Should We Go Back To RED? - V-RAPTOR
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
2,603 words · ~13 min read
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- Today is a great day. It's been over four years since we started shooting on Red
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and they finally have a new flagship, the Red V- Raptor.
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And today we get to unbox it because we did actually buy one.
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It cost us a good $29,000 USD.
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Whether we keep it or not, I'm not a hundred percent sure,
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but if you guys want a full review mention in the comments below, because Linus wants to see how interested
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you guys are in this camera. So if you want to see it, 'cause I want to make that video, please comment down below.
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We have it. It's here in the Storm trooper limited edition white.
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(gentle music) Register your V-Raptor.
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Download V-Raptor operational guide and Red control app.
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So if you guys have been paying attention to anything that Red has done,
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they released the Red Komodo not that long ago
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and it takes kind of after, wow,
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this is thick. Like it feels very dense.
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As you can see, Red's gone with a sort of cube like construction on these cameras
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and they're actually, they're still somewhat modular, but they've built a lot more things in than they used to.
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To keep the consistency of the cameras, they've actually also removed the fan temperature control.
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So you, this runs at one fan speed and is automatic.
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Apparently it's much more consistent. So we'll see how that goes. But let's take a physical tour of it.
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So on the front you have a lot of 1/4-20 ports.
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I am not a hundred percent sure what you do with these on the front
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so close to the lens mount, but they are there.
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You have a record button on the front, which is a little bit smaller than the last camera,
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the Helium, which we have. 4.037. Okay.
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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
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slightly more because of the side plate, but let's take a look anyway.
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5.57 pounds. Okay. So this side plate's not adding that much weight.
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So this thing's actually like about a pound heavier. So they've actually managed to make the camera
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lighter overall and smaller. Like you can take a look at the size difference.
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Not as tall and it's about the same width.
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The V-Raptor, the new flagship, is full frame.
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Wow. It's a decent amount smaller.
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This is a Canon RF mount and not an EF Mount.
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And this mount is adaptable to PL or EF
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with adapters, which we actually have. We don't have any RF lenses so we're going to be using Canon lenses today.
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But updated Canon mount, I mean, it makes sense because Canon just released this RF Mount
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within their newest generation of cameras. So it makes sense that if Red
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was going to go with the Canon mount that they would adapt up to the RF instead of staying EF.
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And so for all of you with RF lenses who have auto-focus,
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this actually has autofocus built in, and apparently it's decent.
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Obviously not going to beat Sony or anything like that. We have, ooh, A Red sticker.
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Classic tech company move. And AC adapter, which is pretty standard.
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Oh, they include travel adapters and a power cable.
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Now we did buy the starter kit so it does come with a couple more things.
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Unfortunately, the monitor that comes with this camera hasn't shipped yet,
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but the cool thing is on the side of the camera here,
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you have controls. So unlike our Helium, which besides the record button,
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and that's basically it, you couldn't control the camera
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unless you had a sight finder, which would be an attachment module that goes here,
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and then you can control here or you could control it from the monitor. But, in order to control the camera,
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you basically needed a monitor. With this camera, you don't need a monitor in order to control it.
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Even though obviously you'll need a monitor to use it as a camera.
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It looks pretty standard for a cinema camera monitor.
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You've got eight buttons here for various controls on the camera.
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We'll get into those later. Menu, a lock button, select, another record button.
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There's the little record, Oh, there's a little tally light
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built into the body now. That's nice. So I was wrong, this is not a tally light.
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This is an on, off switch. And then on the back, we've got the V-Mount,
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a Wi-Fi antenna, two SDI outs, a five pin Lemo,
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audio connector, 2.5mm headphone jack, a AC Lemo plug for the power adapter,
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and then this is an exterior control Lemo, I believe.
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And the last port on the bottom here is a Lemo connector, which I think is for, like,
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camera control or like focus control. We'll figure that out in a bit.
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And on the left of the camera, we have a media door.
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Wow. That's actually a lot better
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than just having a bare open mag door button,
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the slot here that we've just kind of abused for the last four years.
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It's just dust and stuff can get there. If you're in a windy, like, sandy condition,
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or if it's just a lot of dust or rain. And this camera uses completely different media,
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which came with our starter kit. So we have Red branded 660 gigs CFexpress type B.
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So John had just actually asked a really good question. Why did they change the media in this camera?
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And my assumption is, I mean, to fit it in a body that's this size,
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but have a full frame camera that can shoot 8k 120 FPS.
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You need faster cards, but you also want them to be quite small.
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And so they've opted for CFexpress type B,
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which is a newer card than their just old M SETA mags that they had.
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This one's a 960 gig, and you can see, very well loved.
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Oh, also there's this standard, like, positive lock that we've come to know.
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You have a lot of 1/4-20 points right here and here.
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I mean, that was the same with the Helium. There was a lot here as well.
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Actually it seems like there's less, but they're kind of repositioned. And then you've seen this much larger top fan,
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which in theory, again, Red has said that this fan and the camera itself
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is quite a bit quieter than our Helium's. On the bottom of the camera,
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we have the standard 1/4-20 and 2 3/8's.
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Very nice to see. There's an intake here. This one's an intake as well.
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And then the exhaust all comes out of the top from this larger fan.
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Oh, and I also forgot. They have type C which the cool thing about the type C connector,
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and in a future firmware update, they say, you can use an adapter to have it record over Ethernet.
