly well thought out from many years of pro use.

All this for only three hundred United States Pesos more than the El Cheapo Flolight equivalent.

I think the most exciting new product is the Panasonic HMC-150 camera.

On paper it sure looks great, but is Panny really using a full raster imager on this camera?

They've been pushing 720P as a Sacred Number for a long time. The HVX200 even used a 960x540 imager and uprezzed this in-camera to 1280x720 (or 1920x1080 even).

I'd love to hear more about your comparison with the Canon XH-A1!

This morning I found interesting some comments near the end of this interview re RED resolution : http://www.reel-show.tv/index.html?vidId=00077maybe not so great[/link] . Sounds reasonable, but I can't comment.

On paper it sure looks great
On paper, a lot of things sound great. ;)

"Can't fault RED for showing a prototype and announcing it, what makes it comical is that they're still not delivering working RED cameras, either."

Spot, maybe I'm confused, but from what I understand, they've delivered over 4,000 RED Ones. And Steven Soderbergh's latest films, The Argentine, and The Guerilla, were both entirely shot on the RED One. So apparently, they are working.

Now, I'm not saying that everything they've put out has been perfect, and I have heard about quite a few workflow problems with the RED One, but it certainly isn't "vaporware". And I am not rushing out to use one on my next project (I would lean towards the Sony EX-3) but I don't see why people keep ridiculing what the people at RED are trying to accomplish. Whatever they are doing, it is pushing the technology, and the industry, forward.

Course,

HMC-150 has the same glass and sensors as the HVX-200 according to the Panny rep I spoke with when i got to play with one for a bit. I wasn't overly impressed, it's not bad, it's just not great, I've been much more impressed with the footage of the EX series cams than i have of the HVX cams.

Dave

Yeah, Sony has done a really nice job with both of the EX Cams.

If you're interested breaking news here:

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=21835

Bob.

Amazing and Expensive.

If I'm reading this right for 35mm sensor

35mm Brain $7K (small 35mm film style) to $12K (Full Frame)
RedHandle $???.??
lens mount $???.??
Monitoring $???.??
Recording Module $???.??
Battery Option $???.??

For $2699 I get the EOS 5D MkII incuding the $12,000 size FF sensor and all the above accessories in the box at no extra charge. I know it lacks some functions including RAW but there is a lot of nice digital HD video shot compressed.

Hello B&H EOS 5D MkII please. When I use that to make some money maybe I can afford the Scarlet I want.

Course,

I got a HMC-150 the last week of September. Shot two weddings with it so far along with a Canon XH-A1. I got lucky and sold my XH-A1 cameras 2 days before the XH-A1s was announced.
Also, the HMC has the HVX-200a sensor & lens, not the HVX-200.

The HMC-150 has the best low light capability and widest angle lens of any $3,500 range camera and any current 1/3" chip camera.
The HMC-150 is an incremental step up over the XH-A1 IMO. They are both good cameras though. I posted XH-A1 vs. HMC-150 screen grabs over on the DVXuser forum. The XH-A1s has the same sensor block & lens as the XH-A1, so no increased performance with the camera update.

The EX-1 is a great 1/2" camera that has great resolution and good low light. It is yet another incremental step up over the HMC-150 and its only downside is the cost.

For an economical tapeless camera, the HMC-150 is the best currently available.

http://www.red.com/epic_scarlet/

120 Frames
Changeable lens

Here's my money.

Vaporware is all I see - lots of pretty pics and major spin doctoring by the ad wizards - they still haven't gotten the bugs worked out with the Red One from what I've read - I"m not holding my breath.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | solo video journalism blog

The Concept is great, I'll be eager to see something come out. For the time being though I'll be more of a wait and see buyer when the time comes. What I find to be very unique is the concept of being very highly customizable in the interface etc...

It's definitely got some potential, but I won't put my hard earned money out there for something that's almost certainly buggy in the start.

Dave

Buggy from the start like each new iteration of Vegas? And yes I'm being serious.

I'm not saying that the HMC-150 isn't a good camera for the money (more like what I think that HVX should have been pricing at), but what I have issue with is that they are using 540x960 sensors and then using chroma sub sampling to say it's able to shoot 1080p. In some stuff it's not a big deal, but in other stuff it can cause problems. honestly? I just can't get myself to use a pixelshifted image like that. Nothing against that look, but there is a definite clarity difference between images from something like the HVX and the EX-1, but the HMC-150 is just the right price for the image that I see from the those cameras, and while I still don't think the cam is great, I certainly think it's good.

