(This post is based on a recent post of mine from RedUser.)

There’s a lot of counterproductive elitism in the film world, and one of the silliest examples of it is that right around the time the Red One started shipping (this is pure coincidence, I’m sure), some people suddenly decided that Bayer pattern sensors (see Wikipedia article if you’re not familiar) like the ones used in Red cameras are somehow unacceptable for motion imaging.

This, of course, has essentially no basis in reality.

Bayer is virtually the only technology used in the stills world these days, from the cheapest consumer cameras to the most expensive large format digital backs. Bayer sensors are used by probably tens of thousands of pro photographers every day to shoot images that sometimes get blown up to billboard size, and as stills, tend to be examined with far more scrutiny than individual frames in a moving sequence ever will be. And yet somehow, Bayer has been presented by some people in the motion imaging world as some sort of weakness for the Red One, as if Red is somehow cheating.

The truth is, Bayer is so widely used because for a given photosite count, with proper processing, it delivers a better image than anything else. Three chip designs or striped sensor patterns deliver at best 20-25% more visible resolution using 300% more photosites; in many cases it would make much more sense to just build a higher resolution Bayer sensor.

The real reason why Bayer isn’t already widely deployed for high-end motion imaging is not that it’s somehow unacceptable for that purpose, but that high-quality Bayer processing is very computationally intensive. The Red One gets around this by recording a raw image, so this computation doesn’t have to happen in real time — but as the RED Rocket and the 1080p RGB recording modes on the new cameras demonstrate, it is now possible to build ASICs which can do such processing in real time, which allows Bayer sensors to be used even in workflows that require high-quality live output.

I expect that as a result of this, we’ll see large Bayer sensors increasingly become the dominant technology in high-end motion imaging, just as they have in the stills world. Arri’s new cameras all use them. (Though whether this will clue in the industry snobs is anyone’s guess. A friend of mine was having a chat with someone at an LA rental house a few days ago who explained they’d be buying into Arri’s new system rather than Red’s because “The Red uses a Bayer sensor, and is really only a 2K camera”, apparently completely unaware that the Arri cameras are also Bayer, and Red’s S35 cameras are 5K to Arri’s 3.5K.)

Update: David Newman of CineForm points out that processing Bayer images isn’t necessarily that computationally intensive, and that most of the computational overhead of working with Red footage is associated with the compression, not the debayer process. I wonder what implications this will have for the RGB recording modes on the new cameras. If most of the complexity is in the compression rather than the debayer, playing back Redcode RGB footage might actually be more taxing than playing back raw footage currently is, which I think is contrary to what most people expect.

I haven’t previously posted anything about the Epic, Red’s new $40,000 5K camera. Why? Mostly because I’ve been trying to gauge reaction, and figure out just where it fits into the market. As usual, this post assumes you’ve already read the information on the Epic’s tech specs; I’m going to focus on what it all means.

Reaction to the Epic over on RedUser.net has not been entirely positive, particularly from the low-budget indie crowd. In one sense, any negative reaction is totally irrational. Sure, the Epic costs twice as much as the Red One. But both the Epic and the Red One offer far more that what competing cameras offer in the same price range, or even at four times the price level. And, of course, Red is offering that full-value trade-in for Red One camera bodies, which is generous practically to the point of absurdity.

In another sense, though, the less than totally positive reactions were completely predictable. To understand why, don’t think about camera specs and price points. Think about mythology.

Unlike with Scarlet, I think it’s actually a bit of a stretch to say the Red One and the Epic target different markets. The Red One was marketed as an alternative to 35mm film for everything up to and including major motion pictures by major Hollywood directors. That firmly overlaps with Epic’s intended market. I think an important part of the “Red revolution” in many people’s minds was that they’d be able to buy and use the same tools as the pros at the top of the industry. Epic makes that less true; once Epic hits the market, many of the guys for whom money is no object are probably not going to be using the same camera as the indie filmmakers who put their faith in Red.

Now, given just how capable the Red One is, being bothered by this is basically irrational from any sort of practical standpoint. This doesn’t really cause any material harm to indies who can’t afford Epic, who have, obviously, still benefited hugely from what Red is doing. But it disrupts what we could call the “mythology” of Red, and that can be upsetting to people. This is, I suspect, the single largest reason why reaction the Epic has been somewhat mixed.

This sort of thing is always an issue for companies that become the focus of a mythology; reading RedUser.net over the last few days reminds me of nothing so much as reading Mac forums in the days after a MacWorld Expo; in virtually every case, regardless of what Apple announces at a MacWorld, some of Apple’s most loyal followers react negatively, usually because they’re holding the company to a ludicrously high standard and/or failing to take business realities into account.

Red (and Apple) shouldn’t worry about this stuff. People react so strongly because they care about the company and the product. In other words, this kind of reaction is generally an indication that you’re doing something right. As long as you keep building products that get people excited — even if that excitement sometimes takes the form of ardent criticism — you’re ahead of game in every respect that matters.