Final Cut Pro is the most popular pro video editing application in the world; it has something like 50% of the market, while everyone else splits the other 50%. Plus, it helps sell high-end hardware, and having real creative pros doing important things on the platform has significant value to the Apple brand.

Apple is unlikely to walk away from all of that.

But the thing about Apple under Jobs — at least since they got OS X on track and the iPod started taking off — is that they’re sort of fearless. They’re willing to launch themselves into markets against entrenched competitors, or launch products that nobody knows if there’s a market for. They’re willing to scrap highly successful products and replace them with products they know critics (and even some existing users) won’t like, but that they believe are better. They’re willing to fundamentally re-think things that nobody else really questions.

In general, they’re willing to do things that they know people will complain about loudly — but this gives them the flexibility to sometimes make exceptional products.

I suspect this is precisely where they’re headed with FCP. We’re going to get the OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch goodness that everyone wants. But we’re not going to get an app with a strict superset of Final Cut Pro’s functionality. Instead, we’re going to get an app that Apple believes is better overall for the tasks video editors perform, even if some features are cut. And we might also get a significantly overhauled UI; something that results from a process of sitting down and questioning every assumption about how editing interfaces currently work.

In short, I think they’ll come up with something really interesting… that will probably cause a bunch of people to totally freak out about how Apple has ruined everything and make forceful public declarations about how they’re leaving the platform. Meanwhile, people actually willing to embrace the thing might discover it has a bit of that iPad ‘magic’.

I have no inside information; this is all merely based on watching Apple (and reaction to Apple’s products) closely for the last 10 years.

For the sake of context, these new Arri cameras begin at around $70K.

The Car Analogy

Over in this thread on Red user (which is of general interest to anyone concerned with this topic), another poster (I don’t want to use names without permission) suggested that perhaps we shouldn’t expect Red to have too much influence on Arri’s market. Arri has positioned itself as a high-end brand, and sells to customers with the money to afford its products. Red has much more aggressive pricing, and sells largely to the low-budget market, moving a lot more units. The poster compares the companies to Mercedes and Hyundai, respectively, and makes the case that once you’ve established your brand downmarket, it’s hard to move up; how many people would buy a luxury-model Hyundai, if Hyundai decided to make such a thing?

This initially seems plausible, but… is the car analogy really the right model? Cars are a basically mature technology, with differentiation mostly based on aesthetics, brand marketing, and non-functional frills like fancy interiors. Digital cinema cameras, in contrast, are in extremely active development. There are real technical differences between them and there are real improvements from year to year. In fact, the whole shape of the market is still in flux, as demonstrated by the fact that over the last couple of years, Red appears to have sold some thousands of units to people who were previously not in the digital cinema camera market at all, but in the ENG or prosumer camera markets.

Image not to Scale

Maybe instead of Hyundai vs. Mercedes, we’re looking at Mac and Windows NT desktops vs. SGI workstations in the late ’90s. Yeah, remember Silicon Graphics? They made expensive specialized hardware for a small customer base. They were good at it. I’m sure they told themselves the same things the high-end vendors are telling themselves now. “Our customers have a lot of money, and they want the best, and there will always be a market for that.”

They got completely trashed by the rise of commodity hardware. Completely. Trashed.

Why? Because it turns out there are massive economies of scale with most technology products, both for R&D and actual physical production. If the other guy is selling 50x as many units as you are (or in SGI’s case hundreds or thousands of times as many units), it might well be the case that you can’t make a better product even if you charge 10x as much for every unit.

Is this going to happen with digital cinematography cameras? Well… we won’t really know until someone shoots them side by side, but by the numbers Red’s new $7K camera body looks like it might actually produce a better image than Arri’s new ~$70K camera body. So that’s something to consider.

Coasting… off a cliff?

There are a lot of snobs in this industry, and enough subjectivity that they’ll be able to go on justifying the use more expensive gear even if it doesn’t really work any better. That will let some vendors basically ignore Red for a while. Maybe years.

But I think eventually, if for no other reason than that workforce turnover will fill the industry with people who came up using the cheap/powerful stuff, it will be “change or die” time. Companies like Arri need to decide whether they want to get out ahead of the market on this, or try to hold onto the existing high price/low volume model for as long as possible. The latter approach (which is, unfortunately, the direction companies most often decide to take in situations like this) will mean that when these vendors do eventually try to make the transition, Red will already be firmly entrenched in the market they’re trying to move into.

