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Maybe. It would be a bit silly though - the brand recognition was part of the value of the company. BM is having a difficult time breaking into the cinema ecosystem despite having brand recognition for Resolve, so Nikon buying one of the "big three" brands that was being actively used by Hollywood, and then putting it in a drawer seems a bit counter productive.

That’s what I suspect also. Not that I was ever invested or even interested in RED. But I do hope we see the tech become part of Nikon hybrid ASAP and they bring out their own cinema line a la FX3 and FX30 mold. I could go any way right now (as in next year) and that is currently Nikon for stills and Lumix for video, but really want it all with one brand for a variety of reasons. Fortunately, because E Mount adapts almost natively to Z Mount, Nikon and Sony have the highest level of cross compatibility in the hybrid game right now. I’m interested in raw but would rather dip my toe than go all in so if the RED raw became available to certain existing bodies by firmware such as the Z9… Well I am already strongly considering trading 2 ‘lesser’ Nikon Z bodies for a single Z9 and if…if….RED raw came to Z6iii, it would probably be a done deal for me and I’d be all in on Nikon bodies and E Mount glass.

I like the idea of Auto-WB and have done it many times. The only issue I have with the idea is when the camera decides to alter the WB mid shot; then I need to go through the footage and try to correct. It always seems to look strange. Panasonic, in general, isn't so bad at this, but my camcorder (VX980/81) is more agressive with this. If I shoot in daylight WB and just make sure I don't turn on any lights (or add daylight lighting), the shots will look generally great. If I'm off a little, I can correct the whole thing at once.

Well I guess Sony is already doing that with Sony RX10, RX100 and even the RX0 have slog!! So yes, it would be good if Nikon does this too, make it very easy to mix and match together the full range of cameras in a professional workflow.

I absolutely agree. You buy and close a competitor company but this is not the case with Red. The whole deal only makes sense if they keep the Red brand which is their gateway to cinema.

Thinking about this more, I think there are three different approaches. The first is to shoot manually and get it perfect every time. Not even the pros do this with completely controlled sets. Colourists say that they're always making small changes to WB on a shot-by-shot basis, even on big budget productions, so this is only mentioned to make sure we understand that we will be dealing with small changes in post. The second is to shoot on a manual WB. This will mean that you're going to get errors in the WB, potentially being quite noticeable, but they're likely to mostly be in the warm/cool Temp direction. The third is to shoot on auto-WB. I've found that, on my Panasonic cameras at least, the WB errors are pretty minor, and the WB is pretty close - even if the lighting is quite variable and I'm taking shots from different angles and in different locations etc. This means that you'll be making only very small corrections, but they could be in the magenta/green Tint axis as well as the warm/cool Temp direction. We're quite sensitive to Tint errors, so this means that adjusting these is a bit more fiddly, and can take some practice, but is perfectly possible. I know that when I shoot I am very likely to completely forget a manually set WB, and will end up shooting a whole evening at 6500K and it'll be so warm it'll look like I shot it through a jar of honey, so I shoot auto-WB and therefore inevitably have to make minor corrections in post but never have to make large ones. Going back to the minor curves that are part of the Look, and how we can't un-do in post because we don't have a complete profile of that camera/look combination, shooting on auto-WB will mean that these get applied to the footage in a place that will likely only be a very small distance from where they should have been if the shot had perfect WB. Obviously this still depends on your camera, the profile, your colour management pipeline, the tools in your software, your skill in applying them, and the weather and position of the stars etc... so this is also something that you would be best testing for yourself too.

