Jim Jannard posted another intriguing announcement at reduser.net the other day. It announced an upcoming announcement  (FreshDV had the best headline) where RED will “announce the new Scarlet and Epic programs on Thursday Nov. 13th.” He even put up a teaser image as well. That’s a lot of talk of announcing stuff but the guess is that in the wake of the recent product releases from Nikon and Canon with their DSLR still cameras both shooting HD video, the RED Scarlet will be retooled into something really special.

It feels as if we are now in the midst of a major shift in digital image capture devices. Cameras like the RED One and Panasonic Genesis sit at the high end; the stalwart Panasonic Varicam has a new version that now shoots to only P2 and uses AVC-Intra as it’s main codec; and the plethora of low end camcorders shooting to internal hard drives are rounding out the bottom. But IMHO nothing seems quite as exciting for all-around usage and independent filmmaking as the promise of the DSLR shooting HD video. I hesitate to even call it video since, kind of like the RED’s proprietary raw format, it feels like we are getting an entirely new class of image. Stu Maschwitz summed this up best in a recent post at his blog ProLost with this statement about the images coming from these DSLRs:

So why are we so excited by it?
Because the video from these DSLRs stimulates us emotionally. It’s contrasty, with sexy depth of field. It looks like cinema, if you don’t look to close. Guess who doesn’t look too close. Everyone.

Take the Canon and Nikon camera as well as the rethink of the still camera that Panasonic is doing and there are exciting things to come in this space. But that excitement is all at the image acquisition stage of the filmmaking process. As a post-professional I’m more interested in how we can take all of these exciting new developments in camera technology and craft them into the final product.

But I have to wonder; what is the post-production equivalent of these new camera technologies? The sad reality is that there really isn’t anything nearly as revolutionary happening in the post-production space as what we are seeing evolve in camera technology. You may argue that Final Cut Studio has revolutionized post and I would agree with that statement but Final Cut Pro has now been around for many, many years and the current version of the Studio hasn’t had a major upgrade in nearly 2 years.

Maybe it’s the fact that post is the unsexy, utilitarian part of the filmmaking process. Maybe post prodcution has reached a plateu that from this point forward will only see small evolutionary steps which are a direct result of computers gettings smaller and faster. Maybe the dedicated post production professional is becoming a dinosaur since every DP and PA with a laptop and a software suite is now an editor, visual effects artist, audio mixer and colorist. Maybe it’s time for software engineers to really rethink the timeline-based, layer-friendly paradigm that so much software is based around. You know what … that rethink has already been done and the software exists. It’s called iMovie 08.