It’s no secret among those we work with that we love RED. And yet, with all of our camera purchases here at Mystery Box, we’ve never bought our own REDROCKET or REDROCKET-X. On occasion we’ve borrowed a REDROCKET for projects here or there and we regularly discuss whether we should get one or not. But we haven’t. Even after the upgraded REDROCKET-X was released in 2013, we were still on the fence as to whether it would actually accelerate our workflows.
But instead of arguing about what-ifs and maybes, we decided to use a couple of days near the end of last year to really put it to the test. We borrowed a friend’s REDROCKET-X and two full days of testing later, we had our results.
The TL;DR version of our results is that the the value of a REDROCKET-X depends significantly on your workflow. For some it’s definitely worth it, while for others (including us) it’s far less so.
Specifically, you should consider a REDROCKET-X when your workflow demands 1. Real-time or faster R3D decoding and 2. The bottleneck / choking point is the actual decoding process, and not another point in the workflow.
Read More