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Why Red causes conflict, and the future of filmmaking


Chris Kenny

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Going uncompressed is very unlikely to be necessary. Even if Red doesn't deliver anything (and there are hints they will), CineForm has everything in place for a compressed 4K workflow.

I get more like $3K for the workstation (don't buy extra RAM from Apple, they charge way too much), $2-3K for drives. $10K for a calibrated monitor, or $2K for a 23" Apple display plus an HDLink (not as good, but just might be workable). $1500 for an output card, rent a deck for the day if you need to go out to a specific tape format.

 

This doesn't include audio, obviously, with which I'm not as familiar.

 

Sure, you can bare bones anything. I have a set-up like that....cost a little more than your quoting.

You would need more than a 23" monitor. A feature usually takes 4-12 weeks of editing. Depending on the situation I doubt many shooters have that kind of time to devote to post. And this part is what will get you in the weeds real fast. So you buy your $30,000 tricked out red, spend $15,000 for bare bones edit system and then spend one month shooting your epic with of course highly paid professional actors.....then spend 4 months editing the epic and one month on audio.....you wake up the day of the premiere 6 months later - $100,000 in debt and no one shows up for the premiere......Don't laugh - this has happened over and over with several of my friends over the years.....One friend now in his mid-forties still struggling in LA still trying to pay back people for his failed film 20 years ago.....Wow - now this sounds like a good film to make.

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The top two images are from the RED camera. The bottom two are shot on 35mm film. Which method do you think produces the sharpest images? Which method reproduces the richest, most natural flesh tones? You decide.

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Red-Drive mags will just hook up to an edit bay; they're basically just external hard drives with some extra logic for recording direct from the camera. You still want to transfer footage off because regular hard drives are a lot cheaper than digital mags, of course.

G-Tech is a good company, but that kind of turn-key stuff has big markups. Buy one of these for $440 and stick five of these into it for $700... you've got 2000 GB of storage for $1140. Add $50-100 for a controller card with enough ports to let you connect up to four such enclosures to your workstation.

 

Throughput isn't a problem, REDCODE RAW's 27.5 MB/s is easily sustainable by a single desktop hard drive. Any proxy versions will presumably have an even lower data rate. If you do need something faster, just two SATA drives a software RAID 0 configuration can deliver upwards of 90 MB/s. And you could, if you wanted to, make that entire enclosure a RAID 0 array, which would be pretty insanely fast. (Have really good backups if you go this route; with RAID 0 you're hosed if any one of the drives dies.) None of this requires any extra expense over the hardware listed above.

 

The film guys here who've been shooting for 30 years might know a hell of a lot more than I do about PL mount lenses... but a big chunk of my past experience is in the IT industry... I know this stuff pretty well.

The post house I intern at is upgrading pretty much their entire office in 2 months. Brand new Infernos and Smokes, everything top of the line, and at a cost that I'm sure is in the millions including monitors and Autodesk's insane RAID setup.

 

They still would have great difficulty onlining anything in 4k. It's possible, sure, but even with that kind of horsepower it would still be very slow, and probably not in anything near realtime.

 

A while ago I attended a demonstration of Quantel's iQ Pablo, a DI workstation that is capable of working in 2k in realtime and 4k in near realtime. It cost several hundred thousand dollars.

 

I truly have no idea how you think you're going to be able to online 4k with a $1000 drive setup. There is a reason that professional workstations cost hundreds of thousands, and it's not just markup. I mean, yeah, you can "do" 4k on any computer, hell I can "do" 4k on my Pentium4 at home, but not at a speed that's adequate for finishing or doing any sort of effects or grading.

 

It seems like you want to work compressed, but it's kind of a shame to spend all that money on a neat camera and great lenses and then compress the hell out of it. And if you're doing grading or effects, compression is bad news. Also, effects programs treat everything you bring in as if it was uncompressed. So the fact that your file size is tiny means nothing for speed; you're going to be dying when your system can't keep up.

Edited by Scott Fritzshall
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The top two images are from the RED camera. The bottom two are shot on 35mm film. Which method do you think produces the sharpest images? Which method reproduces the richest, most natural flesh tones? You decide.

 

Hey your cheating, you lit your images!

 

Stephen

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The top two images are from the RED camera. The bottom two are shot on 35mm film. Which method do you think produces the sharpest images? Which method reproduces the richest, most natural flesh tones? You decide.

