I just posted this over in the Birger Lens Mount Reservations thread on RedUser, in response to the recent flap over Birger’s Canon EF mount voiding the Red One’s warranty:

People seem more angry at Red than at Birger here. Can we have a bit of a reality check? As a third-party developer, it was Birger’s responsibility to keep channels open with Red. This is how it always works with this sort of vendor relationship. Erik has talked about Birger having “more than 200 customers”. Let’s be generous and assume this means ~300 mounts. That’s still well under 10% of the cameras Red has taken orders for. Red’s primary responsibility is the camera, not taking the initiative to check up on what third-party developers are doing.

Given what appears to be a complete lack of communication, I suppose we’re lucky this all came to light when it did, rather than, say, after Birger had already shipped a few dozen mounts and cameras were failing left and right. That would have created a really awkward situation. Like, the sort of situation that doesn’t get resolved without lawyers getting involved.

Of course, it also would have been nice if Red had some clearly written documentation for third-party vendors explaining (among other things) exactly what parts of the camera are considered interchangeable and what parts aren’t. But it’s frankly a little hard to fault Red too much in this instance for not having such a thing, because if communication had been better (which, as noted above, is the responsibility of the third-party vendor), this issue would have been dealt with anyway.

Finally, I feel it’s rather important to note that even if the Birger mount wasn’t stuck in warranty-related limbo, we still wouldn’t have what we were told we’d have months ago. Birger has, whether deliberately or merely by drastically underestimating the relevant engineering challenges, strung its customers along with promises that its product would ship in a matter of weeks (or even days) for seven months now. It took them six months to just confirm many people’s orders. We still have no estimate of when the focus knob system and/or Bluetooth remote (the electronic focus controls that actually make this more useful than a Nikon dumb mount) might be done. And if Birger did offer such an estimate now (again, even assuming no warranty issues) would you feel comfortable planning around it?

We really wanted Birger’s project to succeed. Back in December of last year, when the Birger mount was supposed to ship in a couple of weeks, I made a post on Indie4K which concluded that “EOS lenses with the Birger mount are shaping up to be the indie option of choice for Red”. And we hung in there for quite a while, despite the fact that it was costing us money (for lens rentals) and that we weren’t using our camera for our own projects as much as we would have been if we’d had our own glass. I don’t think we were the only ones experiencing such inconvenience and expense.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, when Erik posted the pictures of FedEx boxes (implying mounts would really ship this time), and then shortly thereafter explained the new electrical problem would cause yet another delay, we gave up and ordered a Red 18-50mm lens, and four days later we could actually shoot with our camera without renting glass. We weren’t sure it was the right thing to do, because Birger was still saying they’d be shipping very soon… but then again they’d been saying that for half a year already. When these warranty issues surfaced, though, and when another week passed with no information about the focus knob, etc. we knew we’d made the right choice.

From our perspective, the only thing Birger has ever actually handled at the standard I would expect was promptly canceling our order when requested.

I still hope Birger’s product eventually succeeds — I still believe that the ability to use EF lenses (with electronic focus controls) is a very compelling idea for the do-it-yourself indie crowd.

But we couldn’t wait anymore. And if someone just getting their camera asked me whether they should wait, I’d probably advise them not to as well. Seriously. Don’t sit there staring at a $25K paperweight. If you can afford the Red 18-50 lens, buy one. It’s not high-end Zeiss glass, but it’s sharp, it’s lightweight, and it’ll put a nice image on your sensor. If you can’t afford that, get a Nikon dumb mount. Maybe you’ll be able to swap it out for Birger’s Nikon smart mount in a few months. But just get out there and start using your camera!

Update: We’ve given up waiting on Birger. Read this.

We’ve made a fairly large decision about our Red package. We’ve decided (or at any rate are presently leaning heavily toward) forgoing Red’s lenses (and other much higher-priced cine glass) in favor of getting Birger’s Canon EOS lens mount.

I’ve discussed some of the tradeoffs with cine vs. photo lenses before. So, why have we decided to go in this direction? Well, largely it’s just a cost/benefit analysis. We can’t afford a $100K Cooke S4 set. Nor do we want to rent all the time; one of the major attractions of Red, for us, is that we can own a complete package. We can afford Red’s glass, so that’s what we’re putting up against the SLR option.

