I did a little searching and found that Panavision rents its Genesis line of digital cameras for $4,000 per day. Granted "no one pays book rate," and that price includes accessories, and the two cameras may not be equivalent. Nevertheless, why hasn't Panavision been disrupted a long time ago? Are their cameras really that good?
I'm pretty sure the whole point of RED is to disrupt companies like Panavision. I suspect people still use their cameras because that's what they were trained on, and there is significant brand loyalty in the business.
The Genesis is a digital camera that pretends to be a film camera, just like Avid is a NLE that pretends to be a film cutter.
I actually have a lot of experience with Panavision and I can tell you that price isn't even close to what someone will pay there. Genesis are almost 7 years old and that certainly isn;t their breadwinner anymore (imagine a camera THAT good 7 years ago). That being said, Panavision is still very expensive.
People don't pay just for the technology at Panavision though, they pay for service and lenses. True you can buy a 10k camera, but as soon as it breaks, production stops and you are losing money trying to find a new camera. Your PV camera goes down and I can guarantee they have a new camera on set or a technician fixing it very soon. You probably even have a backup on set for free. Generally though, PV cameras just work, and I didn't see a digital cinema camera that was as easy to use and similar to a film camera as the Genesis until Arri's Alexa came out last year.
PVs lenses are also spectacular and you generally can't rent them without renting a PV camera. Most cinematographers that wan't the PV look will use any camera, just as long as they are using the PV lenses.
In some sense the Genesis and its ilk were already disrupted by the Red One, although I question how price-sensitive this market is. Does Peter Jackson care about the difference between $4K per day and $400 per day?
I think Peter Jackson care about the creative possibilities of his tools, as a creative worker he is.
In fact, Peter Jackson IS one of the main supporters of RED, making the first videos and shorts with it.
Peter Jackson will also care about having to move to strange places to rent a camera and return it, and not being able to broke it in the field if he wants.
I bet Peter Jackson cared about $3600/day when he filmed Bad Taste.
Or even for LOTR, that would have cost $1.5m over the trilogy, which is about 0.5% of their budget (or possibly more since they would have needed more than one camera) - so not that significant, but money that could be better spent elsewhere.
I think there are a number of tiers in the market.
Peter Jackson probably doesn't care about the difference in price, but there are a number of student and indie directors/producers who certainly feel the difference between $4k/day and $400/day.
Well, Peter Jackson has something like 36 epics (18 3D setups) on The Hobbit so I think he'd care a little about that if they were renting (they aren't though, as far as I know).
And $4000 a day can add up pretty quick. 50 days is approximately the average number of days for filming. That's $200,000 per camera. Since you frequently want to do shoot from a few angles, you're talking a half million or more just for cameras.
Now, for a normal Hollywood blockbuster, at $50M, that's significant but not too bad. For an independent film, which will likely have a budget under $10M, and sometimes even under $1M, that's a pretty substantial portion of your costs.
So cameras that cost $10K to buy outright will make a big difference in this space. All of a sudden, things that were prohibitively expensive to independent filmmakers are within reach. Independent films allow people to have more artistic creativity given that there's less at stake; they can also be the "long tail" of filmmaking, covering more niche interests than a big blockbuster is going to have to. So this could be a fairly significant disruptive innovation, if these turn out to be worth it.
Of course, it's not quite as good a deal as it might seem at first, since I believe the price quoted is just for the very core of the camera, containing the sensor, and not lenses, which are where some of the real cost is. But still, these will allow people to do 4K filming who never have been able to do so before.
Canon 5d doesn't autofocus during a video shoot, so you need to hire someone to pull focus. Not very practical for indie films. Ironically, it works better for big productions where they have a guy to do that already.
It's also part of crazy Hollywood acounting. The more you can charge against the film the better, that's why flops like Titanic and Empire strikes back still haven't made a profit
You don't want the film company to actually own anything because then the people owed money might have something to go after
I might not have understood properly, but the idea is for these companies to basically always be "losing" money on paper. Many popular movies are "flops" on paper because of accounting reasons. If these companies have 100 RED cameras lying around, creditors will have something to come after.
The studio could be standing between the filmmakers and the camera providers, pointing the filmmaker to the public rate sheets while actually paying much less.
