Wow! That was my reaction upon reading the news on Thursday morning that Nikon will be acquiring RED. While these things take time to be finalized, according to the Nikon statement, “RED will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nikon.” This news was unexpected by the industry and is bound to fuel chatter at next month’s NAB, even though RED hasn’t participated with a large booth for several years.
RED burst onto the scene in 2005 with the goal of creating a digital cinema camera with 4K recording capability. Up until that time, digital cameras used for motion pictures had included the “Panavised” Sony F900 HDCAM (Star Wars, Ep. II: Attack of the Clones) and Grass Valley Viper (Collateral). Both of these used a three-CCD sensor design that generated an HD image recording to an internal or external recorder. To compare, the original RED One and subsequent RED models use a single-chip, Bayer-pattern sensor. It can be argued that the combination of three 1920 x 1080 CCDs (R, G, and B) is actually of higher resolution than one 4K Bayer sensor, where the total number of monochrome pixels are filtered to be 2/4th green and 1/4th each for red and blue. RED’s models are now up to 8K, so that point is largely moot.
A feisty start-up
At their first NAB, RED could be found with a large alpine mountaineering tent as their booth and a long line of people waiting to see test images. Subsequent NAB booths were all interesting in their own way. At the beginning, RED’s founder, Jim Jannard (also founder of Oakley), was taking deposits for camera orders without a working camera yet. Many thought it was a scam, but as we know, RED delivered the goods. In those early years, the ever-present Ted Schilowitz was the face of RED, promoting the camera at many worldwide events.
From this early start, RED cameras became popular on major motion pictures, thanks in part to directors like Steven Soderbegh (Che), Peter Jackson (The Hobbit), and David Fincher (Gone Girl). According to Ars Technica, “at the peak of its movie market share in 2016, over 25 percent of the top 100 grossing domestic films were shot on RED cameras.” However, with Sony upping its cinema game and ARRI becoming a major digital camera provider with the Alexa, RED’s dominance has waned among the top tier of productions.
REDCODE – the secret sauce
The RED cameras internally record camera raw digital files at film speeds, using REDCODE – a Wavelet-based compressed codec. This software was the brainchild of developer Graeme Nattress and garnered RED a patent, which they have vigorously defended ever since. While my layman’s opinion is that the patent is dubious, I applaud RED for defending it as their intellectual property. Lawsuits between RED and other companies, related to the patent as well as other issues, have included LG, ARRI, Sony, Apple, Nikon, and more. This intellectual property will now belong to Nikon.
To date there really has been no direct competitor doing this exact same thing without legal challenge. The general workaround is to use an external device that handles the camera raw recording, like an Atomos Ninja. In fact, Nikon cameras have utilized this to record Nikon motion imagery into the Apple ProRes RAW codec on a Ninja recorder. Another method is what Blackmagic Design does in their cameras, which is to partially decode the data onboard the camera before recording it to a file. While some slam this method as not being truly raw, from my experience in working with these files inside of DaVinci Resolve and other applications, Blackmagic’s raw files generally give me the same flexibility as do RED files.
Working with RED media
I have edited numerous films and other projects that were shot with RED cameras. I have also finished and color corrected many of these, along with others where I didn’t do the offline edit. While the codec is flexible, in my opinion the file structure is not. The clip organization was built around technical limitation of two decades ago.
Clip recordings that exceed 4GB are split into multiple spanned files. These appear as if they are one contiguous file during playback, but aren’t. These “partial” files are grouped into a folder for each clip. File management and relinking is problematic as a result, especially when proxy files come into play. I have had countless media management issues between the offline and the online edit with RED files, when proxies were used. My hope is that if anything comes out of this acquisition, it’s a modern file structure like that used by Blackmagic Design and ARRI for their cameras.
Going forward
At this point, everything that I or anyone else says about future developments is going to be 100% speculation and personal opinion without any inside knowledge. Until the ink is dry on the agreement, things could change. However, assuming they don’t, then RED becomes a subsidiary division of the larger Nikon group of companies. While most of us think of Nikon as a camera and lens manufacturer, the company is into a wide range of product categories. We’ll have to wait and see whether or not cross-pollination occurs between the two camera divisions and whether their goals align.
RED currently offers seven camera models with multiple product options for each. These range from starting prices of $5,995 for a Komodo 6K up to $44,995 for the V-Raptor XL [X]. Add accessories and lenses on top of this. One potential and logical change could be a switch to – or the addition of – Nikon’s lens mount system as either the RED standard or an option when purchasing the camera. (RED used to offer Nikon mounts as accessories for the DSMC/DSMC2 camera brains, which have since been discontinued.)
One could also imagine that Nikon might do away with the lower priced REDs, like the Komodo line, and preserve RED cameras as only a premium brand. Another variation of this theory would be to repackage the Komodo line into a Nikon-branded product. I doubt that the RED brand name goes away, since it’s got great name recognition and that might actually be worth more than the company itself. But by making such a move, it differentiates Nikon from RED cameras in terms of market sector. This would also elevate the brand recognition of Nikon-branded cameras for indie filmmakers, YouTube content creators, etc. That being said, the latest Nikon flagship cameras have been getting high marks. The Nikon Z9 has even found a place as the astronaut camera onboard the International Space Station.
If, as many have opined, this acquisition is all about the codec, then it would pretty much guarantee that you’ll see REDCODE capture integrated into at least some of Nikon’s video DSLRs. Maybe you’ll even see Nikon license use of the codec to other manufacturers. Most of the tech press have been positioning this as a battle between Nikon and ARRI, Sony, and/or Canon. But the up-and-comer is Blackmagic Design. I could easily see the battle shaping up as Nikon with RED duking it out for market share against Blackmagic’s URSA and Cinema Camera product lines.
As with any acquisition, the future success is often determined by the combination of the two corporate cultures. Or as one friend opined – Will the the kaizen of Japanese management come into conflict with RED’s edgy style? Time will tell. Nevertheless, I think the combination could be a good thing and result in speeding up Nikon’s product development, while also slowing RED’s down ever-so-slightly. That could be a good thing for content creators.
©2024 Oliver Peters
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