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So you can trigger the record over Ethernet and you could record to network storage over Ethernet.
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So that's going to be huge for a lot of people.
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Not out yet, future firmware updates. So who knows how long it'll take.
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But Red has said that that is a feature they are going to add.
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And that is very compelling for those who want to use this
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for more than just film work or commercial work.
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Before I finish off the physical tour, you can actually see there's a clear IO difference
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between our Helium and the V Raptor. There's an extra SCI port, which is really nice.
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And then they've opted not to include HDMI at all. Now the Helium, this is using a basics matter,
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so you could actually change the IO on this camera to something else,
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but instead of being able to change the IO on this camera, Red is going to make a XL version of the camera.
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So there's going to have a little bit more IO, more Lemo connectors, more SDI.
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I don't think they're adding HDMI but they're adding more out.
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So you do have that option. Another thing we wanted to try is we have this shark fin V-Mount battery adapter,
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which allows you to use two V-Mount batteries at the same time. And when one is not quite dead,
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you can actually take the other one off that is dead and then hot swap another one on.
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But does this fit with the new V-Mount spacing?
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Guys, it doesn't.
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Red has clearly made compromises for this form factor and they've gone with a skinnier V-mount plate,
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which might have some issues with your existing accessories, like ours.
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I'm sure their sound core has made a new V-mount
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shark fan that fixes this issue. I wonder, like, does our other battery fit on okay?
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Oh no. Oh, that is a very large problem.
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If you just have standard spaced V-mount batteries,
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they will not work on this camera. - [David] Oh, nooooo.
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- We have a lot of these. - [David] Wild.
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- Oh my God. Here's another, our 158 watt hour Watson pro.
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and it doesn't fit. (frustrated grunt) This is a 147 watt hour bebob micro.
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This is a fairly small compact battery. It looks like Red, with the V Raptor,
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has opted to only go with batteries like this.
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Red says a 98 watt hour battery like this one
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will last about an hour. And in my experience, that sounds like it'd be very accurate.
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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.
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This is definitely louder than this.
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Both have the logo, 17 seconds.
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(upbeat music) Okay, that's done. The Raptors done at 30 seconds.
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The Raptor took about 30 seconds to boot up. This took about 33, 34 seconds to boot up, roughly.
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That is an improvement, but not a large one. Anyways, let's get a monitor on this thing and take a look.
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So as far as I can tell right now, the only way, because we don't have Reds monitor
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that's supposed to ship with this camera, the only way to control the camera
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is by using the side LCD on the camera.
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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.
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It seems like the layout is pretty logical.
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You've got image and LUT, you've got all the basic.
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Settings, LUT's, tone mapping, outspace, color.
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8k, 17 x 9 is the full sensor.
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You've got anamorphic mode. And then you can do 6K super 35,
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which we're going to test later. Yeah. So you have every resolution
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from 8K down in almost every aspect ratio. You can also do a custom.
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So if you've got your project frame rate at 24 FPS, let's look at the recording frame rates.
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And it goes all the way to 120.
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So this camera is capable, for the first time in Red's history, 8K 120 FPS.
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And you can actually go down to 2K.
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That allows us to get up to 600, 594 FPS
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but essentially 600 FPS. So the last thing I want to talk about
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while going through this menu is the new compression ratios. If you are used to Red, they have a compression ratio
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that's still a compressed raw and that goes from up to 5 to 1 at a 8k
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to 22 to 1. They've actually simplified it to HQ, MQ and LQ.
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That's actually probably a lot simpler than their old system,
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even though their old system wasn't complicated, it's just kind of streamlines everything.
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And then the last new feature that they have in the recording, is their pre-record.
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So at 8K you can do a max prerecord of 1.4 seconds.
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And so when you're looking at the menus, this is very assistant friendly. So if you have a camera assistant,
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if you're lucky enough to have one, you have those standard, just like the Venice,
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just like, honestly, just like the Black Magic to an extent,
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camera view with buttons to control all of the settings at a glance and just toggle them right from here.
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Very useful, and you've seen it plenty physically now.
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Why don't we go do some test shots? So 600 FPS versus 300 FPS.
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Rolling. Go. (water splashes)
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Here it comes. Wow. That looks pretty cool.
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So how does the Helium look? It looks pretty noisy.
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And then obviously the frame rate is half. So this is our 120 FPS test. Not a perfect test,
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but I just wanted to see what it would look like. And 3, 2, 1 roll.
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(upbeat music)
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Wow. All right. I'm pretty impressed that the fact
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that this camera can do 600 FPS at all,
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it's not going to be the highest quality. There's still quite a bit of noise to the image,
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but in a pinch, in certain scenarios, I actually see the 600 FPS being more usable on this camera
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than the 300 FPS on the Helium was. So now that you guys have seen some test shots
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to our older Red camera, you might be asking, where does this fit in?
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Is this camera worth it for the price? Honestly, value wise, first impressions,
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I want to look into this deeper in a review, but it's a pretty decent value at 29,500.
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Because something like the Arri Alexa LF or the Sony Venice,
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both come in quite a bit more. The Arri is $58,000 and the Sony Venice is $42,000.
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So this fits in kind of next to those cameras. They all kind of do slightly different things
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and they're better, they're good at certain things over the others,
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but honestly, Red has a very compelling camera in this price bracket.
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And so if you guys want to see a full review, reminder, leave me a comment down below.
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But that's it for now for the first impressions. Thanks for watching.