RED has been taking pre-orders of the new V-RAPTOR XL. If you’re interested in finding out more about this latest camera system, the most recent RED Tech LIVE episode is an hour-long tech talk that sheds more light on its features. In the episode, RED CEO Jarred Land, as well as Cleigh Reed, Jonathan Petts, and James Lucarelli gave an overview about V-RAPTOR XL. Information on the camera and its specs has been out for some time, so nothing really new was added during the talk, but some interesting information was shared during the long Q&A session at the end.
Let’s take a look into some of the more interesting questions that were answered:
According to RED, the AF feature is getting special attention from the R&D teams. While we know the camera has contrast and phase detection autofocus, Land, had some interesting things to say about where he sees this going. He clearly stated that he would like to expand the camera’s autofocus capabilities into areas like intelligent object detection and tracking, comparing it to Sony and Canon. But it’s not there yet.
Land says: “There’s something about the intelligence that the engineering team has put into the camera, and it’s not just about the accuracy of AF, and tracking, but there’s the capability in the camera actually to do…everybody uses AI to understand what’s tracking…and you know Canon and Sony do a little bit of this, but for me, it’s that stuff is incredible… Apart from just the improvements in the phase detection and contrast detection that are new, that’s coming, there’s a lot of deeper intelligence that we have with the camera that is a little bit more practical than just making sure it’s focused and in focus. You can actually use it as a trigger, or you can use it for…There’s a lot of things that I shouldn’t really talk about, but that I’m the most excited about because it saves just adding a bunch of stuff to your camera to get it to work”.
Land also went into some detail in the latter portion of Q&A section regarding an EF-Mount that is already in development. On the topic of an RF-Mount however, the team had to explain that due to the ND system taking up too much room, that would not be on the Cards.
The S35 version of the V-Raptor XL 8k VV was again confirmed and said to be in development and testing right now. The team positioned that camera in the lineup as being a smaller version of the XL, that could be particularly useful for product shoots, due to its higher DOF. “It’s probably will be ready in a couple of months. It’s already out shooing.” Land says, “ It’s got the same specs as the normal Raptor and the XL Raptor so same frame rates and everything. But the big difference between S35 is the sensor size which is a bit smaller than our traditional S35 sensors, specifically it’s just to make sure that it fits into those lenses. The biggest request for S35 now comes from the wildlife and sports shooters. The S35 will be full 8K, 120 frames per second”.
Land also elaborated on developing monochrome/ IR versions of the Raptor XL: “We were in the middle of making a couple of monochromes, but we got a special request from a special customer for IR (Infra-Red) XL. So we’re making those first…we’re making a few of them. You can do some really cool stuff with those cameras. So we’ll make a few of those and hopefully get to monochrome”. The V-Raptor IR will most probably be used to shoot day-to-night scenes.