RED Weapon Unboxing

[HelplmChoking]

Something people aren't really taking into account, these cameras are an asset to LMG. Linus and co didn't just throw $100k out a window, it was spent on equipment that will have substantial resale value for quite some time, as well as providing the company with some serious tools to do their jobs better.

If anyone has worked in a company that refuses to upgrade equipment their staff asks for, they know how frustrating it is. I used to deal with constant crashes and poor performance because my old boss refused to upgrade a PC editing images over 12,000px wide and rendering massive scenes from a 750Ti and FX 6300.

Linus may be slightly mad, but at least he provides his staff with quality equipment so they'll never be held back, I'm sure they appreciate it immensely.

[iPolymer]

Haha, this is great Screw the clickbait title, excellent video. Linus is soo mad, but it seems to be well into it with the petabyte protect, and you guys have been using it for a while. I wish Brandon could have made a  video of why you need it. 

[SeaKayJay]

is it really worth the money for the RED camera? I don't even have an 8k monitor yet. With that amount of money, I can buy a new house in my country.

 

after watching this video, it's making me feel bad for not supporting Linus enough.

[Razor512]

51 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

I remember RED also has gpus too.

Yep they do

 

 

That is an extremely lazy design where they did as little of the work as possible. Furthermore, they are using off the shelf non-isolated DC to DC switching regulators for the different rails. Hopefully they don't charge more than $50 for those red rocket cards.

[BachChain]

6 minutes ago, Razor512 said:

Hopefully they don't charge more than $50 for those red rocket cards.

I think you forgot a few zeros

[NumLock21]

10 minutes ago, Razor512 said:

That is an extremely lazy design where they did as little of the work as possible. Furthermore, they are using off the shelf non-isolated DC to DC switching regulators for the different rails. Hopefully they don't charge more than $50 for those red rocket cards.

It's $50 dollars, where it has a decimal after it follow by 2 digits and 2 more digits in front of the 5.

Spoiler

$6,750.00 for Rocket-X

$4,750.00 for Rocket

http://www.red.com/store/products/red-rocket

http://www.red.com/store/products/red-rocket-x

 

 

Only affordable item from Red is this

[XHAD]

Wait is that one camera or two? But to go on I went onto their website and the highest I could spec it out is 154K considering he paid an initial price of 134K that is almost like 10K off of having absolutely everything(check months later edit for the additional 10K). But to off on a tangent about the investment about it, I would guess the pricing of his business is around 5 million us dollars once you factor in salaries, software, storage, cameras, lighting, PCS,  building rental/costs. Heck I would say it could even go up to 10 million once you factor in that he has to pay for all of that stuff for B-roll and various projects and with the commercials he is running.

[The Ran]

52 minutes ago, Rangaman42 said:

Something people aren't really taking into account, these cameras are an asset to LMG. Linus and co didn't just throw $100k out a window, it was spent on equipment that will have substantial resale value for quite some time, as well as providing the company with some serious tools to do their jobs better.

If anyone has worked in a company that refuses to upgrade equipment their staff asks for, they know how frustrating it is. I used to deal with constant crashes and poor performance because my old boss refused to upgrade a PC editing images over 12,000px wide and rendering massive scenes from a 750Ti and FX 6300.

Linus may be slightly mad, but at least he provides his staff with quality equipment so they'll never be held back, I'm sure they appreciate it immensely.

The Red One has lost $14k in 10 years, that's 80% of the launch price. That's a 4k camera, a resolution that is only just now becoming widely accessible (i.e. displays are reasonably cheap) and yet hardly anyone actually watches 4k stuff on Youtube. So, they've spent an absolutely stupid amount of money on two cameras that are completely overkill at present and by the time a significant amount of people will actually be able to view 8k content (even though probably won't waste the bandwidth on it) they'll have dropped significantly in price. Hardly a good investment.

[NumLock21]

If RED it would make headphones it would cost something like this

Red headphones body (that plastic spine that goes over your head) $10,000

The speakers themselves $5,000 a piece and they don't come with ear pads.

Ear pads at $2,000 each

Audio cable to connect to headphone and audio equpiment $500

The damn cable don't even have a 3.5mm jack! That thing cost a additional $250!

Oh you say wireless? Wifi module $7000

 

[HelplmChoking]

Just now, The Ran said:

The Red One has lost $14k in 10 years, that's 80% of the launch price. That's a 4k camera, a resolution that is only just now becoming widely accessible (i.e. displays are reasonably cheap) and yet hardly anyone actually watches 4k stuff on Youtube. So, they've spent an absolutely stupid amount of money on two cameras that are completely overkill at present and by the time a significant amount of people will actually be able to view 8k content (even though probably won't waste the bandwidth on it) they'll have dropped significantly in price. Hardly an investment.

