THe Future Of The Moving Image:Modular Cameras

What we hadn’t imagined back then was a way to make “Obsolescence Obsolete” a much more broad concept. With Scarlet and Epic… it means being able to upgrade EVERYTHING as technology advances. Every component, on an individual level, can be upgraded and improved. The RED ONE is a modular system that can be upgraded. Scarlet and EPIC are completely modular and upgradeable in every way.

A DSMC is a camera that shoots stills and motion. Configure that camera any way you want.

Select a brain. Configure your body.

Qoutes From RED”s Founder Jim Jannard 11-13-08

What can a small company like RED expect to do?  How is it able to put out a Camera like the RED ONE™ with so much capability for such a small amount of money.  It seems it’s sensors are just astounding and the whole rest of the chummy company feel  gets it’s power from that one camera’s performance.  The be able to have in your hands a camera able to take motion picture footage of that quality for only 17,500 bucks seems amazing. But where are we going with this?  Are we going to have lot’s of new films to see?  Are we going to realize the advantages of higher frame rates and super high resolution footage?

Personally I’m getting a Canon EOS 5D Mark II because I can’t wait a year to begin making films.  A year suddenly seems like an eternity but I think it’s going to go much faster then you might think.   For one thing the Cinema experience might be kind of nice but in the end isn’t it just for children.  Don’t ALL the films that come out pander to children.  I’m  hoping to see something truly adult come out.  A new cinema to take film into the realm of art.  Certainly there have been some great films but there hasn’t been anything to compare to the literature that’s come out.  Pynchon, Burroughs,Proust, Joyce etc. created uncompromising works of art that were just as technologically up to to date today as they were when the were written.  Authors like Kafka could spend there lives not finishing some of the greatest novels ever almost written while still keeping a day job.  The most influential aspect of filmaking is budget.  Good looking films cost millions.  Film itself is expensive the camera’s and the crews all tie a film down to needing an audience with a fair amount of money to watch the thing pretty darn quick so no one goes broke.

But what if we reach the point where we are looking into mirrors.  When the image making device ends up better than the eye.  Well let’s hope there are creative people with these cheap camera’s making a real art form out of film.  The only bottle neck I see now is the distribution and display.  It would seem to me that The HD TV may be fine for watching football or the current films but I would hope the computer monitor Video card combination with it’s fluidity of capability and format would become the standard display medium.  HDTV is like console gaming it’s yesterdays news it’s mass market hysteria It’s gonna be needing some more resolution real quick.

And how are the huge amounts of data supposed to get to peoples monitors.  I would hope there are enough people like me out there who can see the inanity of having multiple overlapping data-pipes coming into their homes with the insane “Tiers” and ridiculous “Packages”.  Really information could be like water and all you need is enough bandwidth so you can watch whatever you want whenever you want.  I mean Netflix works just fine on my crappy Belsouth DSL line.  Instead of spending thousands of dollars a year on cable and phone and CINEMAX and HBO you could just use the internet to subscribe to a netflix type of service that would make available a large selection of stuff you might like all categorized and rated by real people  allowing you to watch stuff you will probably like.  Like who listens to the radio anymore?  They stopped being able to play things the audience wanted and started having to play things certain large corporations wanted.  That kind of mass media is going away quick.

I certainly feel bad for the poor shlubs who still live in mass media land.  It takes them two stolen elections to realize the media isn’t and wasn’t on there side yet they still continue to watch and take to heart the shallow meaningless pablum that passes for news and entertainment.  Bread and Circuses I tells ya!  But really it is very very sad that a human being can live in this society with so much apparent and actual freedom and still act like some programed Manchurian candidate when it come to independent thought.