From engadget.com: We’re still slightly bummed that Peter Jackson never made Halo, but this should patch things up a tad — the Lord of the Rings director will film The Hobbit in 3D entirely on thirty hand-machined RED EPIC cameras, starting early next year. 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. 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. That’s how RED rolls. More..

Xoanon here, this is not the Peter’s first foray into Red cameras, Peter used one a few years back to shoot some plane footage at an air show. Meanwhile his post production house ‘Park Road Post’ has experience withe the Red series of cameras.