kye

I had clamps galore but there wasn’t a single thing to clamp to!
 
140 hours, perfect cosmetic condition with Shape arm, 6 batteries and V mount adapter for GBP695 (all but GBP50 of which I covered with trade in). Pretty much my dream camera!

Announcements like this are just wonderful...
All it took was a pair of press-releases and all of a sudden dozens of people with no training or experience instantly turn into patent attorneys and corporate lawyers specialising in mergers and acquisitions and market strategists etc, and not only that, they also instantly gained insider knowledge about market caps, sales figures, product strategies, etc, and just when you'd think that it couldn't get any better they also become R&D experts in both hardware and software design!
With a shift so radical in capability, even the hardened skeptic must believe there is a higher power involved.

This acquisition caused some discoveries:
1- Some RED users are not mentally well. I mean who on earth glue a camera, which is a tool, to his entire identity? Its insane when you think about that. It may sound judgmental but I feel few of these guys are even closet antivaxxer.
2- People in video making echo chamber have no clue about still camera industry. Example one: they don't know how popular Z8 is. Example two: they don't know a big part of Canon market share is related to its strategy of sticking to the old habit of making cheap cripple hammered bodies. Example three: they don't know how much Nikon is involved in CMOS sensor development. 
3- Making "analysis" video about a corporate deal, with almost zero published details, is so easy for some of these YouTubers, that seems "Trust me bro" is not a meme anymore, but a serious way of life! 

It's definitely cute, but I think it's probably not good.
I couldn't find any reviews or sample images, so I suspect it might even be a low-res sensor that just upscales to 44M in software.  It's probably the same sensor and firmware as those first generation 40+MP smartphones.  If retro is in, then a bit of blur is part of the style, not a failure of lens design or MTF curves!

Well, I don't need any because I'm not a customer at any point in the near future, but if I was considering buying into the Red ecosystem, I'd like a bit more information from Nikon or "Red" before I made such a big purchase... another press release... a new Red camera with a Nikon badge on it... something to let me know that they're not just going to ingest the IP and scale back their new cinema division.

I like the formfactor of the Canon XC10/X15. Give it 10bit and a good codec, 4K60, zoom with F2 at the wide and F2.8 at the long end. Voila! I think their launch video really shown off the mojo that camera had. I like really the motion cadence and the rendering of textures. Mojo. 😊 @hyalinejimhad posted a video of his with beautiful colors achieved in Rec709. Anyway, great launch video and a great concept for a S16 cinema camera.
 

It's definitely cute, but I think it's probably not good.
I couldn't find any reviews or sample images, so I suspect it might even be a low-res sensor that just upscales to 44M in software.  It's probably the same sensor and firmware as those first generation 40+MP smartphones.  If retro is in, then a bit of blur is part of the style, not a failure of lens design or MTF curves!

Ha! What a great word! 🙂 

It looks cute. I think it might be mostly a fashion accessory (but it also takes pictures). I like how it's small. It's kind of wild that a camera "for kids" is 44 Megapixel. Odd that there's no bluetooth to transfer to your smart phone or tablet.
I'm an adult and I would consider this for some situations like travelling and my photos aren't so important.

It's some dark web youth shit and you my friend are not allowed to that party.
Nor am I 🤔🤪
 

We all know the camera and imaging industry is being disrupted heavily, first with the move to digital that sunk Kodak, then with smartphones slowly eating the whole industry from the bottom up, and now right at the start of generative AI.  In situations like this market consolidation is an enormous game of 9-dimensional chess, so this move will be the result of more analysis than a person could read in a week, even if we had post-graduate qualifications in corporate law, economics, and accounting.
It's not like Nikon was sitting on a huge pile of cash to begin with - in this phase of a market disruption where the manufacturers are literally fighting to stay alive if this wasn't a great match for the two companies across many/most factors then it will be a mistake that might cost them everything.

I'm reminded of the pattern in automobile manufacturers where the fancy sportscar brand that isn't profitable is purchased by the mass-market manufacturer that is profitable, and then in exchange for the sports brand being propped up the high-powered engineers get sent on excursions to the parent company to talk about how to tune the suspension and tweak the engine for a new hot-hatch variant.
But, in this case, I'm really not sure who is profitable and who isn't...
Simultaneously I'm optimistic about the RED tech trickling down to Nikon, but also pessimistic about that because now Nikon has a cine line their first job will be to protect it with a cripple hammer.

I just hope Nikon pulls the reins in a bit on Red's tacticool/bro marketing. It's 2024, we don't need any more RAPTORKILLERXXXXTREME NOW WITH BOMB-MAGZ being put out there.

RED's patent has stood up so many times in court, it is pretty much beyond doubt that it's valid for raw recording.
Nikon will be pleased to get that, as they can now force Canon into paying them royalties or choose not to license it at all, meaning Canon RAW has to come out of the entire Cinema EOS line and EOS R cameras, as it is internal compressed RAW.
Nikon also get their own Cinema EOS line now, a big presence in video and cinema with RED.
So the purchase makes sense, but it remains to be seen whether they will gain long term sales due to the threat to real-life filmmaking posted by AI production and cinema.
One day I think Sony will buy Nikon and ultimately control RED's product line.

There has been no mention of n-raw being ticoRAW since 2022, so I couldn't say with any certainty if the current version of n-raw is the same as was announced before the Z9 or Z8 was released.
As far as Red's patents... I'm not a patent attorney or a patent judge but I do know that many companies, including Apple, could not convince a court that their patent was invalid.
We do know that in May of 2022, Red filed a lawsuit against Nikon for patent infringement and less than a year later, in April of 2023, the case was dismissed at the request of both Red and Nikon and less than a year after that, it's announced that Nikon purchased Red.
So it may be possible that Nikon wants to enter the high end cinema market, but based on the timeline of events, one can ascertain that Nikon's purchase of Red is about Redcode Raw... maybe... but I haven't sat in on any of the meetings between Nikon and Red for a while...

