Red’s new cameras

Posted by Steve Hull on Tuesday 10 February 2009 at 2:20pm
Tags: cameras | photography | video |

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Scarlet, the (relatively speaking) economy model, has a sensor array size of up to a full 35mm frame with up to 6K image size (6K by 4K, around 24 megapixels) and up to 72 frames per second.  The Epic brain, meanwhile, will offer up to an astonishing 6cm x 17cm (anamorphic) frame at 28K (around 281 megapixels) with a frame rate of up to 350 fps.  No, that's not a typo.  The rest of the modular system includes monitors, battery packs, lens mounts, handles, I/O modules and recording modules.  Red continues to support the use of Canon, Nikon and Arri PL lenses as well as offering their own line.

The mention of Canon, Nikon and Arriflex in the same breath is indicative of what is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Red's philosophy.  There has always been a fuzzy dividing like between moving and still images; moving images are, after all, just a lot of still images shown one after the other very quickly.  Enlarged single frames from films have long been used as (admittedly low-quality) still images in film studies courses and practically all modern stills cameras (and mobile phones, for that matter) provide a limited videomaking capability.

Red, however, has decided that it's time to end the distinction once and for all.  They refer to their cameras as DSMCs, digital stills and motion cameras, and consider them to be up to the task of both video and still image work.  That said, the specifications for the cameras, the configuration of their components and the area of greatest customer interest are firmly rooted in the world of video.  Nonetheless, the eventual merging of the still and moving image worlds seems inevitable and Red is taking a big step towards that goal, however distant it may be.

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