Everyone was quick to scrape and translate Nikon President Masaaki Tokunari's comments to reporters made in a recent interview in Japan, but almost none actually try to make any sense of them (let alone quote him accurately).
The quote that seems to have to provoked many of the news articles has to do with Nikon's intent to incorporate RED technology into Nikon mirrorless cameras. Fortunately, I have some knowledge of RED's "technologies," so can go project further than the vague quote as to what that might be.
The first and foremost technology that might prove useful to the Z System cameras is REDcode Raw, the video encoding that RED accused Nikon of violating with the Z9's introduce of N-RAW. It appears that RED's implementation can be more lightweight than Nikon's (and has better metadata), plus making it available on Z System cameras would also open up additional post processing. Right now, DaVinci Resolve is the primary support mechanism for N-RAW, for instance. The other primary video editors have not yet provided support for N-RAW, but do have support for REDcode Raw.
From there, everything gets more technical, which makes me wonder how much of RED's technology Tokunari-san was really thinking might be useful for the Nikon mirrorless cameras. For instance, RED has excellent and well developed LUTs and something they call CDL (color decision list), which was developed by the American Society of Cinematographers to exchange color correction information via metadata. I would think that both of those items fall into the "lower hanging fruit" side of RED's technologies.
As you move upward into "more difficult" things that could migrate, RED's support of Frame.io comes to mind, though Nikon's anathema towards Adobe (who bought Frame.io) would have to temper. The Nikon/Adobe relationship got off on a bad foot with the Nikon slide scanners and Photoshop, went through silly arguments over white balance metadata, more recently at Adobe MAX was the first to show initial support for Content Authority Initiative on a Z9 that never shipped, and has never really found solid footing where the two companies seem to work well together.
These three things—REDcode raw, LUT/CDL, and Frame.io support—would move the higher end Z System cameras more into becoming Canon Cinema and Sony FX competition, at least at the low end.
I can see a handful of other RED expertise that might carry over, too, but some of this is buried further into things that many of the hybrid camera users probably don't play a lot with. For instance, RED's PTP frame synchronization and IP-based streaming play well with Nikon's acquisition of Mark Roberts, but not so much with the general public that's buying Nikon's mirrorless offerings. RED does have a better pre-amp, audio handling, and a number of audio connection abilities, so perhaps Nikon will finally get around considering adding electronic controls to the hot shoe; they did that with the Nikon 1 and then abandoned it for some reason.
The things at the top end of the list in terms of complexity to bring over are probably the RED Control app and global shutters. RED seems to have a better iOS/Android team than Nikon, so that's good, but Nikon is still using decades-old protocols in terms of interacting with the cameras, protocols that were established with serial communication on the original 10-pin connector and haven't meaningfully migrated into the 21st century. I don't know how you wed what RED is doing in their apps to control cameras with what Nikon is doing.
Sitting on top of RED's image sensors (at least some of them) is an electronically controlled Neutral Density filter. This would be an interesting addition to the Z System cameras, but unless Nikon stacks that on top of the already existing filter—where it would introduce some optical issues, particularly with wide angle lenses—it would need a lot of new integration work on something Nikon believes is now long-established and well understood.
Global shutter would be the trickiest of the bunch. First, RED is not using Sony sensors. Moreover, RED's larger Raptor sensor is 40.96mm x 21.60mm, so not "FX." The smaller Komodo sensor is 27.03mm x 14.26mm, so not really "DX." Thus, new versions of those sensors would have to be generated, and it's unclear how they might link up to Nikon's current expectations in data offload, as many of the methods the mirrorless cameras rely upon are sub-samples to obtain speed, which I don't think is how RED does it. Still, I'm sure that Nikon's sensor group is now looking at RED's sensor source and trying to figure out what they might incorporate.
All the above doesn't even get us to some of the potential insight buried in RED's internal software. For instance, I'm not sure how Nikon is generating the waveforms on the Z6 III, Z8, and Z9 cameras. However, I bet you it's a different algorithm than RED is using.
However, the real problem with integrating anything RED into Nikon and anything Nikon into RED is basically going to be communication. Not just in style, language, or directness (or lack thereof), but mostly in time. I've never seen an integration of two organizations take as little time as was predicted. Beyond the turf fights that come up and have to resolved, it's just a lot of dirty work down in the underpinnings that requires study, understanding, and then agreement on how to proceed. I once saw one company start using their acquisition's work only to find that that the company they had bought was already getting ready to jettison what they had done and move to a new architecture and model. Oops.
There's little doubt that Nikon scored a big win by picking up RED for as little as they paid. Even if Nikon never integrated anything either direction, it would still be a win. Thus, anything that does migrate from Hollywood to Tokyo or vice versa is going to be a bigger win, perhaps even a BAW (Big A** Win). Let's hope that we see the fruits of that in the next generation of Nikon Z System cameras. I don't think we'll see it in the current generation, as they're still being defined from the Z9 technologies.
