I was quite appalled to go into Harvey Norman yesterday and to see that they are selling HDMI cables at anything from one hundred and fifty to six hundred dollars! The cables aren’t even that long - they had four metre ones for about $400, with a 10 metre one for a shocking $599. They are covered with the normal marketing stuff - how it guarantees a ‘better home theatre experience’ and general junk like that. The worst offender for outrageously (and needlessly) expensive HDMI cables is a brand called ‘Monster Cables’, but there are others like ‘Gecko’ and ‘PureAV’. Some of these companies even sell expensive optical cables with gold plated connectors! But why are these cables such a rip off? First, there’s the fundamental fact that they are digital cables.

An analogue signal, which is used to carry video and audio in the older Composite, S-Video and Component video standards, can be degraded with a low quality cable, long cable lengths, and possibly interference from other cables (like power cables). It is worth spending a little more on these cables, like the $60 component cable we bought with our DVD player. A digital signal that these HDMI cables carry, on the other hand, is not affected by cable quality. Generally, unless the cable is broken, it will deliver a perfect signal, which means a perfect picture. Basically, a $12 dollar cable from Monoprice, or even the $3 cable that came with my monitor will always give just as good a picture as the $500 Monster cable. Furthermore, all cables that carry the HDMI logo must be certified to deliver an essentially perfect picture (HDMI certification requires less than one in every million pixels be lost, or something like that. A human would have trouble picking up one in five hundred.).

Clearly these Monster Cables are very high quality - but the only thing that means is that they won’t break as easily. And it’s not even like HDMI cables are often in a position where damage would ever be a problem, and even if a cheap cable did break, you could still buy twenty or thirty new ones for the price of getting a single Monster cable!

Monster cables do not ever give you a better picture, sound quality, or any other benefits than the cheapest $5 bargain bin HDMI cables. If you don’t get a perfect picture with an HDMI cable, then it is broken - nothing to do with the quality of the cable. I would advise everyone to never buy Monster brand cables, or any HDMI cable over $100 - unless it’s 30 or 40 metres long or something.

The new RED DSMC system (that’s Digital Still and Motion) is based around the idea of ‘making obsolescence obsolete’ - meaning that your camera is built up of multiple modules, all which can be switched out to upgrade the system. The center of the system is the ‘brain’, which includes the sensor module, lens mount and processing circuitry. There are seven different ‘brains’ available - from a 3K Scarlet with a fixed lens (much like the originally announced Scarlet), a 3K Scarlet with a B4, C or proprietary Mini-Red mount, and 5K and 6K Scarlets with Nikon, Canon or PL mounts and an S35 or full frame 35mm sensor respectively. On the Epic side, there are 5K, 6K and 9K versions with various mounts, and the incredible (and completely ridiculous) 28K Epic.

The ‘brain’ can then be coupled with any of a large number of optional extra modules, from break out boxes, to flash and hard drive recording modules, a module containing two extra batteries, remote controls, electronic view finders, LCD displays, and so on. You can build the camera to be as big, or as small as you want, and even swap out lens mounts and sensor modules in the field!

This is really a great system - and even though the price can add up pretty quickly, it is still quite incredibly cheap compared to cameras even in the prosumer market (let alone the professional market that this system directly competes with!). This is a very exciting camera system, and I expect that we will certainly buy a small Scarlet system - maybe with the fixed lens, or with the Mini-Red mount. While some of the prices are already posted over at Reduser, the prices for much of the system remains to be seen.

Check out the full anouncement, with pricing information over at RedUser. Some of the new equipment is really quite incredible.

Well, there’s still about eight hours to go until the big announcement, but RED’s Jim Jannard has posted some new pictures of both the RED Scarlet 3K camera, and the 5K RED Epic. Like all the images posted since the redesign, they are small, really close up, and probably just leading speculation away from the truth. Some of these look like parts of the new cameras, but the first one looks like it could be of a new lens - possibly indicating that Scarlet has interchangeable lenses?

Still, it remains to be seen what RED come up with, and I, like most people who have been constantly refreshing REDUser and ScarletUser for weeks, can’t wait!

