HD for Indies has dug up a mysterious link to an enigmatic website that claims to be developing a brand new digital cinema camera. It sounds great, what with full 4k resolution (4520×2540), up to 60p fps, RAW 4:4:4 uncompressed data channels, and so forth. Unfortunately, there’ not really a lot of hard data there. In fact, there’s really nothing but a lot of very, very optimistic promises, like custom lenses, custom codecs, and a presentation at NAB ‘06 (late April).
Personally, I’m skeptical. The totally anonymous site is oddly organized, their test image is obviously from an off-the shelf Canon DSLR, and their claims are very, very extreme. I hope I’m wrong, because it sounds like it would be a great camera, but as of now, I’ll be surprised if the RED Camera ever sees production in its proposed form.
Nevertheless, the resulting discussion is required reading, because folks are describing exactly what is involved in making something like this. Mike Curtis has gone into some of the sheer bandwidth requirements of that kind of data, and there’s a much less structured forum debate at DVinfo.net. Ignore the pointless cynicism, but there’s some good info there for those who want more imformation on what separates a specialized digital cinema camera from just a (comparatively) simple HD cam.