 

The 8k footage isn't so people can watch 8k video, it's so 4k video is much, much easier to edit. You can reframe, punch in, stabilise and all sorts when you shoot at higher resolutions than the finished product.

[The Ran]

Just now, Rangaman42 said:

The 8k footage isn't so people can watch 8k video, it's so 4k video is much, much easier to edit. You can reframe, punch in, stabilise and all sorts when you shoot at higher resolutions than the finished product.

I get that. Hardly anyone watches 4k on Youtube as is, especially not on something like a tech channel. They could just as easily film in 4k and crop/pan to 1080 if needed (still upload as 4k for the greater bandwidth) and exactly the same amount of people would watch their videos. Absolutely nothing would change, 4k adds nothing of value and 8k definitely doesn't.

 

If it would only cost them a couple grand more for an 8k camera over a 4k one then by all means it would be an easy thing to justify, but lets not forget that we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars here. Just imagine all of the other things they could've gotten for that sort of money and the value they would have actually added to the channel.

[HelplmChoking]

1 minute ago, The Ran said:

I get that. Hardly anyone watches 4k on Youtube as is, especially not on something like a tech channel. They could just as easily film in 4k and crop/pan to 1080 if needed (still upload as 4k for the greater bandwidth) and exactly the same amount of people would watch their videos. Absolutely nothing would change, 4k adds nothing of value and 8k definitely doesn't.

 

If it would only cost them a couple grand more for an 8k camera over a 4k one then by all means it would be an easy thing to justify, but lets not forget that we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars here. Just imagine all of the other things they could've gotten for that sort of money and the value they would have actually added to the channel.

 

I'm sure LMG staff look over it, calculated the returns they expect and made an educated decision.

As I'm not familiar with the details of LMG's finances, I'm not exactly qualified to comment on the sensibility of the purchase. I think that if they can afford it, this is equipment that will have a tangible benefit both to the quality of the finished product as well as their workflow, and I'm sure that benefit has worked out to be worth the cost.

A company doesn't grow to the size of LMG by making dumb choices, so I trust that Linus and the team have made the right choice here.

[Drak3]

2 minutes ago, Rangaman42 said:

The 8k footage isn't so people can watch 8k video, it's so 4k video is much, much easier to edit. You can reframe, punch in, stabilise and all sorts when you shoot at higher resolutions than the finished product.

They got the 8K camera mainly for B-roll closeups. And quite frankly, no matter what spin you put on it, it's a waste of money.

It's the cinematic equivalent of buying the 6950X and 4 Titan Xps, cascade cooling and overclocking all of it, BIOS hacking the Xps for quad SLI, to play vanilla Minecraft.

 

Realistically, what they're doing can be achieved as easily with a 4K camera that has decent macro functionality, so the only reason to have the 8K waste of money is to fix bad camera work. Unless they're fired their existing staff to hire the cheapest people they can find, I doubt their fixing much, if any, of that. And when it comes right down to it, switching B-roll to a track system would be much more feasible than the 8K camera.

[redf5]

1 hour ago, Rangaman42 said:

Higher res is easier to edit with, it captures insane detail and RED colour science is basically as good as it gets.

I see, but isn't it a bit overkill to invest so much for 'just' Youtube videos? It's not like the majority of users have 4K monitors, and I'd wager it will be a few years before that becomes reality, nevermind 8K. So why not buy a less expensive 4K camera?

[HelplmChoking]

Just now, Drak3 said:

They got the 8K camera mainly for B-roll closeups. And quite frankly, no matter what spin you put on it, it's a waste of money.

It's the cinematic equivalent of buying the 6950X and 4 Titan Xps, cascade cooling and overclocking all of it, BIOS hacking the Xps for quad SLI, to play vanilla Minecraft.

 

Realistically, what they're doing can be achieved as easily with a 4K camera that has decent macro functionality, so the only reason to have the 8K waste of money is to fix bad camera work. Unless they're fired their existing staff to hire the cheapest people they can find, I doubt their fixing much, if any, of that. And when it comes right down to it, switching B-roll to a track system would be much more feasible than the 8K camera.

 

A waste of money? That depends entirely on how much money they have. Spending is relative, and if I had a net profit of $100k a month, I wouldn't mind dropping that much on some new equipemt.

