The Lord of the Rings trilogy was quite epic, and somehow I felt that the movie should get extended to like five or six parts even, as three is really insufficient to tell all the stories of the middle earth. The Hobbit is supposedly a prequel to the LOTR trilogy, and JRR Tolkein didn’t manage to finish the story. Luckily, his son has penned the finishing of the story, and Peter Jackson will begin the filming next year.

The award winning director might have pissed many people off by not directing Halo, but he’ll compensate that by filming The Hobbit in 3D entirely on thirty hand-machined RED EPIC cameras, starting early next year. Something like how Avatar was filmed.

That’s the news straight from RED founder Jim Jannard, but that’s not all, as a limited number of pre-production EPIC packages will be available to early adopters as well. $58,000 buys your deep-pocketed budding director a machined EPIC-M body, titanium PL mount, Bomb EVF and 5-inch touchscreen LCD, a REDmote, a four-pack of batteries, a charger and a solid state storage module with a four-pack of 128GB SSDs. Great stuff to have, if you’re serious about your career as a movie director and have a backing support of a gold mine, or sort.

Jannard expects to hand-assemble that first batch of 5K imagers in December or January, start the real assembly lines a month after that, and hopefully have widespread availability by NAB in April, though he’s not making any promises there.

SOURCE via RED