Heh - yeah, not too sure I want to do it for money TBH.
But your points about the actual shoot make sense. That's why I mentioned that a lesson learned was that I should have got there for the soundcheck and ensured that they ran through the chosen song at least once, with proper lighting (at this venue in particular the lighting was controlled by the sound guy, so would have been possible) in order to get some different angles.
I had intended to set my A6600 up as a static long shot for the same reason, but when I got there I found a room where there was literally nothing I could secure either a tripod or monopod to, so I couldn't, unfortunately.

All good points @kye - and thanks for taking the time to watch. I did, in fact, go for a loose shaky style in the actual shooting as I thought it would suit the style and the song - and I made it even looser with some zooms and pans added in post. This was very much an experiment - I was mainly there to do stills (which in part led to my not having prepped as much as I should have done). Overall I'm satisfied that it's worth me doing some more of these but - as you say - I need to do some deep background on the genre as well!

Nikon use intoPIX's TicoRAW  for high-efficiency encoding of raw stills and raw video. It's a different algorithm from what RED is using. RED's patent has been suggested to be invalid anyway, as RED demonstrated it in a camera more than one year before applying for the patent (which was Nikon's counter-argument when RED sued them and so the case was settled outside of court, which also happened with Jinni Tech who used a similar argument). I doubt very much Nikon bought RED for the patents but simply to get a foothold in the higher-end video camera market.
 

No it’s not well respected by post.  Thats myth.  I’m going to guess you aren’t in post at a high end facility.  Nobody I’ve met likes or prefers REDCODE over other raw codecs.
Owner operators who own red cameras are the only ones who talk like this.
It’s a high bit depth raw codec and that’s all it has going for it.  It’s actually not that efficient.  ProRes plays back faster. ProRes RAW plays back faster.  BRAW plays back faster.  Why do you think they sold stupid things like RedRocket?
Most high end post output of RED didn’t use REDs own cards for final render because the debayer looked better with the internal decodes of the native app.
It was the first conceptually raw codec(maybe depends what you think of Cineform) but it’s not efficient at all in playback.  Thats why they moved to DCT. As the resolution went up, playback gets harder and harder with Wavelet.  

I feel very confident being a reader of this former for the past decade to fully understand every aspect of this acquisition. 

Gerald just dropped a video talking about how he has discovered that camera overheating tests are almost completely unreliable.
TLDR; he tested the same camera in the same environment with the same settings, and got results ranging between 55 minutes and 8.5 hours.
Here's the video, which talks about it in much much greater detail:
I think this pretty much means that camera overheating is an un-testable risk for any camera without a fan.  
This is because:
The tester probably didn't tell you what ambient temp they tested at The tester definitely didn't tell you what airflow and ventilation was present The tester probably didn't test all the modes you will use The manufacturer might update firmware after the testing and completely invalidate the data The test won't have been in the situation you're recording in
and, lastly, in case you're still with me... The test is probably a random number generator anyway I think that overheating is now officially the camera boogyman.
Sceptical of overheating in general? I've personally missed moments when my iPhone overheated........and that's a camera that no-one has identified as having a thermal management problem.

First finished piece using the FS7, first live band video.
This was a bit of a nightmare, to be honest, but it taught me 4 very valuable lessons for next time:
1. Get to the venue before the soundcheck. Set up and crucially...
2. Get the band to do a run-through of the song you're covering, ideally with the stage lighting as it will be later.
3. Get a second static view that you can just leave rolling.
4. During the gig, start rolling and don't stop until the end.
You can probably guess from the above that my major problem wit this piece was lack of coverage, which is why some of the cutaways don't quite fit.
Having said all that, it was a great experience and the band are happy; so on to the next one!
 

Well he certainly did know very accurately didn't he !

Well, I was a m43 user, but moved on since I saw the writing on the wall (until now, my predictions are 100% accurate).

My 2 cents is my current camera: Fujifilm X-S20. A EVF hump bigger than the GX85 (which I had, and loved), IBIS (not amazing, but better than none), very good AF (much better than the Gen4 Fujis, and there is a firmware update on the way to improve it and give touch-tracking in video), 10 bit 4-2-2, and using Flog or Flog2 the DR comparison to a GX85 is enormous.

Size of the system is a bit larger than m43, but lenses still smaller than FF. The Sigma 18-50 f/2.8 is almost glued to my camera - very good image, diminutive size (shpuld be the blueprint for future m43 zooms, but...).

 

Gerald just dropped a video talking about how he has discovered that camera overheating tests are almost completely unreliable.
TLDR; he tested the same camera in the same environment with the same settings, and got results ranging between 55 minutes and 8.5 hours.
Here's the video, which talks about it in much much greater detail:
I think this pretty much means that camera overheating is an un-testable risk for any camera without a fan.  
This is because:
The tester probably didn't tell you what ambient temp they tested at The tester definitely didn't tell you what airflow and ventilation was present The tester probably didn't test all the modes you will use The manufacturer might update firmware after the testing and completely invalidate the data The test won't have been in the situation you're recording in
and, lastly, in case you're still with me... The test is probably a random number generator anyway I think that overheating is now officially the camera boogyman.
Sceptical of overheating in general? I've personally missed moments when my iPhone overheated........and that's a camera that no-one has identified as having a thermal management problem.