There’s a lot of counterproductive elitism in the film world, and one of the silliest examples of it is that right around the time the Red One started shipping (this is pure coincidence, I’m sure), some people suddenly decided that Bayer pattern sensors (see Wikipedia article if you’re not familiar) like the ones used in Red cameras are somehow unacceptable for motion imaging.

This, of course, has essentially no basis in reality.

Bayer is virtually the only technology used in the stills world these days, from the cheapest consumer cameras to the most expensive large format digital backs. Bayer sensors are used by probably tens of thousands of pro photographers every day to shoot images that sometimes get blown up to billboard size, and as stills, tend to be examined with far more scrutiny than individual frames in a moving sequence ever will be. And yet somehow, Bayer has been presented by some people in the motion imaging world as some sort of weakness for the Red One, as if Red is somehow cheating.

The truth is, Bayer is so widely used because for a given photosite count, with proper processing, it delivers a better image than anything else. Three chip designs or striped sensor patterns deliver at best 20-25% more visible resolution using 300% more photosites; in many cases it would make much more sense to just build a higher resolution Bayer sensor.

The real reason why Bayer isn’t already widely deployed for high-end motion imaging is not that it’s somehow unacceptable for that purpose, but that high-quality Bayer processing is very computationally intensive. The Red One gets around this by recording a raw image, so this computation doesn’t have to happen in real time — but as the RED Rocket and the 1080p RGB recording modes on the new cameras demonstrate, it is now possible to build ASICs which can do such processing in real time, which allows Bayer sensors to be used even in workflows that require high-quality live output.

I expect that as a result of this, we’ll see large Bayer sensors increasingly become the dominant technology in high-end motion imaging, just as they have in the stills world. Arri’s new cameras all use them. (Though whether this will clue in the industry snobs is anyone’s guess. A friend of mine was having a chat with someone at an LA rental house a few days ago who explained they’d be buying into Arri’s new system rather than Red’s because “The Red uses a Bayer sensor, and is really only a 2K camera”, apparently completely unaware that the Arri cameras are also Bayer, and Red’s S35 cameras are 5K to Arri’s 3.5K.)

Update: David Newman of CineForm points out that processing Bayer images isn’t necessarily that computationally intensive, and that most of the computational overhead of working with Red footage is associated with the compression, not the debayer process. I wonder what implications this will have for the RGB recording modes on the new cameras. If most of the complexity is in the compression rather than the debayer, playing back Redcode RGB footage might actually be more taxing than playing back raw footage currently is, which I think is contrary to what most people expect.

As existing Red One owners, we’re pretty happy, though it’s going to be hard to decide whether to upgrade in Stage II or Stage III — as I see it, upgrading in Stage II basically means getting to keep your Red One body for an extra $9000. But if the previously announced price on the S35 Scarlet holds up, that will be only $7000 and if you don’t need anamorphic, speed ramping, or frame rates about 72 fps, will otherwise be a better camera that’s part of the new modular system and so can share accessories with the Epic X better. Our decision will probably come down to timing; it’s unclear at this point how much of a time gap there will be between Stage II and Stage III.

1. New Final Cut Studio Rundown
2. Red offline/online Final Cut & Color workflow
3. Will RedRay usher in the age of consumer 4K?
4. RedRay: is that really possible?
5. Your regular installment of Red myth debunking
6. Red’s Nov. 13th announcements: is the Red One obsolete?
7. Red’s Nov. 13th announcements: why so many models?
8. Meet the Five-Z
9. In defense of compression
10. Epic mythology
11. Scarlet vs. HVX200
12. The future of indie cinema
13. QuickTime REDCODE support explained
14. Photo lenses vs. cine lenses
15. Whither the Long Tail?
16. Red’s impact: boutique production
17. Red’s impact: starting small
18. Evolution of Digital Media Creation Technologies l
19. How to store data #1: background
20. Putting everything on the line. Or not.
21. Archiving #2: tape vs. drives
22. Market segmentation, IT & skepticism
23. Archiving #1: optical formats
24. Changing the economics of feature production?

And the ever-popular debate with Rian Johnson:

1. Response to Rian Johnson #1
2. Response to Rian Johnson #2
3. Rian Johnson Response Round 2

Absolutely incredible.

Incidentally, sorry about things being a little slow lately here at Indie4K. There hasn’t been a huge amount of Red-related news since Final Cut Studio 3. The good news is, things seem to be heating up again.

We’re also about to head into production on a round of our own short projects (we’re shooting the first of them next week) which I can actually post interesting stuff about (unlike most of the projects we work on for other people), and I expect some interesting blog material to come out of that.