Otago

Does anyone know if Red has ever made a profit ? It's quite easy to disrupt a market if you have enough money, it's making the money back in that newly disrupted market that is the challenge. I can't see how Blackmagic are making much money either, there's a lot of development work in what they do with Resolve and RAW. Not that it really matters to us as film makers, I'm very happy for billionaires to have a hobby camera company! As long as they don't go bust, and unrepairable, when said billionaire gets bored. I know for a fact that the original Red EVF was designed and made in Scotland and that Speck Design in Palo Alto, California did lots of thermal work on the Red One too - it was on the very edge of thermal shut down most of the time till it gained a far bigger fan and a huge thermal mass in the mount. I wonder how big the Red internal design team really is. (I know what I wrote is only loosely related to what you wrote but it made me think )

1) Makes total sense, a very easy upgrade path for 4k users especially if they have been using adapted EF lenses and a great additional camera for an Ursa owner. 2) I was thinking the RF mount not for the native lenses, though they seem to be good, but for all the adapters that are available from Canon and others. With so many EF lenses out there perhaps it's just a niche market that adds an extra cost for most users. I would've chosen the RF mount if there wasn't that pesky patent Perhaps Red will be licensing it for the Komodo or perhaps they are just flying a few more sheets to the wind!

As someone starting out in the world of video I thought it was really interesting to see the example videos, especially the one in the gym - it doesn't look much better than what I am shooting and totally reaffirms that lighting and composition are really important! I am surprised that they didn't go with a more universal mount, like the RF possibly ? They may not want to reverse engineer a mount considering they already have the work done for previous cameras, or want sued and have to take a camera off the market - the patent for the EF mount must be lapsed by now and it's not like you can do a firmware mount change. Are 4K deliverables just going to be the norm now ? I think deliveries to streaming services need to be in 4k but I can't tell the difference between upressed 1080p and 4k when it's been through our intranet compression system though. The UltraStudio4K mini seems like an interesting device though, the microphone port on the front looks to be a real push towards the YouTuber market - or is there some use in professional editing that I don't see ?

I'm not arguing that cameras should remain the same, I'd love to see a lossless compression 6k 16-bit RAW shooting FF DSLR size camera with IS and weather sealing etc... I don't think that is out of the realms of possibility either, just that it will take longer to come than before because there are fewer cameras sold to recoup the investment. I get to regularly drive a 997 C4 and Golf R and whilst the Porsche is more fun to drive, and as you say probably far more reliable, it is not as fast as the R getting from point to point, definitely faster on the track but not on a country road, much like phones vs DSLR's will soon be. It may cost less to design and build a camera now than it did 10 years ago but, as we have seen from the most recent reports, the numbers sold are far smaller. In mass manufacturing volume is king. I have designed products that wouldn't be profitable till they had sold over a million units because the tooling and engineering costs were so high, if my client couldn't sell that many then the product just wouldn't be built. The world probably wouldn't miss the latest innovations in bottle closures but I will definitely miss innovations in cameras It gets even worse when the suppliers that every camera manufacturer uses stop investing in developing new sensors, shutters, diaphragm units etc... the whole eco system dies and there's no way back from that. The Arris and PhaseOnes can probably survive, they are used to making small volume, niche, products and they also have no choice to stay in business. Canon and Nikon can fall back to their other businesses and that leaves us with £10-40k cameras - which is far more than I can afford to spend! We have already seen this with Fuji massively cutting down on film production, Copal stopping shutter manufacture ( apart from subcontract work ) but the niche suppliers like Ilford make it work, because they have little choice.

