As a very early adopter of the RED One camera, RED is offering an amazing deal on swapping our RED MX for their new Epic-X camera. We won’t be taking the deal. It was a tough decision, but let me share my reasoning with you.
First, I am sentimentally attached to our RED One, now a RED MX. I’ve had it forever, and I feel like I’ve finally gotten it to where it makes some of the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen. My movie “Unlaced”, now in post, looks fantastic. Stunning, really. And the last two or three tv commercials we’ve done look amazing, too.
Second, we just got our RED One upgraded to the MX sensor this past summer, and that’s the same sensor in the Epic-X and Scarlet-X. We also just upgraded to the solid state drives (SSDs) on this camera. That’s over $10K right into that camera in upgrades that we’d lose if we gave up our RED MX as part of the trade in for Epic. That doesn’t seem to make sense, as our RED MX is now a truly amazing and wonderful cinematic tool that I and my crew know how to operate in our sleep. Plus, again, I just plain like this camera. It’s gotten me through some fun and trying times.
Then there’s our production pipeline. It’s set up to deal with 4K footage pretty well. Up that to 5K, and you’re looking at some serious slowdowns in post. That’s not good for us, one of our advantages to clients is the value we provide at the quality level we give. If I have to upgrade our production pipeline right now, we’ll need to raise our rates immediately, or do less work. Neither is appealing to me, I like that we offer cinema-quality to our clients at a reasonable price.
People often underestimate the cost of setting up an efficient production pipeline- it’s not just the camera you’re buying, you need to make sure you have computers with tons of RAM, SSDs instead of hard drives, esoteric cards like the RED Rocket, RAIDs for big storage… the list goes on. I learned this the hard way when I bought our RED One. It ended up really costing us about $100K, all in. Getting Epic means starting over, in some ways. Not cool for our little shop.
Finally, there’s Scarlet-X.
RED really knocked it out of the park with Scarlet-X. It’s basically our RED One MX in a package 1/3rd the size, but better. Or maybe a better comparison is, it’s basically an Epic-X minus a few features I have little use for on our jobs. It’s tiny, and it does almost everything its big brother Epic-X can do, minus high framerates and the best compression. Now, those Epic-only features do make me drool, but I haven’t needed them yet- not once, not even with the film, and our tv commercial work. Plus, I live in LA, so when we do need- absolutely need- those features that are specific to Epic, we can just rent one of the thousand or so that’ll be available shortly.
Scarlet is perfect for what I need it for: as a compact, high quality camera for grabbing stuff on the street, as a camera ideal for airline travel to tv commercial shoots, and so forth. Plus, if it gets broken we’re not out $40K.
Of course, the initial cost to us of going Epic or Scarlet is about the same, thanks to RED’s awesome Epic upgrade/trade-in deal. But the hidden costs of Epic with the pipeline and accessory changes we’d need, compared to the prospect of having two complete worldclass camera systems that work for our production pipeline by keeping our RED One MX and adding Scarlet, really sealed the deal for me. Again, if RED hadn’t done such an amazing deal with Scarlet, the story would be different.
And sure, the geek in me wants the biggest gun, and that’s clearly Epic. But the filmmaker in me understands that owning both an upgraded RED MX and a Scarlet provides advantages to us that outweigh RED’s awesome trade-in deal with Epic.