With SLR lenses, for the price of just a Red 18-50mm zoom, we can get the Birger mount, plus several primes and zooms. For the price of the 18-50mm zoom + the price of the 50-150 zoom, we can buy practically every current-model EOS lens we can ever imagine wanting to shoot with. The SLR route just provides much more flexibility. For instance, buying the two Red lenses, we’d be stuck at f/2.8. Going the Canon route, we can walk into B&H and buy one of these, and get a lot more light onto the sensor for night exteriors.

The Birger guys have managed to come up with some pretty neat stuff. Their mount will be able to feed lens metadata into the camera, once Red enables this feature, for instance, just like Red’s lenses (or other lenses with /i technology) can. This will solve the problem of figuring out what your aperture is set to on EOS lenses (which have no physical aperture controls or indicators). The camera will simply tell you.

Perhaps more interesting, the Birger mount can control focus as well as aperture, using the built-in focusing motors of EOS lenses. And this is were we get what I think might be a little glimpse of the future. If you read my previous post (linked above) about the benefits of real cine glass, you’ll see that a lot of them are related to the mechanics of focus pulling. If electronic focus pulling turns out to work smoothly, a lot of that goes right out the window. Lenses won’t need perfectly calibrated physical focus markings, because a bit of testing will produce an electronic table mapping specific physical distances to specific electronic settings. Lenses won’t need extended focus scales either, of course, because they can be moved with electronic precision regardless of how close together their focus marks are physically. This opens the door up to achieving great results with very low-cost mass-produced glass[1].

Electronic focus control has boarder implications than just eliminating the need for some costly precision mechanical engineering, though. It also opens the door to all sorts of new capabilities. Birger’s system will be controllable via Bluetooth. Imagine figuring out your focus marks using Red’s “magic focus assist”, and then programing them into a laptop and cueing them at the appropriate times with a couple of key presses. Or imagine a “smart” autofocus system based around range-finding equipment, which could rack focus to track an object through space far better than any human focus puller. Birger has dropped hints they’re already working on something like the latter, due in the second half of 2008.

Given all of this, it seems like EOS lenses with the Birger mount are shaping up to be the indie option of choice for Red.

Footnotes:

[1] We see this in a lot of places. Advances in electronics or information technology can sometimes eliminate the need for costly high-precision engineering. Consider the analog video systems of a couple of decades ago. Noise or distortion could creep in anywhere; power supplies had to provide clean power, every cable had to be perfect and well-shielded, and every electronic part had to be made with the highest possible precision. In today’s digital systems, none of that is true anymore; once a signal is digital, the electrical (or sometimes optical) paths that carry it only need to be good enough that the receiving system can tell a one from a zero. As long as that’s true (and for systems with digital error correction, sometimes even when it’s not), a bit of electrical noise somewhere doesn’t have any impact on the image.

Or, to use another glass-related example, consider that it used to be important to have matched color across a set of lenses; otherwise odds were you’d never get shots to match perfectly in post. Modern digital color correction has essentially eliminated the need for perfectly matched lens color.

There hasn’t been much news out of Red lately, but there are a few tidbits tonight:

First off, as people who read this blog probably know, Red has run into some last minute delays. Jim Jannard posted a bit on that tonight:

I wish I had good news. The reality is that we are close to knowing where we are, but not quite. I still expect to announce the new schedule on June 15th, but I have to say that the last 5% of the project is the most difficult. We have had obsticles that we did not expect. Keep your fingers crossed.

Other new bits of info:

• The 18-50mm zoom will be marked with T-stops (starting at T3), settling a long and tedious debate.
• Red will ship a 50-150mm lens (also T3) later this year.
• It looks like there’s some new grip hardware. Or maybe that’s just stuff we’ve seen, configured differently.
• Jim has posted the text of a Peter Jackson interview about Red from the New Zealand magazine ONFILM.

Choice quote from Jackson:

If you shoot at 4K, but want a “film lookâ€?, then you finish at 2K and add some grain. It’s easy. It looks like film. However, if you finish and screen at 4K. the result is like shooting in 65mm, like the old epics used to do. It’s pretty exciting, and will have a major impact on indie filming — but we could see no reason why you couldn’t use these cameras for any type of movie. I’m seriously considering using RED for The Lovely Bones.