the advantage of ownership

So last week was supposed to be a big week for the filmmaking world. Canon released their much anticipated C300 large-sensor 2K digital film camera with some accompanying jaw-droppingly awesome short films shot on the new camera. An hour later RED announced their new Scarlett camera, promising 4K resolution at 24p for under $10K. (which is a joke, considering that a single not-included proprietary RED memory card is $1,800!) Avid also announced their new version of Media Composer which I discussed the last week.

So here's the deal - this might have been a big deal for people who are trying to make independent feature films with budgets between $150K-500K. For the rest of us this really was something of a non-event. Make no mistake, to get either the Canon C300 or the RED Scarlett up and running you'll need to drop easily $25,000. Which is my deflnition of a deal-breaker!

"But Alex," the sales reps would say, "these cameras are meant to be rented, not purchased!" And here's my problem with that whole line of thinking...