The announcement at NAB about the RED Rocket was yet another product announcement from RED with no shipping date. In a recent post at reduser Jim Jannard announced some more specs and the expected ship date of the first week of July. This ship date, is clearly ahead of the Scarlet and Epic ship dates and is very soon after the announcement of the product. This is somewhat confusing as the Scarlet was announced well over a year ago, with updates in November and December and we still have no release date for either product other than “summer 2009, behind schedule by a couple months.”

So for this NEW product to be announced and ship prior to the Scarlet is somewhat puzzling and maddening for sure.  Really, I want my S35 Scarlet NOW!

However, as I thought about it, I suppose it does make sense.

Red Rocket almost certainly takes a lot of its IP from RED RAY. Red Ray provides hardware decoding of the .R3D file as does RED Rocket. Red Ray has been in development as long as the Epic and Scarlet cameras, so Red Rocket, while it might be a new and awesome implementation, still has had some development since NAB 2008.

So, with a July release date for RED Rocket, should we expect to see the EPIC and Scarlet start shipping? I don’t think so. RED Rocket targets a different market than either the Epic or Scarlet cameras. Scarlet is going to be a MASS produced camera competing in several spaces between the HDV crowd all they way up to the Digital Cinema Crowd.  Epic will be the top of the line Digital Cinema Camera.

It’s target market are post houses and really more specifically, HOLLYWOOD post houses. Hollywood doesn’t have to wait for Scarlet or Epic. They can shoot RED ONE right now. But “the big guys” have a real problem with post on RED. It doesn’t fit into their usual workflow.  Independent producers and post houses have really jumped into the RED workflow and made it work.  Companies like Plaster City Post, OffHollywood, or Silverado Systems have made it work and support RED with an indie spirit and top notch service.

Independent RED productions don’t have the level of complexity that larger Hollywood productions with their studio heads, multiple producers, levels of bureaucracy and “in the loop people.” Producers and stakeholders need dailies. They need review footage, they need to see what’s going on even if they are away from the set. This, up until now, has been a CPU intensive operation requiring lots of time and lots of horsepower.

RED Rocket makes it possible for large scale dailies creation. This more than anything else they do, will allow RED to move into mainstream Hollywood production.

Scarlet and Epic will only speed up the adoption of RED RAW as the main digital film acquisition format starting at the indie level and moving into the mainstream Hollywood level.

FROM RED:

RED Rocket board with Quad DVI and Dual Link HD-SDI- $4750

Decode and debayer 4K R3D files realtime. Hyper-accelerated transcode to any system codec. Specs to be posted upon completion of testing.
Plays full quality realtime 4K to 4K monitor or projector from DVI output. Plays full quality 2K/1080P scaled from 4K footage out the Dual Link HD-SDI from RED Rocket card.
Plays full quality 2K scaled from 4K footage realtime through system graphics card and monitor.
Optional Breakout box with Quad HDMI and Quad Dual Link HD-SDI- $1200
Plays full quality realtime 4K to 4K monitor or projector from QUAD HDMI/HD-SDI RED Rocket breakout box output.
Delivery schedule in now 1st week of July.