Early on, there was huge skepticism about what Red was doing. This came largely from people who had experience with traditional film and video acquisition, and they were skeptical with good reason. The RED ONE looks like a huge leap in technology, coming out of nowhere.

The crucial point many of these skeptics failed (and often still do fail) to understand is that it isn’t coming out of nowhere. It’s just not coming out of the traditional film/video acquisition industry.

Red is being built around technologies — and, perhaps more importantly, adopting a mindset — from a much more competitive and fast-moving industry, where features are driven by technology rather than by market segmentation schemes. I’m speaking, of course, of the commodity information technology market — the market where, for instance, hard drives have gotten 250 times larger (per dollar) in the last 10 years.

Now, of course, digital technology has been invading the traditional film/video acquisition industry for more than a decade. You can’t, as far as I’m aware, even buy an analog video camera these days, and several major motion pictures have been shot digitally. But the crucial difference is that while the existing vendors in this industry have co-opted some IT technology, they haven’t adopted the mindset I mention above — of building products around what the technology makes possible.

If one conceives of the motion picture camera market as a continuum, with low-end consumer camcorders at one end and film cameras at the other, for a very long time, products have been clustered mostly at the extremes, without much in the middle. This makes sense, historically, because for a long time shooting at high quality could only be made so cheap (due to the unavoidable cost of film stock), while low-cost electronic acquisition could only be made so good (due to technological limitations). There really wasn’t much of a continuum at all; there were two distinct markets with very different budget ranges and requirements.

High-quality digital acquisition has removed the material conditions which required this. For some years we’ve been seeing consumer camcorders slowly creep up-market, and increasingly find use in filmmaking, but for the most part the traditional camera vendors still don’t really seem to understand what has happened. They’re still mostly using new technologies to build cameras for the same old market segments — consumer camcorders at one end, and expensive systems designed for deep pocket customers like broadcasters and major productions at the other, with little in between.

Red isn’t thinking like this; they’re starting with what’s possible and figuring out how to make the best camera at the best price.

I’m not approaching Red from the traditional film/video industry — I’m approaching it from the IT industry. My reaction when I first heard about Red was not “They can’t do that!” but something more like “It’s about time someone did that!”

Can a cheap camera change the economics of feature production? I’ve thought a lot about this, and the answer I’ve come up with is “sometimes”.

If you’re making a $100M movie with tons of visual effects work, A-list actors, etc. then even if your camera and your film stock and processing costs were free you’d probably only save a couple percent, at most, on your budget. This means that, obviously, an inexpensive digital cinema camera won’t enable you to make a $100M movie for very much less than $100M. Or a even $5M movie for much less than $5M. If digital is chosen for films in this price range, it will be because it’s better for a particular production, not because it’s cheaper.

It’s more interesting to approach this from the other side. What are the people making $3000 movies with $20000 worth of equipment doing right now? They’re not spending anything on crew payroll, because they’re just making movies with their film school friends. They’re not spending anything on cast, because they’re getting underemployed actors, who just want to act, to work for free. They’re probably spending next to nothing on things like wardrobe and locations, because they’re taking interesting stuff their cast/crew have free access to (the rich uncle’s yacht, etc.) and writing them into the script. They’re choosing their subject matter so they don’t need stunts, explosions, elaborate visual effects, or other stuff that just fundamentally can’t be done for cheap. They’re doing post-production on the desktop, even if that means they can’t twiddle knobs to tweak color in real-time as the footage plays.

If they do all of this well enough (and many of them won’t, of course, but some will), you can’t tell they’ve done it on the cheap. But there is still one place where you can tell, immediately, if a production is an ultra-low-budget affair… right now, there’s just no way to do acquisition on the cheap and have quality that rivals 35mm on a big screen. Unlike with all these other things, it doesn’t matter how talented you are, or how much time you’re willing to invest, or how carefully you tailor your script to fit within your limitations. There’s just no way to shoot a 35mm-quality feature without spending tens of thousands of dollars (probably upwards of $100K) on camera rental, film stock, processing, telecine, lab costs, etc. or renting one of the existing digital cinema cameras at a daily rate that’s probably higher than the production’s entire budget. (And ending up with digital footage you probably can’t practically use with your desktop editing system anyway.)

And this is where inexpensive digital cinema cameras make a huge difference. If RED delivers, 6 months from now there will be a way to get that quality level, with maybe a $25-40K camera package you can buy outright, and few additional costs on a per-production basis. Now, obviously this approach won’t let you tell every story. You can’t make Star Wars or Lord of the Rings for $3000 just because you can shoot 4K for cheap. But there are a lot of interesting stories it will let you tell.

This isn’t going to radically change Hollywood, mind you… but bringing the cost of 35mm-quality acquisition down from $100K per feature to $25-40K as a one-time expense and maybe $1500 worth of hard drives per feature is certainly going to have a major impact on a particular segment of the market. And it will matter to major distributors, because they’ll start seeing ultra-low-budget stuff on their radar that they might want to consider buying because of the picture quality, rather than in spite of it.