One company that has recently really come to the fore in terms of engineering ingenuity and bringing fantastic products to market at fantastic price points is Blackmagic Design.

The first product that stood out to me earlier this year was the Decklink HD Extreme, offering dual link HD-SDI even up to 2K RGB 4:4:4 at a ridiculous price point of $995.

The next big news item was the acquisition of DaVinci and the launch of Resolve, of specific interest to me was a software only industry standard color correction solution at… you guessed it $995, which was perfectly positioned to run head to head against Apple Color.

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Now they’ve done it again with the Decklink HD Extreme 3D, at $995 and the very nifty Ultrastudio Pro offering 10-bit uncompressed HD in 4:2:2 color space in a external USB 3.0 device at only $895!

All in all, whether you are Final Cut Studio based, Avid or Adobe, Blackmagic Design is the one-stop shop for video I/O and D.I. at home-studio prices.

When the time comes for me to upgrade and expand my own post capabilities, it will be powered by Blackmagic without question.

I don’t usually like to just copy and paste blog posts as I believe it undermines some of the reason you all come here, and I like to think (maybe I kid myself) that you actually want to hear my opinion about the technology relating to the digital cinema revolution.

So I will have my say here, and then paste the article for you as it puts the information across and I don’t feel I need to re-invent it.

Well, it cannot be denied that Red Digital Cinema were and for some still are the driving force. I believe they took something that the likes of DALSA conceptualized with it’s 4K Origin camera, and brought it to the masses in the Red One.

The Red One is still a fantastic feat of engineering, with the Mysterium-X it’s still on top. Not only that, Red Digital Cinema pioneered an unheard of R&D program daring to involve it’s customers from the get-go, something that literally guaranteed unprecedented pre-sales and customer loyalty.

Reduser.net, which to be honest I have not visited for quite some time is the home of what can only be described as a cult following, where members worship the company and product that set them free from the world of consumer and pro-sumer psuedo-HD video and thrust them into true digital cinema nirvana.

For me, I look to Jim Jannard and his company Red Digital Cinema with a level of respect that is reserved for the likes of… well… him alone, maybe Richard Branson but only at a push.

The latest news is both sad and unfortunate, and I sincerely look forward to seeing Mr Jannard’s ingenuity and never-say-die attitude overcome these obstacles.

The following was published on EOSHD.com

Above: Foxconn’s Terry Gou and Red’s Jim Jannard.

It has all the drama of cinema’s greatest movies. Our friends at 1001 Noisy Cameras report that Red has been hit by a double whammy leaving it without a manufacturer and with a major unsolved bug in the firmware of both Scarlet and Epic.

With competition from DSLRs putting pressure on Red to compete in the same market place as Canon and Panasonic, today Red’s Jim Jannard seemingly added the very last nail to Scarlet’s coffin by himself.

We have stumbled on an issue that has caused us considerable grief. It is unexpected and it has us baffled…

In a forum announcement, Jannard posted an incredibly frank and open statement.

The firmware of both cameras has a major unfixed bug backing up production schedules, but even more seriously Taiwanese company Foxconn are to close their Chinese factory, with the shock loss of 800,000 jobs, moving significant production back into Taiwan. Red has no electronics manufacturing partner at the time of writing.

I have started two companies… Oakley and RED… and have never seen anything like this in 35 years of business. We will get past these obstacles. No question about it. But we are going to need patience from our customers… We have been a “lucky” company up to this point… Trust me when I tell you that we have been humbled… So what does this mean? Obviously another delay… To compound matters, the company that was to make Scarlet has made an incredible announcement recently and has significant issues.

Foxconn has suffered well publicised issues at the Chinese factory, and is expected to move massive factory production to Taiwan, Vietnam and India. Wages with most likely be higher and most likely passed onto customers.

It is thought that when Red was informed of the Chinese factory closure, Jannard sought to have the camera manufactured in America but this plan fell through. Jannard did not say whether Foxconn dropped Red as a customer due to production capacity pressure from the move and in order to cater for larger companies such as Apple and Dell, or whether the deal fell apart due to Foxconn passing on increased costs to Red.

This exposes Red’s major weakness against competitors like Canon and Panasonic. They have to subcontract out all their hardware manufacturing. Their plan to take over the world is now beginning to look too ambitious.

RED has pushed the envelop in every way. We have pushed ourselves and our competitors. We have laid out a roadmap for everyone what the future of image capture should be. I can only hope that counts for a bit of your consideration.

I think what counts for most people’s consideration right now, is whether they will be able to buy a Scarlet or Epic in 2010 at all.

For every day that passes whilst Red suffer, their camera specifications and designs slip further and further into the clutches of competitors, who are already some distance ahead of volume and pricing. DSLRs are now everywhere. What I can’t stand about Red though in comparison to the more conservative and failure-fearing Japanese corporations, is their sheer arrogance. It seems this at least, has now been fixed.

