Shot on Red Paradigm Shift Approaching

by Gordon Lake

When you think of things shot with the Red camera you probably think of films. The Red, after all, is a natural replacement for film cameras and has more than proven itself in films like Ben Stiller Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, or Tom Hanks Angels & Demons for the VFX shots. My Bloody Valentine 3D is a Red film as well as the TV show ER.

But I would guess that you wouldn’t think of the Red as a camera for shooting corporate training video or a high school football game or a wedding. Matter of fact, given the price tag of a complete Red package (starting around $40,000), the thought of shooting anything that doesn’t need the absolute highest image quality would be considered overkill. That is about to change.

It’s about to change because the Scarlets are coming. Think of these as baby Reds with price tags for complete systems starting under $10,000 and a quality that most will not be able to distinguish from the Red. Theses cameras will start showing up in the fall and could be joined by similar cameras from other manufactures by the end of the year.

Not just for Films any more

When I first shot a meeting with the Red it felt awkward. Not because of the functionality of the camera, but because of my mindset. I had a moral conflict with using such a high end piece of equipment on such a simple project. When kids pick up the Scarlets later this year they will have no such issues and wedding videos will start looking more like films, not to dismiss that more goes into getting a great look than just owning the right camera, but it’s a start.

We at Gordon Lake Productions are responsible for producing the Los Angeles Red Users Group videos. Beginning in June those videos will all be shot on the Red. That makes since because it is a Red Users Group. But we’re also moving all single camera shoots to the Red, and it’s not because the Scarlets are coming, but because of another major development….. Workflow.

Most major Editing systems now support Red files natively. The big news is Cineform’s FirstLight.

Cineform makes a Digital Intermediate codec that lowers the files size of your videos while maintaining the quality. What FirstLight does is allow you to make real time color changes without touching the original video.

What this all means is that you can shoot on the Red, dump the files to your editing system, sit with a client while editing and color correcting at the same time.

While this is not a replacement for the expertise of a good colorist, it does work in those situations where the video was not destined for a color session anyway.

This workflow is great news for clients who have wanted high quality videos at low prices. But it’s bad news for many production professionals.

The Paradigm Shift

The industry is about to undergo a paradigm shift in which quality that was the domain of professionals with mouths to feed will now be accessible to kids still living at home with very little overhead and the ability to peddle their wears with no adverting expenses on CraigsList at price points that make working at Starbucks look appealing.

This will have little effect on those at the top tier of the industry where talent is more important than the tools you use. But for those whose clients want quality but at the cheapest price possible, could find themselves out of business in 2010.

CraigsList is a phenomenon that is partially responsible for destroying the newspaper industry. CraigsList cost the San Francisco newspapers more than $50 million annually in lost ad revenues.

The only thing that has saved production companies from lowball completion is that the cost of the tools needed to deliver high quality videos were above what most lowballers could borrow from family members (about $10,000). The Scarlet is within this price point.

And while some will make the argument that the cost of post production hardware and software keeps the process on the expensive side, another factor is being missed. That is that proxy files allow for work to be done on cheap low power computers and many lowball competitors are using free hacked software downloaded from bittorrent sites.

Filmmakers not Entrepreneurs

The other point that many will miss is the type of lowball competitor that will enter the post Scarlet market. Some of these are people who are not buying the cameras to start a production company where profit would be a consideration and price points would reflect that. No, some of those purchasing the cameras are doing so to make movies. It’s only after the cameras sit around (because movie making is harder that just buying the camera) that the cameras become a way to make a little extra money.

The frightening thing to production companies is that some of these wanabe filmmakers will actually have the creative talent to do great work. I’ve seen this scenario before when the Panasonic VHX 100 cameras came out with 24p capabilities for about $4,000.

The cameras were good enough to be used in films that won best cinematography awards two years straight at the Sundance film festival. You then saw this as the most requested camera on Craigslist in New York, Chicago and LA.

I could go on but I’ll end here with real numbers.

Last year (2008) in the LA area you could hire a cameraperson with a Red camera package for about $1,500. This year (2009) I’ve seen them advertised for about $500. Next year I predict you’ll see operators with Scarlets going for about $300 per day.

Next year your production company can go high or low, but anything caught in the middle is (as the saying goes) not a light at the end of the tunnel, but an oncoming train.

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