how you describe your workflow sounds really convincing james, no question that the usage of the red has a lot of sense in your business and that the red made, or will make, somehow a revolution in your busines.
once more i realize how different is our work, although it takes the same name "photography".
and it looks like that the equipment for the different jobs in the wide land of prof. photography gets even more specialized and different than it was anytime before.
Rainer,
In a business sense, I doubt if our needs are that much different.
I guess it comes down to if you offer something clients use it, if you don't they obviously don't ask.
Right now, all clients large and small have a voracious appetite for content. Motion, still, combination, for every type of use.
We all see TV commercials and web spots that look like they're shot with cell phones, other's that look like they have a Ridley Scott budget, but at the end of the day, everyone is asking for imagery from every project we do.
It's funny, two days ago when I was writing my reply, I had an email from a client's design group that was doing displays for a large function. They wanted to know if the RED stills from a recent project would enlarge properly.
"Properly" covers a lot of territory, so this week we made a web gallery linked to medium and large jpegs from RED, 5d2 and 1ds3 images from this last project.
Except for the shape of the format, even I can't tell the difference and I shot most of it. It doesn't mean a 5d2 or a larger still camera won't reproduce well or better than a RED motion still, but most of the detail in the image had more to do with focus, exposure, lighting, cropping, shutter speed, etc. than the actual pixel count or camera.
The next day the multi media agency from this client e-mailed asking from footage from the same project.
Now I'm not advocating everyone buy a RED, but I do know that with web, social media, large format displays and every medium, that requires a "non media buy" clients are creative ways get their message out and the need for imagery from every project, in every format is strong.
Whether the economy improves or not, you'll soon see all forms of digital project from led panels to projectors and once again, the media needs will change or better put the mediums we will be required to shoot with will have to offer multiple types of content.
To relay an interesting story, about 5 years ago I requested the digital tech from the shoot to backup and hold the project as an extra offsite safety net. One Saturday I got a rush call from the client that had to have 5 images immediately and I was on the road, my retouchers were out and I couldn't get to our on line servers to collect the raws so I called the tech and asked him to pull the images. He never backed them up and once I questioned him to why he said, "nobody ever asks me for an image after a project" . I rephrased my question again and asked if they NEVER asked him for an image but never asked him twice.
He said twice, which meant since he didn't offer it, nobody asked again. It also meant he wasn't someone I hired often.
Not to hijack this thread and go off topic, one thing that is interesting is talk of camera size. We hired a stedicam operator for next weeks project and he say she loves the RED ONE because it's so small. Now I think the RED one is huge, the arri monstrous and he thinks that anything under a Panaflex is a small camera, so a lot of this is relative.
In a prefect world I would love to see every image in every scenario captured on every type of camera at once (so would most clients) but since medium format doesn't do high iso very well, smaller still cameras don't do the best motion, it is difficult to find a one camera fits all solution or the time and budget to recreate every situation multiple times.
IMO
BC