All images in this post are copyright © Red Digital Cinema Company. Full size images can be seen at Jim’s post on RedUser

More Images and Updates

This is interesting. Jim has let slip that “Scarlet® and RED EPIC® are part of the same DSMC system”. This new image seems to be of Epic, but given this new information, it could actually be a hybrid of components from both the cameras.

This one could also be a RED Scarlet camera configured as an SLR. This would probably mean that Scarlet will be able to have interchangeable lenses, and that it is probably full frame. If speculation is correct though, it could be, on the other hand, an Epic sensor module.

As it was announced, Scarlet was going to have a 3K resolution sensor (that’s more than two and a half times the size of Full HD!), shoot frame rates of up to 120 frames per second, with the ability to do very short bursts of 180 (where one second of motion becomes seven and a half seconds of video - think ultra-slow, ultra-smooth video), and record onto compact flash cards or an external hard drive using RED’s very efficient and high quality REDCODE codec. And, all of this for just US$3000! But in August, Jim Jannard, owner of RED Digital Cinema, dropped a bombshell:

We have changed everything about Scarlet because the market has changed and we have discovered a lot of things in the process. We have a new vision.

Wipe you minds of the past announced Scarlet. Forget the design and forget the price. It is all different now. We think you will be surprised. Glad we didn’t take any deposits…

Well, after two months of wild speculation, with the only information about the new design being gathered from a few very close up, disorienting shots, RED have announced that they will be releasing the new specifications and prices tomorrow. I’m certain that we will see new renders, and possibly prototypes of the cameras. Whether we’ll see any images or video shot with the camera remains to be seen.

Jim was very optimistic about the announcement, saying on Sunday that “We are so excited that we can hardly stand it. The whole RED team has been working more than I could have ever imagined on this. Probably because we are so motivated by the program.”

Whatever they announce, there will be some disappointed people - as some were even disappointed with the original Scarlet’s amazing specifications. But for those with realistic expectations, and, judging by Jim’s posts, those who are expecting the impossible, Thursday is going to be very exciting indeed.

I recently made a new website for my operating system project, Symmetry. The old site I was using for it was basically just the default Wordpress theme with a slightly different header image. The new site is a completely custom theme that I made, and I think it is a lot simpler and cleaner.

I also did a bit of re-branding as well. Although the project has retained its logo, I made up a new name for it - Symmetry. I had been wanting to change the name for a while, but never got around to it until I decided to sign up for free Git hosting at Gitorious. It was a bit of a spur of the moment thing - I needed to put in a project name, so I thought for a few seconds and came up with Symmetry. It fits in with the old logo, and the old name can be used as an abbreviation - Symmetry Operating System (sos).

Now, seeing that this card was pretty recent, it wasn’t supported by the graphics driver that shipped with Ubuntu 8.04. Now, I did try to update the driver manually using the driver from the Nvidia website, and it’s times like those when you really appreciate the drivers in the repositories. To put it one way, it didn’t really work. Whereas I had a kind-of-working desktop beforehand, now I was working in a resolution of 800×600, which didn’t look great on my 22 inch screen. So, I did what it seems I always end up doing - upgrading to an untested, unstable early alpha of Ubuntu!

Now, I have to say that it was actually pretty smooth. The update worked first time, and then I was able to just grab the driver for my card from Synaptic. Sure, a whole host of programs crash from time to time, but compared to my other experiences, I had a pretty stable system.

But somewhere along the line, I found that I was no longer able to move any windows when Compiz was running. (I knew this because Compiz had a little habbit of crashing on startup for a while). Now, I assumed that this was a bug in Emerald, the application that draws the nice, glassy window borders. I put up with this for a few days, but eventually started sifting the net for a solution when it just got too annoying.

It was actually quite a bit simpler than I was expecting. It wasn’t a bug or a crash. Turns out, I had disabled a very important plugin in Compiz:

What an anticlimax. But it really makes you think - what purpose does this serve? Why would anyone ever want to disable the ability to move windows around? What’s next - an ‘Open Programs’ plugin?

