>>4312719With only 220 employees at the time of acquisition I'm more convinced at this point Red was being bankrolled by Jannard for the majority of its existence. The fact that the Helium 8K released in 2016 had multiple FPGAs indicated they had absurdly high BOM costs for their cameras since they likely couldn't afford to get custom asics designed (they don't have enough employees to do it on their own), which also leads me to believe large parts of the camera design and engineering was likely contracted out too. It would make their shoddy support seem reasonable too if most of their shit was contracted out. If they didn't get lucky with Cameron, Jannard being a billionaire, and being one of the "firsts" in digital cinema then there's no way they would have lasted this long.
Nikon probably thinks they could save Red because they already have a decent image processing asic that can compress raws in body so a lot of money on Red's BOM costs could be saved there with some tweaks, and it could be a stepping stone to get Nikon into the high margin cinema glass.
