If you’ve been watching for pre-NAB announcements and rumors as closely as we have, you’ve surely seen some of the big news. A couple of the biggest morsels being Sony’s NEX-FS700U, which can shoot up to 960 frames per second, and some rather cryptic invitations being sent out from Canon which contain nearly no details on what they might be talking about. Rumors are swirling about the possibilities.

Canon has been getting a lot of press recently for their C300 and EOS 5D Mark III, but many were expecting more from the new 5D in the way of video. Some are speculating that Canon is planning on announcing a 4k cinema camera to compete with Red. That idea surely makes sense. Considering Red’s hold on the digital cinema market, it stands to reason that Canon would want to get a piece of that pie. To make things even more interesting, the C300 is priced at $16,000, while the 5D Mark III is at $3500. A digital cinema camera priced right in between would be a strong competitor to the Red Scarlet, which is currently priced at $11,700.

Of course, the biggest piece of evidence we have is Canon’s own press release from November 4th, 2011. The release announces plans to release a so far unnamed EOS-series DSLR which will feature a 35mm full-frame CMOS sensor capable of recording 4k video at 24 frames per second. Canon goes on to say that the scheduled launch date is undecided. Based on the image provided by Canon, it certainly doesn’t look like they’re referring to the EOS-1D X, leaving the implication that this may be the beginning of a new EOS model.

Videomaker will be attending both major Canon press events at NAB 2012, so you can be sure as soon as we do what exactly they’re planning on telling us.

There’s some new wrinkles to Red‘s camcorder lineup. First off, everything you knew about Scarlet? Forget it. They’ve revamped the whole thing and have a new version of the Scarlet alongside the Epic. The idea is that you can have a fully modular camcorder setup that is prepared for digital cinema at whatever resolution you want to shoot. You can start with the Scarlet “brain” for $2500, add a compatible (2/3″) lens, batteries, and as much monitoring, I/O and recording modules as you like. Then if you feel so inclined, you can graduate up with a new “brain”, lenses, etc.

The traditional camcorder manufacturers (and, really, film camera manufacturers too) are probably more than a little worried watching the Red lineup evolve. The pricing is fierce. The stuff looks cool. There are some Hollywood productions on the drawing board that will be using Red’s technology. We expect hard drive manufacturers to be rubbing their hands together in anticipation of big sales (on the order of terabytes, easy) of drives to Red camcorder owners working on big productions.

The lone problem? Red is mum about the exact date when the new stuff will become available. The original Red One is now shipping, though.

Red Digital Cinema announced on their scarletuser.com forum, that their highly anticipated Scarlet camcorder has been taken back to the drawing board in response to recent market changes. They promise that the new Scarlet will be better than the originally planned model, but details were not yet forthcoming.

Release dates have been moved from early 2009, to just 2009. We’ll post updates about Scarlet 2.0 here as they come out, but as for now, everything you thought you knew about Scarlet is wrong.