I have been taking a look at Adobe’s new Buzzword word processor. Basically, Buzzword is a flash based web application, and I have to say, it is very nice. As you can see from the screenshot above, the text rendering absolutely brilliant, with access to real typefaces like Myriad and Minion, as opposed to the boring Arial you generally see in normal web based word processors.

Being written in Flash, it has quite a few other advantages apart from nice typefaces too - nice image wrapping for one; better tables another. The interface is also a lot more dynamic than most word processors - whether they be applications or web based. It’s certainly nicer than the new Microsoft Office look, and is very nice to use.

The application can export to a range of different file formats, like rich text, Microsoft Word formats, plain text, HTML and also Adobe PDF - although Evince wouldn’t open the PDF that I exported… It also boasts good collaboration features (like most other internet word processor), but that’s not much use to me, so I haven’t tried any of that.

All in all, it looks like a word processor that I might actually consider using in the future. It’s certainly a project to keep an eye on. Check it out at Acrobat.com - you have to sign up to use it first.

It also makes switching from X to a virtual terminal much, much faster. There are some videos in the article demonstrating it, but since this is not planned for release until the end of the year, it is still fairly buggy and unreliable.

Read the article at Phoronix.com…

Ever since RED Digital Cinema’s new professional pocket camera was mentioned at last years NAB tradeshow, there has been wild speculation circulating around almost every camera and video forum and website around. Most people were expecting an HD or 2K camera for around $5000. When you take a look at the specifications of other cameras around the same price on the market, such as Panasonic’s HVX-200 and the Sony PMW-EX1, you can see that they were asking for a lot.

But in true RED style, the announcement at 9:00am at this year’s NAB shocked us all. The resolution that this camera shoots is not HD. It’s not 2K. It’s 3K. To put that in perspective, that’s two and a half times bigger than full HD. It can shoot at up to 120 frames per second, or even as fast as 180fps for a burst of a few seconds. That means that a one second action, when played back at the regular 24 frames per second, becomes seven seconds of action. Another significant aspect of this camera is that it shoots REDCODE RAW. This is a compression scheme that is much more efficient than traditional codecs. This is similar to RAW on a digital SLR camera, but it’s compressed using wavelets. This codec gives you very close to uncompressed quality, but with a relativity low data rate.

Now, judging from other cameras on the market, a camera with these specifications would run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be surprising to see it on the lower side of $50,000. But RED is targeting a price of three thousand dollars. They did it with the RED ONE (a 4K resolution, $17, 500 camera now on the market that outstrips cameras like the Sony F950 - which retails for around $115,000 ), and I have complete faith that they can do it again.

The resolution that Scarlet shoots at is huge - and it’s RED’s lowest resolution camera!

I’m really looking forward to this camera’s release in early 2009, and I am very happy that RED have finally released a camera that I can afford.

Other RED Products Announced

Aside from Scarlet, there were two other big things from RED this NAB. The first was a new 4K video player and distribution format called RED RAY, which can fit two hours of 4K footage on a standard dual layer DVD. Like the other big announcements, it’s being released in early 2009, and will cost under $1000. This looks like an amazing product, and could help speed up digital cinema adoption, as well as be a format that could be used in the home. It can downscale 4K to HD if only one of the HDMI ports are plugged in, or deliver full 4K resolution if all four are hooked up. This would be a very well future-proofed format - when you get a bigger TV or higher resolution projector in your home theater, you could just plug in more cables, and all of your movies would suddenly be 4.5 times higher resolution! No needing to replace your movie collection yet again to fit your new TV.

Another product announced was EPIC, a 5K camera that is smaller, lighter, and faster than the RED ONE, but twice the price. It’s a little impractical right now, as a quad- or eight-core workstation is recommended for working with 4K footage, and 5K is an extra 4.7 million pixels in every frame than that. So it looks like this camera will definitely be used (at least initially) only on high-budget movies.

You’ll also notive that I moved the blog out of its own subdomain, and into the main site. I think its better this way, and makes it easier to keep all the images and media together.

And finally, I hope you like the new design! I have been working on the new site for a while now, and I think that it is much improved from the old version.