- Today is a great day. It's been over four years since we started shooting on Red
and they finally have a new flagship, the Red V- Raptor.
And today we get to unbox it because we did actually buy one.
It cost us a good $29,000 USD.
Whether we keep it or not, I'm not a hundred percent sure,
but if you guys want a full review mention in the comments below, because Linus wants to see how interested
you guys are in this camera. So if you want to see it, 'cause I want to make that video, please comment down below.
We have it. It's here in the Storm trooper limited edition white.
(gentle music) Register your V-Raptor.
Download V-Raptor operational guide and Red control app.
So if you guys have been paying attention to anything that Red has done,
they released the Red Komodo not that long ago
and it takes kind of after, wow,
this is thick. Like it feels very dense.
As you can see, Red's gone with a sort of cube like construction on these cameras
and they're actually, they're still somewhat modular, but they've built a lot more things in than they used to.
To keep the consistency of the cameras, they've actually also removed the fan temperature control.
So you, this runs at one fan speed and is automatic.
Apparently it's much more consistent. So we'll see how that goes. But let's take a physical tour of it.
So on the front you have a lot of 1/4-20 ports.
I am not a hundred percent sure what you do with these on the front
so close to the lens mount, but they are there.
You have a record button on the front, which is a little bit smaller than the last camera,
the Helium, which we have. 4.037. Okay.
I don't want to take the side plate off 'cause there's a little bit too much work, but the caveat to this is it'll weigh
slightly more because of the side plate, but let's take a look anyway.
5.57 pounds. Okay. So this side plate's not adding that much weight.
So this thing's actually like about a pound heavier. So they've actually managed to make the camera
lighter overall and smaller. Like you can take a look at the size difference.
Not as tall and it's about the same width.
The V-Raptor, the new flagship, is full frame.
Wow. It's a decent amount smaller.
This is a Canon RF mount and not an EF Mount.
And this mount is adaptable to PL or EF
with adapters, which we actually have. We don't have any RF lenses so we're going to be using Canon lenses today.
But updated Canon mount, I mean, it makes sense because Canon just released this RF Mount
within their newest generation of cameras. So it makes sense that if Red
was going to go with the Canon mount that they would adapt up to the RF instead of staying EF.
And so for all of you with RF lenses who have auto-focus,
this actually has autofocus built in, and apparently it's decent.
Obviously not going to beat Sony or anything like that. We have, ooh, A Red sticker.
Classic tech company move. And AC adapter, which is pretty standard.
Oh, they include travel adapters and a power cable.
Now we did buy the starter kit so it does come with a couple more things.
Unfortunately, the monitor that comes with this camera hasn't shipped yet,
but the cool thing is on the side of the camera here,
you have controls. So unlike our Helium, which besides the record button,
and that's basically it, you couldn't control the camera
unless you had a sight finder, which would be an attachment module that goes here,
and then you can control here or you could control it from the monitor. But, in order to control the camera,
you basically needed a monitor. With this camera, you don't need a monitor in order to control it.
Even though obviously you'll need a monitor to use it as a camera.
It looks pretty standard for a cinema camera monitor.
You've got eight buttons here for various controls on the camera.
We'll get into those later. Menu, a lock button, select, another record button.
There's the little record, Oh, there's a little tally light
built into the body now. That's nice. So I was wrong, this is not a tally light.
This is an on, off switch. And then on the back, we've got the V-Mount,
a Wi-Fi antenna, two SDI outs, a five pin Lemo,
audio connector, 2.5mm headphone jack, a AC Lemo plug for the power adapter,
and then this is an exterior control Lemo, I believe.
And the last port on the bottom here is a Lemo connector, which I think is for, like,
camera control or like focus control. We'll figure that out in a bit.
And on the left of the camera, we have a media door.
Wow. That's actually a lot better
than just having a bare open mag door button,
the slot here that we've just kind of abused for the last four years.
It's just dust and stuff can get there. If you're in a windy, like, sandy condition,
or if it's just a lot of dust or rain. And this camera uses completely different media,
which came with our starter kit. So we have Red branded 660 gigs CFexpress type B.
So John had just actually asked a really good question. Why did they change the media in this camera?
And my assumption is, I mean, to fit it in a body that's this size,
but have a full frame camera that can shoot 8k 120 FPS.
You need faster cards, but you also want them to be quite small.
And so they've opted for CFexpress type B,
which is a newer card than their just old M SETA mags that they had.
This one's a 960 gig, and you can see, very well loved.
Oh, also there's this standard, like, positive lock that we've come to know.
You have a lot of 1/4-20 points right here and here.
I mean, that was the same with the Helium. There was a lot here as well.
Actually it seems like there's less, but they're kind of repositioned. And then you've seen this much larger top fan,
which in theory, again, Red has said that this fan and the camera itself
is quite a bit quieter than our Helium's. On the bottom of the camera,
we have the standard 1/4-20 and 2 3/8's.
Very nice to see. There's an intake here. This one's an intake as well.
And then the exhaust all comes out of the top from this larger fan.
Oh, and I also forgot. They have type C which the cool thing about the type C connector,
and in a future firmware update, they say, you can use an adapter to have it record over Ethernet.
So you can trigger the record over Ethernet and you could record to network storage over Ethernet.
So that's going to be huge for a lot of people.