[HelplmChoking]

Just now, redf5 said:

I see, but isn't it a bit overkill to invest so much for 'just' Youtube videos? It's not like the majority of users have 4K monitors, and I'd wager it will be a few years before that becomes reality, nevermind 8K. So why not buy a less expensive 4K camera?

 

Sure it is, but if they can afford it, why not go all out? LMG is angling to become a wider media company, with enterprises like the Floatplane Club. That could include filming for outside clients as well.

[The Ran]

Just now, Rangaman42 said:

I'm sure LMG staff look over it, calculated the returns they expect and made an educated decision.

As I'm not familiar with the details of LMG's finances, I'm not exactly qualified to comment on the sensibility of the purchase. I think that if they can afford it, this is equipment that will have a tangible benefit both to the quality of the finished product as well as their workflow, and I'm sure that benefit has worked out to be worth the cost.

A company doesn't grow to the size of LMG by making dumb choices, so I trust that Linus and the team have made the right choice here.

In regards to content that goes on their Youtube channels the only return they're going to see on this "investment" is revenue from the video on the camera. I'm gonna go ahead and say that alone definitely isn't worth it (and for that they could just return the camera after making the video). So, in order to actually make that money back it's going to have to come from adverts, whilst that could certainly be possible it would be just as likely if they were shooting in 4k (after all, that's what they had been doing before now). No one's going to watch an 8k advert, I doubt another company would pay them extra for it to be in 8k, and I can't imagine a company turning them down because they couldn't do 8k (because it's not like they'd have many alternatives to turn to).

[Drak3]

Just now, Rangaman42 said:

A waste of money? That depends entirely on how much money they have. Spending is relative, and if I had a net profit of $100k a month, I wouldn't mind dropping that much on some new equipemt.

If you had any business sense, you would if said equipment yielded little benefit to the end product, and mostly for poor effort.

You seem to forget, LMG is a business, if they look at the bank statement, and go "we have so much money, blow half of what we made this month on a single item we won't realistically utilize", they're not going to be in business for long.

The 8K waste of money made for a half way decent episode of Holy Shit, but beyond that, it's not bringing them in enough money to justify it. It was either an epeen moment, or a serious miscalculation.

[AkiraDaarkst]

6 hours ago, alex73630 said:

Another thing, image resolution (Like "4K" is 3840x2160) and image definition are two separated thing, if you play a 8K video (CGI video renders, like Big Bug Bunny, are a good source for those examples) on a 4K (or even Full HD) screen and an identical video but in 4K on the same screen, you would actually see a more "cleaner" image with the 8K video, because it have more informations to display, even if your screen can't show it completely (that's exactly how Nvidia DSR and supersampling works).

 

So I don't think that switching to RED and 8K shooting is a bad idea for professional creators like at LMG, the only issue is space and they solved it. I honestly hoped that Brandon would showed up in the video to speak about this camera and why shooting in 8K is useful for them, maybe in a next video (of honest answers maybe ?)

Rendering CGI in 8K resolution is different from filming live scenes in 8K.

 

What kind of professional creators are they?  I don't see them filming Hollywood blockbusters.

 

3 hours ago, redf5 said:

Loved the video, I have a question, though. Is there any real need for such an expensive piece of equipment, or is just for shits and giggles? 

Depends on what they're needs are but I don't think whatever they do actually requires 8K.

 

6 hours ago, The Ran said:

Image stabilised lenses or even in body stabilisation would be significantly cheaper. Also considering most people watch in 1080 or lower it wouldn't be a big deal to stabilise 4k footage to a lower res, even for those that do watch at 4k they probably won't care if a couple shots are at a lower res.

They could've gotten a very nice steadicam for about 1/10th what they spent on the cameras.

 

5 hours ago, alex73630 said:

I agreed about YouTube videos (even if I'm the kind of watching everything in the higher quality on YouTube), but (as I said in my edited answer) because they do some professional shootings for others companies and some video that actually would benefits of this upgrade, I think this is just an long-term investment that will pay one day. But hey, if Linus says ok, I think everything is fine (no jokes intended) and they planned everything for good reasons. (And Linus just decided to make a funny video about complaining of that huge cost)

When you film for corporate clients (e.g. let's say some corporation wants a commercial produced for them) you charge them not just for the filming and editing and of course the camera crew, but also for storage space (because if you have dozens of corporate clients you'll end up with using a lot of storage space to archive all the rushes and masters filmed and edited for them).  8K would be very expensive for corporate clients, unless LMG is undercutting the competition and charging clients 1/10th of what would be a standard price rate.