 

Well of course we know that the 35mm is superior. I agree with Stephen though, I wish you had used outdoor 35mm to compare with outdoor Red stills. No big deal.

 

But why is this thread and all other Red threads continuing?

 

Tim has stated the following:

 

"I'm putting an end to this never ending argument.

 

From now on this forum will not allow the touting of cameras that cannot be publicly tested."

 

Since Red does not exist that means an end to the Red forum, no?

 

R,

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It seems like you want to work compressed, but it's kind of a shame to spend all that money on a neat camera and great lenses and then compress the hell out of it. And if you're doing grading or effects, compression is bad news.

 

With DCT compression, yes. With wavelet compression, things are very different. It exhibits practically none of the artifacts that cause so much trouble when color grading, etc. with DCT compressed footage.

 

Have you taken a look at the 4K frame Red has posted, fed through REDCODE? It doesn't look anything like, for instance, an over-compressed JPEG.

 

Maybe you might gain some benefit going uncompressed for green screen. I'm hoping when Red posts their professionally shot green screen tests, the include frames that have been compressed as well. But for most day-to-day shooting, with modern wavelet compression, the cost/benefit ratio of uncompressed just doesn't work out.

 

Also, effects programs treat everything you bring in as if it was uncompressed. So the fact that your file size is tiny means nothing for speed; you're going to be dying when your system can't keep up.

 

RED has now confirmed the RGB variant of REDCODE will be implemented as a QuickTime component. Practically any video app on the Mac platform except for a few fairly obscure high-end tools will happily input and output directly in any format QuickTime understands. And certainly all of Apple's own stuff does, which includes Shake, and of course whatever they release based on the FinalTouch code base.

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With DCT compression, yes. With wavelet compression, things are very different. It exhibits practically none of the artifacts that cause so much trouble when color grading, etc. with DCT compressed footage.

 

Have you taken a look at the 4K frame Red has posted, fed through REDCODE? It doesn't look anything like, for instance, an over-compressed JPEG.

 

Maybe you might gain some benefit going uncompressed for green screen. I'm hoping when Red posts their professionally shot green screen tests, the include frames that have been compressed as well. But for most day-to-day shooting, with modern wavelet compression, the cost/benefit ratio of uncompressed just doesn't work out.

RED has now confirmed the RGB variant of REDCODE will be implemented as a QuickTime component. Practically any video app on the Mac platform except for a few fairly obscure high-end tools will happily input and output directly in any format QuickTime understands. And certainly all of Apple's own stuff does, which includes Shake, and of course whatever they release based on the FinalTouch code base.

 

Chris,

I have asked the guys at RED about the availability of REDCODE, REDCINE for non-RED owners.

I have not received a clear concise answer. They keep referring to their charts and 12 bit vs. 10 bit.

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Hi,

 

Wavelets are not magic; they can and will cause very similar problems to DCT if overused. I would consider that taking a stream down to 28Mbyte/sec and calling it 4K could reaslistically be called "compressed to buggery."

 

Phil

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Wavelets are not magic; they can and will cause very similar problems to DCT if overused.

 

They can cause problems, but they're mostly different problems, which aren't nearly as offensive. (E.g. adding a bit of softness, instead of creating horrible blocking artifacts.)

 

I would consider that taking a stream down to 28Mbyte/sec and calling it 4K could reaslistically be called "compressed to buggery."

 

I'm curious on precisely what basis you're making this claim. Could you, for instance, point out offensive compression artifacts in the compressed frame Red has posted?

 

Red is compressing RAW bayer data, not a full RGB image. This is only about 10:1 compression, not the 30:1 compression it would be if this were RGB (though the bayer-pattern data presumably has more spacial complexity, which does make compression for challenging). Wavelet compression holds up extremely well at these levels; the DCI digital cinema spec calls for about 30:1 JPEG 2000 compression for theatrical distribution.

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Chris,

I have asked the guys at RED about the availability of REDCODE, REDCINE for non-RED owners.

I have not received a clear concise answer. They keep referring to their charts and 12 bit vs. 10 bit.

 

Seems to be a bit of debate over 10 bit log v 12 bit linear. RED are claiming that the advantages of 12 bit linear outweigh the disadvantages. Time will reveal all.

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