I think camera's may be coming to a cross roads, they won't be tools anymore, there won't be a noticeable difference in the output of a cheaper DSLR and a high end phone in most situations and for most people's uses. This has happened in lots of industries; computers are one, my 5 year old MacBook Pro still does everything that 90% of computer users need it for but Apple still sell plenty of new ones, cars are another because the current Golf R is far quicker than a Porsche from 10 years ago and the difference isn't that great to even a modern Porsche. There will still be a market for people buying cameras like the Leica M, the Fuji's and esoteric products like the ALPA because using them is a different, and better for some, experience to using a phone or a conventional wheels and screens DSLR. Much like the Porsche and Golf example above. The issue for me will be whether they end up dead industries because of a lack of return on investment and reliability, can companies fund a new camera that we can afford when they know they will only sell a few 10's of thousands of them ? Companies still make film, but how many truly new emulsions have come out since the peak of film ? Companies still make turntables and hifi speakers but there's very little real innovation, because they are cottage industries. Perhaps a lack of reliability will be their saving grace, will my GH3 last me as long as my Hasselblad ? I'm yet to actually have a digital camera fail me when I haven't done something egregious to it so perhaps ?

Yes, but Otago Street in Glasgow, Scotland, rather than New Zealand I'm afraid

Hadn't thought about putting 3 camera frames onto each HDMI frame, very clever! You could also map your tonal range to each channel and have 12288 values for each frame. Somewhere between 13 and 14 bits. Do you know how SDI raw is done ? I would assume they will use something similar to keep the development easier. I watched an interview with Jeromy Young where he said that he wasn't sure what Nikon were going to give them as a signal but I got the impression that it was more about the politics of the bit depth and resolution, and the capabilities of the camera, than the technical aspects of the HDMI stream.

I agree, normally it's 3840x2160 values, 0000-4095 Red, 0000-4095 Green and 0000-4095 Blue for each pixel in 12 bit, being updated 30 times a second ( which always amazes me ) I believe 12Bit 4:4:4 YUV and RGB can be converted with no loss as there is no chroma sampling happening ( I think the 4's denote that in every 4 pixel grid there will be 4 values each for YU and V and therefore you can convert to RGB with no loss of information ) Looking at RAW Stills files, there is a header with some information on the camera and the bayer filter, and then an array of values with what ever bit depth the RAW is ( so for a UHD 12-bit RAW file there is a value from 0 to 4095 and there are 8.5 million of them ) When the file is debayered the header is used to say what the filter array is and we get a colour image with 3840X2160 values that are from 0 to 4095 for Red Green and Blue ( probably mapped in some weird way to a 16 Bit container, but that's beyond my understanding ) Assuming that isn't all rubbish then you could send 3840x2160 values from 0-4095 down HDMI and have your RAW data at the end, and actually could do 3 times that amount ( we are only using, for instance, the red channel here ) if you wanted to. I too would like RAW directly in the camera, it just seems the simplest way to do things now. Why have a super complicated ASIC in my camera, which will never be updated, when I can keep upgrading graphics cards and software and get better images from my old footage ? Storage in the camera is now fast enough to do it but I suppose that's for version 6.

I'm not that up to speed with video quality yet, but ... I haven't seen any comparisons between the S1 and the GH5 (both with 10-bit 4:2:2) - is that because the 10-bit upgrade for the S1 hasn't made it's way out to people yet or is it because the difference is so massive that it's not worth comparing them ?

I have heard from a few people now that Atomos and Nikon will be using using ethernet connectivity over HDMI to transport the RAW. Is there a reason for that ? Has anyone confirmed or hinted that's how they are doing it ? HDMI 2.0 supports UHD 12-bit 4:4:4 at 30fps, which would be fine for streaming the RAW sensor values - does the HDMI spec say that it has to be a colour, viewable, image ? When the RAW SDI outputs are used on cameras is the output a UHD 12bit "image" formed from the sensor values ? Or is it more propriety than that ? In theory anyone could record the values and do a debayer if it is just a 12-bit stream of sensor values, and should be sort of viewable if you squint hard enough! I have also heard that it has to be a crop, but Nikon ( and others ) provide a scaled RAW file, in their stills side, that behaves just like a normal RAW file with a slightly lower noise floor and slightly lower dynamic range. Is there any information about this or is it just conjecture ? I'm trying to figure out if this is something I should be interested in or whether it's going to be hobbled. I really like the design of the Z6 and I get on much better with their menus than Panasonic and Sony.