That's an excellent real world review. I did work with the Red One early last year and was blown away. I want to try the Epic but none of the projects I do warrant it, unfortunately.
snip.
Can you share your desktop specs? What kind of read/write performance (in MB/s) do you get with it? Is it on a RAID?
My current home setup is in desperate need of an overhaul. I don't use it for professional work, but I'd like to play with 4K footage in real time if I can!
Yes, definitely. Red has been an inspiration when others had gone to sleep. But the giants have woken up now.
And Red has answered with the Dragon update, and a monochrome camera - that's potentially 8K if the Leica M Monochrom analogy were to apply.
I've never used an Epic so can't say really anything about it, though I believe it's exactly the same form factor and lcd as the Scarlet, which some parts I like, some I don't.
I know a lot of dps have moved to the Epic and some back to an R1 or an Arri for the "look" and "look can cover a lot of territory in motion imagery.
When I ordered an Epic and it was ready to ship, I changed my mind and went with one more RED 1 and a Scarlet. I looked at the Specs of the Epic and it's native sensor is 2:1 instead of 16x9 so cropped 16x9 your not at 5k your at around 4.5 K or something like that.
You can go to 120 fps which is the one benefit of the Epic, though I've needed that like two times and the R1 will go to 60 fps with 3k.
So the only benefit I saw from an R-1 to an Epic was fps, and there a lot lot of ways to get to slow motion. Even the weight is not that much different as a stripped down R1 weighs a little over 8lbs, with Nikon mount Zeiss and a Canon mount Scarlet/Epic comes it at 5 lbs.
2k, 3k, 4k, 5k, not many films at any level on any device or medium are playing at 4k and I've seen 4k production on a first class Hollywood screen and honestly once they go through the digital intermediate with effects, grading etc. etc., I couldn't tell that it was 4k. It wasn't a Eureka moment for me
though I'm sure Ill eventually have clients ask for 4k, in the broadcast world I don't think 4k will be mainstream for another decade. Look how long it took to switch to Hi-def (in it's many flavors) and looked how dumb down the translation and transmission is on cable or satellite,.
I bought a Scarlet not to be a poor man's epic, but to be a smaller form factor and was hoping for better autofocus.
I think the world of RED's innovations but given what we shoot and how we shoot, if I had the perfect camera it would be a Sony FS 100 with a RED sensor (or a Sony with better color and not so ambient sensitive).
I don't even mind the build quality of the fS 100 because except for my R-1's I don't think any of these cameras are built for the long term and I'd love to see some real innovation on focus pulling like face detection tracking.
Actually the FS100 will track focus the best of any camera I've used, but that's not to say it's perfect, just real good in a pinch.
As far as computers, I don't have the exact specs in front of me, but they range from one early intel quad core box to two of the next to latest 12 cores. We run one main station to a Raid 0 backed up to another Raid 0.
I never compare or time read/write though it seems with the Rocket it's always about 1 to 1, with a fast I mac I7 (obviously no Rocket card) it's about 3 to 1.
Our building is wired for the latest cat and I should put this stuff on a network, but that's just another $10,000 and another thing to worry about.
For drives we've kind of gotten over the heavy Raid thing. I have 18 4 disc Raid 5's I've used for backup for a few years, but now everything goes on a Lacie-1 terabyte rugged. They don't seem any slower than raid 0's and we can isolate each project, or parts of the project down to each drive.
Drive 1 raw footage and usually processed one light footage or proxy's, drive 2 graphics and edit, drive 3 render. Then back them up to a larger drive every night. I don't see one bit of speed difference between a normal drive and a Raid 0.
In regards to video cards It doesn't matter than much with the RED files as we have RED Rockets, but obviously a faster card helps. Where a faster card really works is with CS suite and I'd look at their specs.
Actually, for speed we have three I-macs two I-7's and those process out fairly quickly, not real time, but I'd say about 3 to 1 which isn't bad considering the price of the computer and size.
Since Apple seems to have abandoned the professional imaging market, the next station we build will probably be pc, but pc's tricked out with cards, ram, software, monitors and drives are not cheap. You can get to 15 to 20 grand very, very, quickly.
But that will be a while as we are very well learned in FCP 7, (loathe FCP X) and really have just messed with but not gone deep into premier or AVID.
At this stage I don't see any reason to go to anything but Premier (personal opinion) because AVID does pretty much the same but is a steeper learning curve.
Still in so many ways FCP 7 is the most elegant and intuitive of all the NLE's when you need to do a lot of things.
I really don't have the time to be a full time editor and lay that task off to either someone in house or outside, depending on the scope of the project.
I cut the original style cut, for client approval and sometimes even in the treatment stage and then oversee the edit but don't usually just sit down and edit for 12 hours straight every day.
I've done it, but I just don't want to go down that road.
IMO
BC