Mixed down at the top of the green, it will be virtually indifferentiable from it's 1000's of times as expensive counterpart. Of course part of that is that a lot of the orchestral compositions you've been hearing in studio films have been synthetic for years. In a sense, digital cameras like the Red are a form of synthetic chemical film, vastly cheaper, and at first, not as good.
Today I got my first ever strike from youtube. I uploaded a video from the latest version of my pipeline and it got summarily nuked. I couldn't imagine what was wrong. It turned out that the violation was that it was "too realistic, and could be used to convince viewers that they were watching something that never actually happened" I did some research and it's apparently part of a new initiative youtube is launching out of fear of people engaging in political and news manipulation with synthetic visuals.
With all of these things, over the years, I've talked about trajectory, vision, time. In each case, synthetic alternatives are clumsy and a poor substitute for the real thing. Early days, they mostly fall into the hands of lazy opportunistic people who think they found a magic bullet so they don't have to work or think anymore. This is the story of tech. Then, over time, each breakthrough gets into the hands of more and more people, and amongst them, are some that can see that with real work, and the right attitude, these cheap synthetics can be improved, refined, extrapolated into something genuinely beneficial.
Most people don't have a ton of patience. They look at something the first day, and proudly declare that it's all garbage, and they're right. But the thing they didn't think about at all was where they were ultimately wrong. The trajectory. The multiple factors slowly converging over time to an inevitable moment where that overconfident snap judgement turned into a full blown error.
I don't know how many remember the first digital hollywood films. Mostly shot on the Sony F950, "Collateral" with Tom Cruise, Soderberg's "Contagion". They didn't look too good, and a legion of smirking critics used to laugh off digital cinema as the refuge of the incompetent. 20 years later, All studio films are shot digital. The quality is in many ways better than chemical film, and can perhaps ape it's way through the remaining gap. With the visual AI tech we're collectively moving towards, a blackmagic cine camera kit can become indifferentiable from a 1 million dollar IMAX rig that costs the price of that new digital camera per minute of filming.
With all these fields, all these synthetics in them, the important part to keep your eye on, is the trajectory. I started working with all these technologies, and even building a number of my own 5 years ago (and also 25 years ago), because I knew that they would get better, but that no matter how good they got, you would still need education and experience to use them well. Now, this year, the trajectories are converging, and at the moment that they become viable, I'm not cracking open the book for the first time, trying to get a handle on a massive amount of new information all at once. I'm ready.
From tiny acorns mighty oaks grow.