Good question. I think the fundamental challenge of making corrections in post is having the tool operate in a colour space that matches the footage as closely as possible. For example, if your footage is in Linear, and you have a node in Linear, and you adjust the Gain wheel (which literally applies gain by doing a simple multiplication) then they match exactly and the result will be a perfect exposure or WB change, just like it was done in camera. If you get your colour management pipeline correct then you can get this practically perfect adjustment for LOG footage too. The challenge comes when the camera records in 709. This is mostly because cameras don't just do a CST from Linear to 709, they apply all sorts of "make it look lovely" sort of small tweaks. When we record in the wrong exposure or WB then these tweaks get applied wrongly. For example, the profile might compress the skintones, and do so by expanding the reds and yellows on either side. If you shoot a clip where the skintones are too yellow then your skintones might get expanded rather than compressed. No CST will un-do all these small tweaks, so you're left with an image that's curved in all the wrong places rather than all the right ones. So, what happens in practice is it comes down to the individual profile you choose (which will have its own unique set of tiny curves that make that look) and your own ability to manipulate it using the right combination of tools to get the most pleasing result. My results vary mostly based on the luck that I had when correcting each individual test image - your results will likely suffer the same variance unless you're a far better colourist than I am. I'd suggest you do your own tests. Either find a spot in the shade on a sunny day, or even better is to do it on a cloudy day. Do a manual WB against a grey card (or piece of white copy paper if you don't have a grey card), then just shoot a clip of yourself (or a volunteer model if you can get one 🙂 ). Then shoot a range of test clips setting the Colour Temp manually. Then just pull them all into post and see which tools seem to work the best for you, and which gives you the more pleasing looks. One thing I did notice was that I had trouble getting the blacks and shadows to be right when the skintones were dialled in, with them tending to be the opposite of the original tint on the image (ie, if the image was warm then the correction ended up with cooler shadows) so with everything else being equal that might be a reason to go warmer so you get a bit of colour separation in the final images.

Hmm.. 10G ethernet isn't that fast I guess, but it's all relative. For example if you're shooting the highest quality setting "12K - 12,288 x 8040 Blackmagic RAW 3:1 - 1,194 MB/s" then you'll only be able to pull it off the camera in real-time, but that's not likely to be a situation that most people would be in. If you were shooting in 8K (Blackmagic RAW 3:1 - 533 MB/s) then you can copy it off in double-speed, or 8K 12:1 and 4K 3:1 (~133MB/s) then you're copying at 9x realtime. Of course, most productions are going to be rolling for a lot less time than they're stopped in-between takes, so the DIT can keep pace with offloading the files off the camera throughout the shoot without having to stop the production to swap out media. It is a pretty low-cost way to protect yourself against camera/media failures where you'd lose the contents of the media. It's like that old backup saying.. Two is One and One is NONE!

You said it man, Nikon N3 and N30 are practically a given. That's would place them in a very attractive position for these new "professional content creators".

Yeah that's my understanding too, with the ethernet connection. Why else do a 10G on the camera I guess?

As you were the one that asked for skin tones, was there a specific situation you were thinking of when you asked? I thought your question might be related to your adventures with the GX850 and shooting out in the real-world?

Well I’m assuming a DIT on a three camera shoot will appreciate it. pretty sure they are doing a CFe dual card magazine too.

I sincerely don't think their is much money in pure cinema cameras. Most of the money would come from the likes of the Fx3, fx6, Fx9 type of cameras, that would sell tens of thousands, rather than a few thousands at best. RED revenue was like 158 millions USD. That is peanuts from a 4.5/5 billions USD revenue company like Nikon. They are more trying using the brand name for the whole product line as a minimum. Their might be special version of the Cinema z8-z9 with RED raw etc, or the whole line uses it. Nikon knows that video is as important as photo in a photo camera today. This moves put them higher than even the likes of Canon in terms of branding. Tomorrow Nikon will be able to put "The Flash" or "Dr Strange" or "The Squid Game" on their marketing material. Both companies could also share technologies. Tomorrow Red could launch a Komodo/Raptor with state of the art Ibis and autofocus, to compete with Sony Fx6 to Burano, Venise. Sony which has been their main competitor. And we might see some of those global shutter sensors either shared between the cameras on some models, or some specific model for Nikon still.

As we always say, the camera, especially these days, is the least important part of the equation. Big camera has always equalled big production, but that is more about perceived industry ‘standards’. It all gets rigged out anyway so the size of these tiny cameras gets hidden.

Hehe, I found it. Well done. Congratulations to you, the director, cast and team! @Emanuel