ARRI Alexa 65 and Panavision DXL cameras are not for sale. They are only available for rental from ARRI Rental and Panavision respectively.

Sony don't manufacture the F65 anymore, so you won't find a current list price. It originally retailed for $65k for the camera body, and $20k for the SR-R4 recorder, so basically $85k. [1]

[1] http://nofilmschool.com/2011/09/sony-officially-prices-f65-t...

I'm curious why they didn't qualify the FS700 (considering they include the FS7) or any external recorders. Being able to record straight to a pair of SSD's in an Odyssey would seem preferable to dealing with Sony's bolt-on recorder + proprietary cards.

It's amazing that a show that'll be watched by millions can be produced on a few thousand dollars worth of equipment. It brings the barrier to entry way down. It's still gonna cost upwards of $100,000 per episode, even for a very low budget small-scale thing, due to crew, locations, sets, insurance, etc. But, it's a really interesting time for television and film production.

It's also interesting how in charge of this trend Netflix is; they're right out front (Amazon is doing interesting things too, with their pilot voting feature). They're providing the formula for how to make shows for Netflix (which would probably be acceptable across the board at Amazon and whoever else is doing original programming at this level and on this scale).

I really like this kind of openness about technical requirements, because it feels like an open invitation to make things. This, more than any hand-wavey "There's more opportunity for small productions than ever before!" kind of statements feels like an actionable piece of knowledge and a part of any business plan that involves making content for this new market. Democratizing that knowledge by posting it on the web is super cool. It seems small, I guess, but it's a cool indicator of where the market is going.

If I were fresh out of film school, or currently working at a production company, I'd be looking at that and thinking, "I bet I could raise the money I need to put together a pilot to these specifications." You'd still have to put all the pieces together to make a good show/film like you always have, but the technical side of it looks really achievable today in a way that it never has.

You're not counting the cost of glass for these cameras. Glass can be insanely expensive.

Yeah, I looked up some of the cameras, and it looks like the Sony FS7 can be had in a bundle with a 28-135mm lens for around $10k. I wasn't leaving it out...I think $10k is in the category of "amazingly cheap for a camera suitable for professional film and television production".

Sure, if you wanted to shoot beautiful cinematography, you'd want more lens options. But, if you're running on a budget, you could shoot a whole film with that one lens, and it'd still look better than most television shot in the 90s-00s.

My impression is that people generally don't even buy these cameras - they make a shooting schedule and then rent a camera (and associated lenses, mounts, dollies, etc)

Yeah, that's usually true. But, initial purchase price dictates rental price in a competitive market, which most of the hubs for filmmaking and TV production are. So, a $10k camera rental will cost an order of magnitude less than a $100k camera rental, all other things being equal (all other things aren't exactly equal, but still, it'll cost a lot less).

The RED cameras are pretty much unusable without a lot of very expensive add-ons. The real cost comes out to 100K+.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t1PQJmM8P4

Yeah -- pretty much all of them are like that

I was putting some quick foundational numbers in there... I would expect all of those prices to be 5X or more than what you see after all the extra stuff that one would need to have a complete setup might be...

let alone time, training, education, talent, etc etc etc...

They come with a lot of "emotional" baggage

Well, its died down now, but it used to be a proper cult. old $work used to make software that was a key step in transcoding from their shitty jpeg2000 "redfile" to something more usable.

yes they had high resolution, but they had rolling shutter and were still quite expensive. Not to mention poor colour reproduction.

... and crashing. I hear a lot of complaints about crashing.