 

[Ezio Auditore]

Holy SHiT!!!

[RadiatingLight]

10 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Linus 2017

 

And oh the irony that probably 90% of people are watching LMG content on 4" 1080 screens.

750p screens, because Iphones.

[scottyseng]

9 hours ago, AkiraDaarkst said:

This may be the only LMG video I have ever enjoyed watching, and only because I'm laughing so hard at the imbecile(s) at Linus Media Group who came up with the moronic idea of investing in the RED 8K cameras.  For $120,000, I'd get a nice Canon or Sony cinema camera (i.e. the new Canon C700 or Sony PMW F55, or even just a 4-6K RED camera and have money left over to spend on additional accessories like a nice drone to carry a heavy payload of a camera, a good mechanical steadicam, perhaps the new DJI Ronin Mark II plus a few other items.  And I will likely even have money left over to travel to different locations to actually film in the real world and not waste $120,000 to film tech videos for YouTube.

Yeah, I was kind of scratching my head why they didn't get a C700 or one of Sony's cameras....I get the whole resolution thing...but I think they need to work out their color issues first (I'm sure people have noticed the orange skin tones from time to time). I actually wonder how long it'll take to recoup the losses on the cameras though. I guess it's the early adopter tax for 8KHD.

 

That being said, I wish I could be able to look at / hold a cinema camera (Just a noob at photography). haha.

[JuNex03]

4 minutes ago, scottyseng said:

Yeah, I was kind of scratching my head why they didn't get a C700 or one of Sony's cameras....I get the whole resolution thing...but I think they need to work out their color issues first (I'm sure people have noticed the orange skin tones from time to time). I actually wonder how long it'll take to recoup the losses on the cameras though. I guess it's the early adopter tax for 8KHD.

 

That being said, I wish I could be able to look at / hold a cinema camera (Just a noob at photography). haha.

The orange skin tones are trademarked by LTT as per their orange and black color scheme. lol

[AkiraDaarkst]

Just now, scottyseng said:

Yeah, I was kind of scratching my head why they didn't get a C700 or one of Sony's cameras....I get the whole resolution thing...but I think they need to work out their color issues first (I'm sure people have noticed the orange skin tones from time to time). I actually wonder how long it'll take to recoup the losses on the cameras though. I guess it's the early adopter tax for 8KHD.

 

That being said, I wish I could be able to look at / hold a cinema camera (Just a noob at photography). haha.

I don't think the C700 was in actual production when they bought the RED 8K.  But RED already had a 6K sensor out and if they wanted higher than 4K res, they could've gone for that.  And Sony is rumored to be working on a 8K camera to replace the F65.  Canon already showed off a prototype of an 8K camera.

 

Sometime ago I was discussing the 8K camera with the company that sells/rents us the camera gear and accessories we use.  The guy there said he hasn't seen anyone interesting in using 8K from anyone besides me and I only asked if they would be stocking at least one camera for the purpose of renting so I could try it out.  People who rent and buy gear from them use it for a wide range of uses and their company is the main supplier of equipment for all the filmmakers in the country.  They even had people coming in to ask about simple 4K/6K cameras to produce videos and when he explained to them about the workflow requirements they backed off and went for a lower resolution production.

 

 

@Everyone Else

http://www.red.com/sample-r3d-files

http://www.red.com/tools/recording-time

 

RED offers some samples of their cameras' capabilities using various compression levels of their REDRAW codec.  With their 8K cameras, even a couple of seconds of video takes up a few gigabytes of storage space.  If you're filming a 30 second commercial for you'll probably film at least 10-30 minutes worth of footage (and this assumes some sort of REDCODE compression).  This includes multiple takes of the same scene and various necessary B-roll.  That's going to be about say 1TB of storage spaced used up per commercial if not more.  Even if Linus had a 1 petabyte storage server, including filming for their own production and considering they would have to make backups, they'd fill up that 1 petabyte storage server fairly quickly.

 

 

[H0R53]

Linus...Why did you do this? Less than 10% of your community watch in even 4K, and your existing cameras work...if it's not broke don't replace it. This was entertaining but also the most cringy thing I've seen in a while...I got so mad at their pricing. That camera is not worth that much, the whole setup is probably worth 20K in Cannon or Sony gear..there's no need to spend that much money on overpriced pieces of plastic made by asians in a sweatshop.

 

Stupid move, Linus. Extremely poor choice.

 

Play stupid games, get stupid prizes.