Except the suit from Aliens didn't actually work, it was just a big fiberglass structure suspended from a crane, with the body suspended the rest was light enough that it could be moved around just with muscle power.
Either way the current camera isn't a still cam but a motion camera and has outputs and software for the formats and software tools that are used in digital film editing. And besides, complaining that there's no free software for a camera setup that's around $30,000 for a basic moderately featured setup is kinda silly.
I have no doubt the new still capable cameras will support writing standard
Read the article before you comment. The 261 mpixel model is a large format back which will use custom large format lenses, not plain 35MM SLR lenses. It's also 186mm x 56mm, RED has a nice comparison shot of the various sensor sizes at http://red.cachefly.net/13/page12.jpg
They already provide freely downloadable tools for processing the encoded RAW footage into more common formats (http://www.red.com/support REDCine works on Intel Mac or Windows) and can export to TIFF, JPEG, and OpenEXR (and possibly more, those were just the ones I saw mentioned in the latest release notes). They're also putting out a SDK for the format so it can be integrated into more software. It's not exactly locked down.
Well, they haven't announced anything about storage for the new systems other than a CF adapter for the lower-res units so I can't judge it yet. The Red One however's been out for awhile and has a couple of storage systems. They've got a CF adapter built in with 8GB and soon 16GB high speed cards available. The 8GB cards provide about 4-5 minutes at 4k which is about the same recording time as a 400' film canister (though much, much smaller obviously). Unlike film you can shoot a scene, swap cards and walk that card over to your on-set laptop and dump the footage onto it and a couple of external drives for backup and start editing together a rough cut while the next scene's being shot and then go reuse the card for another shot.
They also offer a hard drive option that uses a pair of 160GB 2.5" SATA drives in RAID-0 and can record 3 hours of footage at 4k (4096x2304).
Compact storage is pretty advanced these days, and RED has a very effective codec that wavelet compresses the RAW footage instead of the processed RGB data. The current camera has 2 encoding modes that work out to approximately 28 or 36 MB/sec at 4k. The top end of the new models is about 35x the resolution of current camera though so even accounting for codec efficiencies they're still going to need quite a bit of bandwidth to actually record that much video data.
Then again given the size of this unit, especialyl once you add lenses, it's pretty much going to be tripod or dolly mounted for any motion shots, not a big deal to have a storage pack on the trolley built into a carrying case. A couple hundred terabytes of RAID configured for speed and hooked up via cable wouldn't be out of line for a setup like that.
To see a need and wait to be asked, is to already refuse.