Dave

Great analysis of these latest announcements by Stu Maschwitzhere.

As he says, none of these are DV Rebel cameras. I'll also be interested to see how well they perform as digital film cameras. Before laying down you hard earned ask to see their spectral response curves. Sensors made for machine vision applications don't perform so well in video or digital film cameras.

Bob.

"Buggy from the start like each new iteration of Vegas?"

True but completely irrelevant. If Vegas stops working worst case there are other NLEs. If your camera refuses to boot or has a codec error or you get a lens jammed in the mount in the middle of a shoot then what?

Still there is a valid issue here that applies to all camera manufacturers. More of the functionality of the latest cameras is being implemented in software, quite a few run full blown OSs. That could raise some troubling issues as the industry moves forward.

Bob.

I'm not saying that the HMC-150 isn't a good camera for the money (more like what I think that HVX should have been pricing at), but what I have issue with is that they are using 540x960 sensors and then using chroma sub sampling to say it's able to shoot 1080p. In some stuff it's not a big deal, but in other stuff it can cause problems. honestly? I just can't get myself to use a pixelshifted image like that. Nothing against that look, but there is a definite clarity difference between images from something like the HVX and the EX-1, but the HMC-150 is just the right price for the image that I see from the those cameras, and while I still don't think the cam is great, I certainly think it's good. Dave

Dave:

The HMC-150 uses a multi-axis pixel shifted sensor system. This references that one chip is spatially offset by half a pixel, which doubles the effective sampling sites (960x2 = 1920, 540x2 = 1080) to give the system a theoretical max of 1920 x 1080 sampling sites.

To take matters further, the "pixel shift" system isn't really all that different than a bayer pattern system used in many sensors. Look at the Silicon Imaging SI-2K chip -- that's a 1920x1080 chip system, right? So is it "true" 1920x1080? Well, it has a bayer filter over it, which means that 1/4 of its pixels are covered with blue, 1/4 of them are covered with red, and 1/2 are covered with green. And that means that its red and blue resolutions are (guess what): 960 x 540. Its green is better, at 960x1080-ish (but "ish" because it's not an actual 960x1080, it's a zigzag pattern of half-size 960x1080 pixels). You cannot read the system as discrete pixels, because no individual chip pixel works on its own -- each blue pixel must be used in concert with a nearby red and green pixel, for example.

However, back to HMC-150 resolution, I have tested this camera against others and agree that the ultimate resolution is lower than some other less pixel shifted cameras, and you can see this more and more as the viewing screen gets larger (i.e. projection).

What you get out of this pixel shifted comprimise is fewer but larger photo sites on the 1/3" sensor. You get more sensitivity, less noise and less smearing than any other 1/3" camera currently available. It's a little analagous to the digital camera mega pixel war. The bummer is that there in no way to produce a native 1920X1080 1/3" chip, you have to go to 2/3".

About the HVX200a vs. HMC-150 price; these cameras use the exact same sensor block & lens, after that, the HVX has a much more advanced signal processing and capture system which includes over and under cranking and is geared toward television and film production.

The Sony EX-1 does have a great, sharp 1/2" imager compared to the 1/3" Panasonic imager. But the EX-1 has other problems with its rolling shutter and motion artifacting contributing to less smooth video. I admit, for a static tripod shot, the EX-1 has the best resolution I have ever seen on a large screen.

If Vegas stops working worst case there are other NLEs.
You'd hae to re-create your project, which would take a huge amount of time.
Or rather, as is usually the case, if a NLE really screws up (project file corrupted, output bugs) then you sit there trying to fix the problem. If there are output bugs (way worse than just a simple crash), you can burn a lot of time trying to get it to work. This applies to any NLE.

Whereas if your camera is broken, then you're looking around for a second body. Any camera can break on you. Granted, beta build implies that the build may not be stable.

2- In defence of Vegas, some of the older versions were pretty damn stable. Especially compared to Final Cut and Premiere at the time.

I haven't run into the black frame issues as I haven't needed to do HDV work in Vegas.