RED Ray... Wow...

[spideralex90]

Not sure if anyone saw this, if so merge this or delete or whatever.

But this sounds awesome. Blu-ray will go out of business! jk.

anyhow here's the link: http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/25/red-blows-away-small-room-of-videophiles-with-4k-red-ray-footage/

I personally haven't read about this before. Sorry if i'm late jumpin on the wagon.

[Ian-T]

I'm sure if they spend tons of money on marketing this product that it will kick Blu Ray in the proverbial A$$, For their sakes I sure hope so.

[kafeero]

I think it will be too expensive to take over bluray.
But it still is impressive.

[John Rambo]

red did it before with the scarlet

advertising something then not manufacturing it

they are selling us dreams

[94strings]

I think this product appeals to our technolust. Have we ever seen 4K projected? I have not , yet I believe the impact of red ray will be huge. I have yet to aquire a 1080p lcd instead holding out for a 1080p projector. I am saving for a fixed lens scarlet which we should have a release date for hopefully soon. Red ray is said to sell for under a grand and is still estimated for sale this year....

[Halsu]

red did it before with the scarlet

advertising something then not manufacturing it

they are selling us dreams


They're still more or less on schedule with scarlet, as far as i know. They also succesfully delivered their previous camera (which was also trolled to be vaporvare) - it's available now and kicking ass as we speak.

I see no reason to doubt Red Ray any more than Red One.

[Halsu]

I think this product appeals to our technolust. Have we ever seen 4K projected?

I have, though the footage was Dalsa Origin and 3D graphics, not Red One.

It looked very, very nice, but the difference to 2K projection of the same footage isn't as big as one could think: from a regular viewing distance in a movie theater, BOTH looked tack sharp, more or less perfect.

[Erik Bien]

Have we ever seen 4K projected?

Yep (http://hv20.com/showthread.php?p=207978#post207978). Last year at RED's NAB booth, and this year at the REDuser party. Followed immediately by REDray at 10 Mbps on the same 26-foot screen. I hadn't detected any difference, neither had the two DPs or the director I spoke about it with after the screening. :hv20-smilie153:

[funnychicken11]

Have we ever seen 4K projected? I have not....

uhh, I bet you have;
A lot of movies lately have scanned the film at 4K, and print their final output at 4k as well. The less 'high budget' movies often use 2k, but if you seen any blockbuster recently it's probably 4K

[1]

Have we ever seen 4K projected?

LOL, yeah; our local cinema projects at less than 4h!

(that's hecto instead of kilo! :hv20-smilie03:)

[Halsu]

uhh, I bet you have;
A lot of movies lately have scanned the film at 4K, and print their final output at 4k as well. The less 'high budget' movies often use 2k, but if you seen any blockbuster recently it's probably 4K

Not true.

First of all, most films, blockbuster or not, are finished in 2K digital intermediate, not 4K. Even if they were scanned and processed at 4K, the visible resolution of the film scan (the way the amount of detail looks) is closer to 2K than 4K. 4K scan will show the shape of individual grains better, but the apparent sharpness isn't much higher than with a 2K scan.

Second, there are no regular commercial theaters that have 4K digital projectors out there, so even if the original digital master was 4K (which is very rare as said), the projection master and the projector are not, they're both 2K.

Third, if you are talking about film projection, the real life resolution is far away from 4K. It's closer to 1.3K (or 720p in HD terms) at best. In many "worst case" cases, the resolution of a theatrical print isn't much higher than standard definition TV.

http://www.cst.fr/IMG/pdf/35mm_resolution_english.pdf

Here's a page from reduser.net that discusses the issue of 4K scan resolution pretty understandably, in layman's terms and with examples.
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=1487&page=2#17

[lordtangent]

I honestly think the real big news (which is a side effect of the development of Red Ray) is the Red Rocket accelerator board.

Red Ray is great for watching dailies. But I don't think it is even meant to replace Blue Ray. And all the parties involved in digital cinema distribution have settled on the DCI spec, so it doesn't have any real chance there either.

Yeah, Red Ray is really only going to be useful for doing dailies from Red acquired material, or perhaps as a form of accelerator for debayering/rendering Redcode by sending the SDI directly to a video capture device.

IMHO, Red Rocket will be a much more useful product for most users.

[Halsu]

Yeah, Red Ray is really only going to be useful for doing dailies from Red acquired material, or perhaps as a form of accelerator for debayering/rendering Redcode by sending the SDI directly to a video capture device.

...and of course also everywhere else, where extremely high resolution playback is a bonus - say, those huge video screens on rock concerts and such.

[Soultrape]

...and of course also everywhere else, where extremely high resolution playback is a bonus - say, those huge video screens on rock concerts and such.

Such as Bionic Eyes that can see infinite Detail! ehem... maybe called RED Eyes? :] Jim must announce...

[Erik Bien]

I honestly think the real big news (which is a side effect of the development of Red Ray) is the Red Rocket accelerator board.

