I've heard from friends in the indie film space that BlackMagic cameras come close to RED cameras but at fraction of the price. It's interesting that BlackMagic produces their own video editing software as well (well, it was an acquisition [1]).
I wonder if it's some form of competitive advantage to have in-house software?
(EDIT: looks like Davinci Resolve has been used in TV shows and major Hollywood productions, including Oscar-nominated films [2])
It means they can do things that would otherwise stall due to waiting for industry adoption. Like coming up with their own file format that sucks less than other formats in some important ways.
Blackmagic RAW isn't really "raw" in the sense that it's the data exactly as it comes out of the sensor ADC. It's ever so slightly "cooked" in the camera, which dramatically reduces file size, but still preserves all the dynamic range and color info that you need for doing fun stuff with it later.
Any camera maker could do this and publish a support library, but no software would feel the impetus to integrate it immediately, so nobody would use it, and if nobody's using it, no software would feel the impetus to support it ever.
But because Resolve is such a competent offering in the software space too, you can enjoy the benefits of the new format immediately, if you're shooting with their cameras and editing with their software. And that creates market inertia and people talking about how useful it is, so if other software wants to win users away from Resolve, they'll likely have to grab that library and build in support for the format.
“It means they can do things that would otherwise stall due to waiting for industry adoption.“
That was certainly the case for the Vegas Video team back when Sony owned the group. That said, it enabled some head-scratching behaviors, like XDCAM and XDCAM EX having different schemas and formats despite both being XDCAM branded random-access media.
If plenoptic computational videography ever becomes more popular, it will likely be on the back of a similar hardware/software integration. Existing NLE products feel a bit shoehorned for RAW post-photography/pre-assembly to grading/finishing workflows being pluggable.
This is correct. Blackmagic introduced a full raw workflow recently which was a game changer. Red holds a patent on raw video which they’ve been real dicks about aggressively enforcing. It has stifled innovation. BM got around that by partially debayering their capture and storing it in a format that gives you the flexibility of raw but is more performant and avoids Red’s patent bullshit. It’s amazing to grade BRaw footage. You just keep pushing it and, oh look there’s detail in those shadows and those highlights aren’t actually blown out. No banding, no grain, massive color depth at 12bit and the flexibility to change ISO in post.
RED are penises. They worked closely with the foundry to make a tool(storm) to allow logging, editing and quick grading. It was very popular, apart from the RED users had to pay for it. They pirated it with gay abandon.
the only thing worse than RED are the rabid fanbois that use them.
Anyway, RED saw the software, stole the interface and made a free version.
RED then threatened to take the Foundry to court, after they integrated REDcode into Nuke. They went on about how innovate and clever the format was. Its just a tar with JPEG 2000.
I was at IBC when we released storm, I had the privilege of using 4 red rockets, all of which broke. I was there looking at the RED forums where they were sharing the cracked version.
I was there when Whitmore got the email about redcode, and not using the official SDK. That we "had illegally reverse engineered proprietary code".
I was at the dinner when either bruno or sam said "it turns out they like storm a lot, but not enough to pay for it"
Interesting, it seems that even after several years away from the company, I have fallen foul of the Foundry's culture of secrecy.
> I had the privilege of using 4 red rockets, all of which broke.
Unsurprising; the original RR was a repurposed DVS Atomix with custom firmware. Now redundant since R3D decoding on GPU was released. RED's overpriced, unreliable hardware is my #1 gripe, but not really relevant to this discussion.
> I was there when Whitmore got the email about redcode, and not using the official SDK. That we "had illegally reverse engineered proprietary code".
I didn't know that a non-SDK-based REDCODE integration was ever in Nuke. If correct, to be honest that was an unwise move anyway; RED have always warned against reverse engineering in their licence agreements (and yes, reverse engineering was necessary to read R3Ds without the SDK, it was never plain vanilla JPEG2000 and didn't use the tar format at all). If Whitmore allowed it, he should have expected RED's response.
The legal grey area is that reverse engineering a file format isn't the same thing as reverse engineering proprietary executable code by disassembly. However, after having had a similar run-in with RED regarding reverse engineering, I have no doubt that Jannard's legal team would have persisted and come out on top.
> I was there looking at the RED forums where they were sharing the cracked version.
Sure, some end users pirated Storm like other Foundry software because the licence manager had been cracked long before, but that wasn't RED's fault.
> RED saw the software, stole the interface and made a free version.
The interfaces were no more similar that any two "pro" video apps (REDCINE-X looked particularly awful at launch). RED built a competing app with an overlapping feature set. This happens all the time.
> "it turns out they like storm a lot, but not enough to pay for it"
And why should they have? RED established a team that could develop their app without charging end users (a loss leader, I suppose), while still remaining profitable. The Foundry failed, or declined, to do so. Storm could have been expanded to cater for the needs of the DSLR (and later mirrorless) filmmaking communities; a much bigger market than indie RED shooters that was crying out for reliable and affordable post software. Instead, Storm was assimilated into Hiero with a big price tag for a handful of customers.
Years later, Bill told me that Storm was ultimately killed "because we didn't understand the low-end market". They could have just asked.
The RED patent is for compressed raw video. Uncompressed raw video (like Sigma FP) is unencumbered by the patent, but the file sizes are huge.
RED were pioneers in the early days of digital cinematography but now they are slowing things down. Can't really understand how they got a patent for something so simple. Even Apple lost the patent lawsuit to use compressed raw video in Prores RAW without paying royalties RED.
I'm hoping Blackmagic RAW would take off beyond Blackmagic cameras, but so far only Atomos has picked it up. (BM and Atomos both use FPGAs in the ISP so maybe that's what you need to process it realtime)
RED cameras are a personality cult. Sure they had great resolution back in the day, but they expensive, and a massive pain in the arse to post process, unless you bought their crappy redrocket cards that were uber fragile.
> I wonder if it's some form of competitive advantage to have in-house software?
There is only one company that "goes it alone" and thats pixar. Even then they've steadily been replacing their inhouse tools with off the shelf ones.
From what I recall the only other company that went inhouse was rhythm and hues, and they went bankrupt in 2013.
Most of these tools come from VFX studios in the first place. Nuke, baselight, photoshop, renderman and katana all came from VFX studios originally
I wonder if it's some form of competitive advantage to have in-house software?
(EDIT: looks like Davinci Resolve has been used in TV shows and major Hollywood productions, including Oscar-nominated films [2])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DaVinci_Resolve
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DaVinci_Resolve#Media_produced...