Well if you have any interest at all in reading some back and forth discussion on the much hyped RED ONE digital cinema camera then grab a good scotch, pull up a chair and dig into this forum over at the Avid Community Exchange. It began with this one:

Hi All,

Well the Red One has hit the streets and I was wondering how many folks have had one in their hands.

Our DP brought one in last week and I have to tell you, for me, this is the biggest piece of vaporware I’ve ever hand in my hands in in 20 years.

After going through it with him, I was left with the distinct impression that filmography has come full circle. It is now to the point that shooting video is actually MORE expensive than 35 mm film.

First off, no OPTICAL viewfinder?!?! What DP is gonna want to look at a monitor to judge lighting and contrast? Our guys said they couldn’t use this camera without going back to a light meter, a color meter and a prayer that what you’ve captured looks the way you THINK it should have looked. The electronic image out of the camera is an “Approximation of the actual image”…huh? Couple that with the fact that you get 2 mins per card of recording time, then you have to offload and the rendering time for one two minute card was 3.5 hours!?!?! Who’s got that kind of time? you’re back to shooting 1/2 scenes at a time in most cases.

At least for us, our 35mm rigs are more flexible and cheaper to produce an end product than this much-hyped “new technology”. Has anyone else got a different point of view? I would love to hear an argument on the other side ’cause everything I saw about this camera made me go “no way”.

Now I could care less if Avid has a “Red” solution or not.

And five pages later the discussion is still going on. The original poster has since come around a bit but a post like that to start a forum thread  is bound to generate a lot of discussion. What’s great about a thread like this is that if you have been reading, researching and/or debating the RED ONE you can really see a lot if opinions, both pro and con on the camera. Most hype technology has similar threads that pop up in forums all over the Internet. You can gather mountains of information that was really unheard of years ago in the days before the ‘net. Plus you can put your two cents in as well. Yea it can be a long read and yea it takes a while to dig through it but the information and discussion can be indispensable if you’re interest in the topic. If you are, enjoy.