Or maybe the REALLY 'real big news' is the other side effect of developing REDray — the compression codec. A few little hints (http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=38421&view=findpost&p=283949) lead me to believe RED are well aware of the potential for this beyond optical drives.

[lordtangent]

Isn't it just playing back RedCode RAW? There is nothing really magical about their magic codec. Lossy RAW compression isn't even an original idea. Cineform did it at least a year or two earlier, and Nikon NEF is also a lossy compressed RAW. (NEF RAW is a hybrid of lossy color mapping and lossless data compression)

[Erik Bien]

Isn't it just playing back RedCode RAW?

It's my understanding that the REDray demo played from a data stream of 10Mpbs (< half that of DV/HDV) at 4K resolution, 10 bit color. AFAIK, there's more going on to do that than just a partial decode as you get with .R3D reference QuickTimes.

[lordtangent]

h.264 could account for that. Or Dirac codec, which is supposed to be comparable to h.264 in terms of bandwidth vs quality delivered.

I just have a really hard time accepting that Red has invented a new long GOP codec independently that is superior to codecs that have YEARS of development behind them. Dirac COULD concievably be applied to RAW the way "RedCode" is. RedCode is nothing but I-Frame JPEG2000 with some "swizzling" of the data to make it more compatible with the wavelet compression. The same swizzling could be applied before feeding the data to a long GOP wavelet codec like Dirac. Dirac is Free Software, so Red wouldn't even have to pay royalties on a patent.

[bighaircarey]

Yes, I agree that the biggest part of RedRay is the codec. I think it is possible that RedRay might turn out to just be the codec and nothing else. I still haven't seen anything concrete on what they were actually playing the REDRay off of at the the party, but I don't think it was dvd or anything like that.
The potential for that kind of compression is huge when you think about video over broadband. If they can compress 4k that much think how much they can do 1080p or 720p.

[Ian-T]

....well....since you put it like that....

[Erik Bien]

I just have a really hard time accepting that Red has invented a new long GOP codec independently that is superior to codecs that have YEARS of development behind them.

I'm highly unqualified to speculate about how they did it (your guess is undoubtedly better than mine!), and RED themselves are keeping mum (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showpost.php?p=408476&postcount=124) on the subject, but when Graeme Nattress speaks of a "REDray encode (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showpost.php?p=410484&postcount=198)" it makes me think this isn't just a partial debayer of straight-from-camera REDcode RAW but something specifically optimized for low-bandwidth delivery.

EDIT: Michael Cioni (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showpost.php?p=408239&postcount=59) (who edited and supervised the DI for both RED reels) talks about REDray compression.

[lordtangent]

Well, we know they are using wavelet compression at least. Considering the data rates they MUST be using some sort of long GOP scheme. I-Frame only at those data rates would look like crap no matter how sophisticated the codec. They could have dusted off Snow codec or built a variant of Dirac... (Both open source) or created something similar. It's probably insanely computationally intensive but at least the Red Ray player can play it back in real time. Perhaps Red Rocket will also provide some level of acceleration.

The cool thing is that since it's backed by Red it will probably get some play. (unlike Dirac) The bad thing is they may make it totally proprietary, also unlike Dirac. IMHO, we have enough proprietary codecs already. What we need is some uber free codecs we can use for everything. Dirac is a really good candidate for that.

[overstreet1983]

About redray overtaking bluray... I think I read that they didn't intend for it to be a consumer product... but I don't know.

[antman]

LOL, yeah; our local cinema projects at less than 4h!

(that's hecto instead of kilo! :hv20-smilie03:)

hahaha:hv20-smilie77:

[zephyrnoid]

I honestly think the real big news (which is a side effect of the development of Red Ray) is the Red Rocket accelerator board.

Red Ray is great for watching dailies. But I don't think it is even meant to replace Blue Ray. And all the parties involved in digital cinema distribution have settled on the DCI spec, so it doesn't have any real chance there either.

Yeah, Red Ray is really only going to be useful for doing dailies from Red acquired material, or perhaps as a form of accelerator for debayering/rendering Redcode by sending the SDI directly to a video capture device.

IMHO, Red Rocket will be a much more useful product for most users.


Very reasonable argument, though I've watched leapfrogging happen before.
It's just a matter of time before Blu-ray is obsolete. I remember waiting for 10 years for Firewire spec to be ratified and rolled out. It's only been ubiquitous for about 12 years and it's nearly obsolete already. RED has the gumption and financial backing to think ahead. Mainstream manufacturers cannot, they have to turn a buck right away.

WARNING TO RED: Don't become the next SGI . SGI was in the 90's what RED is today. The Best, Fastest, Biggest, Priciest NLE hardware platform and ... it's GONE!
Fortunately, the software it ran is still with us.:hv20-smilie70:

[fishops]

WARNING TO RED: Don't become the next SGI . SGI was in the 90's what RED is today. The Best, Fastest, Biggest, Priciest NLE hardware platform and ... it's GONE!

SGI never made an NLE.