The market aperature opens

Cinema-grade 35mm film cameras have always been brutally expensive, and the same goes for their digital counterparts. One reason is just that they're complex and expensive to produce. Another is that the manufacturers have always maintained a distance between castes of customers. Professional gear not only has features and abilities far beyond those of "consumer" gear, but is far more expensive as well.

This is starting to change with video gear. The RED digital camera (red.com) is the first professional video camera that makes 35mm-grade cinematography available in digital form at prices independent producers can afford. It shoots with a 4520 x 2540 resolution (2540 progressive) at 60 frames per second RAW, using a 12-megapixel Mysterium CMOS sensor. It's flexible, format-agnostic, and costs $17,500. For something this good, that's cheap.

Linux has become the platform of choice for much of Hollywood's cinema production. Does the availability of cameras like RED's beg for more Linux in the rest of the cine production world? We'll see.