Not out yet, future firmware updates. So who knows how long it'll take.
But Red has said that that is a feature they are going to add.
And that is very compelling for those who want to use this
for more than just film work or commercial work.
Before I finish off the physical tour, you can actually see there's a clear IO difference
between our Helium and the V Raptor. There's an extra SCI port, which is really nice.
And then they've opted not to include HDMI at all. Now the Helium, this is using a basics matter,
so you could actually change the IO on this camera to something else,
but instead of being able to change the IO on this camera, Red is going to make a XL version of the camera.
So there's going to have a little bit more IO, more Lemo connectors, more SDI.
I don't think they're adding HDMI but they're adding more out.
So you do have that option. Another thing we wanted to try is we have this shark fin V-Mount battery adapter,
which allows you to use two V-Mount batteries at the same time. And when one is not quite dead,
you can actually take the other one off that is dead and then hot swap another one on.
But does this fit with the new V-Mount spacing?
Guys, it doesn't.
Red has clearly made compromises for this form factor and they've gone with a skinnier V-mount plate,
which might have some issues with your existing accessories, like ours.
I'm sure their sound core has made a new V-mount
shark fan that fixes this issue. I wonder, like, does our other battery fit on okay?
Oh no. Oh, that is a very large problem.
If you just have standard spaced V-mount batteries,
they will not work on this camera. - [David] Oh, nooooo.
- We have a lot of these. - [David] Wild.
- Oh my God. Here's another, our 158 watt hour Watson pro.
and it doesn't fit. (frustrated grunt) This is a 147 watt hour bebob micro.
This is a fairly small compact battery. It looks like Red, with the V Raptor,
has opted to only go with batteries like this.
Red says a 98 watt hour battery like this one
will last about an hour. And in my experience, that sounds like it'd be very accurate.
I think that about does it for the physical tour. So why don't we turn this thing on? But first we have to help pay for it.
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3, 2, 1.
This is definitely louder than this.
Both have the logo, 17 seconds.
(upbeat music) Okay, that's done. The Raptors done at 30 seconds.
The Raptor took about 30 seconds to boot up. This took about 33, 34 seconds to boot up, roughly.
That is an improvement, but not a large one. Anyways, let's get a monitor on this thing and take a look.
So as far as I can tell right now, the only way, because we don't have Reds monitor
that's supposed to ship with this camera, the only way to control the camera
is by using the side LCD on the camera.
And it's a little matt display. I don't know what resolution it is, but it doesn't seem or need to be very high.
It seems like the layout is pretty logical.
You've got image and LUT, you've got all the basic.
Settings, LUT's, tone mapping, outspace, color.
8k, 17 x 9 is the full sensor.
You've got anamorphic mode. And then you can do 6K super 35,
which we're going to test later. Yeah. So you have every resolution
from 8K down in almost every aspect ratio. You can also do a custom.
So if you've got your project frame rate at 24 FPS, let's look at the recording frame rates.
And it goes all the way to 120.
So this camera is capable, for the first time in Red's history, 8K 120 FPS.
And you can actually go down to 2K.
That allows us to get up to 600, 594 FPS
but essentially 600 FPS. So the last thing I want to talk about
while going through this menu is the new compression ratios. If you are used to Red, they have a compression ratio
that's still a compressed raw and that goes from up to 5 to 1 at a 8k
to 22 to 1. They've actually simplified it to HQ, MQ and LQ.
That's actually probably a lot simpler than their old system,
even though their old system wasn't complicated, it's just kind of streamlines everything.
And then the last new feature that they have in the recording, is their pre-record.
So at 8K you can do a max prerecord of 1.4 seconds.
And so when you're looking at the menus, this is very assistant friendly. So if you have a camera assistant,
if you're lucky enough to have one, you have those standard, just like the Venice,
just like, honestly, just like the Black Magic to an extent,
camera view with buttons to control all of the settings at a glance and just toggle them right from here.
Very useful, and you've seen it plenty physically now.
Why don't we go do some test shots? So 600 FPS versus 300 FPS.
Rolling. Go. (water splashes)
Here it comes. Wow. That looks pretty cool.
So how does the Helium look? It looks pretty noisy.
And then obviously the frame rate is half. So this is our 120 FPS test. Not a perfect test,
but I just wanted to see what it would look like. And 3, 2, 1 roll.
(upbeat music)
Wow. All right. I'm pretty impressed that the fact
that this camera can do 600 FPS at all,
it's not going to be the highest quality. There's still quite a bit of noise to the image,
but in a pinch, in certain scenarios, I actually see the 600 FPS being more usable on this camera
than the 300 FPS on the Helium was. So now that you guys have seen some test shots
to our older Red camera, you might be asking, where does this fit in?
Is this camera worth it for the price? Honestly, value wise, first impressions,
I want to look into this deeper in a review, but it's a pretty decent value at 29,500.
Because something like the Arri Alexa LF or the Sony Venice,
both come in quite a bit more. The Arri is $58,000 and the Sony Venice is $42,000.
So this fits in kind of next to those cameras. They all kind of do slightly different things
and they're better, they're good at certain things over the others,
but honestly, Red has a very compelling camera in this price bracket.
And so if you guys want to see a full review, reminder, leave me a comment down below.
But that's it for now for the first impressions. Thanks for watching.