They promised excellent resolution for a supposedly cheap price. At the time there was an explosion of "HD" cameras, a lot of them coming from modern DSLRs lead by the canon 5D suddenly opened up the world of good enough resolution and colour to the world.
However at the time RED footage was a massive pain to deal with. redraw was JPEG2000, which from memory is wavelet based. In a world when GPUs were for graphics, CPUs couldn't decode rthe frames in anywhere near realtime.
you could buy a $4k super fragile ASIC card that would allow decoding in real time, but it was a dick to use. It might have got better, but GPUs took over.
However, the big problem with RED is that they over promised and under delivered. They had devoted fans who would foam at the mouth for any company or person that dared to be critical.
THey didn't have a global shutter, they were quite noisy, and they were nowhere near as cheap to run as they made out.
THey kept on making new products, but never managed to really execute them properly. For example they were going to make a 4k laser project that would blow cristie or barco out of the water. Turned out that it didn't work, and at IBC/NAB they were using an overdriven barco.
The tech support people were very nice, however part of the cache of working there was "being in the know" so as soon as it came to getting techincal details you needed to make a decision (liek the redray) things went back to vague marketing terms.
Arrl and Sony all make much better cameras, the might have less pixels, but much better dynamic range and optical resolution. moreover the workflow isn't shite and they are reliable.
However, now, not so much.
They promised excellent resolution for a supposedly cheap price. At the time there was an explosion of "HD" cameras, a lot of them coming from modern DSLRs lead by the canon 5D suddenly opened up the world of good enough resolution and colour to the world.
However at the time RED footage was a massive pain to deal with. redraw was JPEG2000, which from memory is wavelet based. In a world when GPUs were for graphics, CPUs couldn't decode rthe frames in anywhere near realtime.
you could buy a $4k super fragile ASIC card that would allow decoding in real time, but it was a dick to use. It might have got better, but GPUs took over.
However, the big problem with RED is that they over promised and under delivered. They had devoted fans who would foam at the mouth for any company or person that dared to be critical.
THey didn't have a global shutter, they were quite noisy, and they were nowhere near as cheap to run as they made out.
THey kept on making new products, but never managed to really execute them properly. For example they were going to make a 4k laser project that would blow cristie or barco out of the water. Turned out that it didn't work, and at IBC/NAB they were using an overdriven barco.
The tech support people were very nice, however part of the cache of working there was "being in the know" so as soon as it came to getting techincal details you needed to make a decision (liek the redray) things went back to vague marketing terms.
Arrl and Sony all make much better cameras, the might have less pixels, but much better dynamic range and optical resolution. moreover the workflow isn't shite and they are reliable.