The past couple of years we have been on a roll. Humility has now set in. Until we solve this one… we are heads down and nose to the grindstone. Probably not a bad lesson for us to learn.

Separately, as someone familiar with the Taiwanese / Chinese situation I believe the political fall out of Foxconn moving 800,000 jobs out of China will probably lead to a deterioration in stability and peace too horrible to contemplate.

http://www.eoshd.com/content/252-Red-Scarlet-and-Epic-hit-by-unprecedented-production-problems

Just when I thought Panasonic were on top, Philips have unveiled one of the most beautiful things I have seen in a long long time. The 56PFL9954H/12 is it’s model name, and is dubbed the Cinema 21:9 LCD TV 56″ – that aspect ratio is the same as 2.39:1 just more marketable.

The screen is a 17bit panel, at 2560x1080p with support for native 24p and 1080p up to 24p. It uses content aware scaling to show standard 16:9 TV broadcasts and game console feeds without distortion. It displays 2.35:1 cinema without black bars and makes the most of it’s large 56″ diagonal frame.

Fantastic. Finally we have cinema in the home that looks exactly the way the director and DP intended.

What do senior Canon product planners think of DSLR video?

EOSHD.com has rounded up a ‘state of the union’ collection of the latest Canon quotes, from the people who make big decisions. These guys decide company strategy and channel customer requests from key markets like the USA to Research & Development back in Japan. Like a true democracy, Canon say that what happens next will depend on what customers ask for.

And it seems most want the DSLR video revolution to keep on going.

Tsunemasa Ohara (above), Senior General Manager of Canon’s Camera R&D centre on Micro 4/3rds and mirrorless cameras -

We think this mirrorless type of camera – SLRs, DSC and other systems in this area – will expand the total camera market. That’s our current opinion.

EOSHD: Canon see it as growth market, which means they will almost certainly enter it.

Tim Smith – did the DSLR video revolution catch Canon by surprise?

Yes. We’ve learnt a lot from what people want and need, and we’ll respond… it has also made us think differently [about the video cameras we make]. Are we looking at doing a video camera with a big chip in it? It’s certainly coming up a lot, we’re having our planning meetings…it will appear…we just need to figure out where we stand in all of this [market post DSLR video]… we will pull all this together eventually.

Tim Smith – will Canon have raw or uncompressed live HDMI out on future DSLRS?

The best way to make this happen is [for customers] to keep pushing us.

Chuck Westfall, on extended manual video controls in the 5D Mark II -

One of the issues is that adding the full range of manual controls on this camera makes it a much more complicated instrument. It’s not necessarily that we’re never going to do it, but it’s generation 1.0. We’d like to get some market feedback, which we’ve already received now, before we start making any serious changes to the overall feature set or design.

EOSHD: Canon added manual controls via a firmware update, but it is clear Canon see a need for balancing complexity with familiarity when it comes to the camera body itself.

Chuck Westfall, when asked whether video is going to be standard in every future DSLR?

We don’t want to guarantee. It is going to depend on the overall market strategy. But at this stage, the image processors we’re using, especially the DIGIC 4, are powerful enough that it really makes it very easy for us to add that feature without increasing the cost.

EOSHD: HD video costs nothing extra in the current hardware to implement.

So the overriding message of what Canon’s guys say here is that product strategy is in the palm of our hands, so lets speak up.

On that surprising cost admission by Chuck Westfall above, well – it should not be taken literally, because the stills side of the camera – sensor, image processor costs a LOT to develop. It is just that it has made a ‘free’ add-on video camera possible. The results are not too bad from a ‘free’ video camera, either.

I think dedicated video mode development in DSLRs will cost much more for Canon to implement in the future. They will need to keep pushing the codec further, and this requires firmware developments as well as better hardware. It is rumoured that DIGIC 5 will be based around a video core, not a stills orientated one. Video requires greater horse power, and stills processing can fit around that. But customers want this, and so Canon will do it.

Right now, HD video on stills cameras has come about partly due to the buzz from customers over HD and partly because it was a relatively cheap and easy feature to add. The CMOS sensors were getting quicker to support better continuous stills shooting rates and the mobile CPU hardware was speeding up as inevitable under Moore’s Law.

The next step from Canon may be very important in determining how they fair – not just in the existing photographic market – but in a whole new one built up around DSLR video and their position in the video camera market. DSLR technology will have a greater and greater role to play in stand-alone video cameras, the beginnings of which we are seeing right now with the Panasonic AF100.

Sources:

http://www.cinema5d.com/news/?p=3176
http://www.photoradar.com/news/story…k-iv-interview
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-10213645-39.html