What happened to Red Ray?

Stuart -we would be more than happy to be added to the beta testing of Red Ray Pro...there's a number of folks at Red I've been bugging about this particular product for some time...and now that we're a couple weeks away from picture lock stage and hoping to generate a 4K master on my feature film Path Of Souls we would love to be able to lead the workflow charge so filmmakers can follow a legit, comprehensive end to end 4K pipeline, which would of course include RRP and Red Projector to take to the masses.

I really hope the Red Ray Pro has some form of built in Deck function with offload and conversion features, with dual Thunderbolt ports for Broadcast and Post Houses.
IMO it's not just about getting a 4K image on a TV or other screen it's about getting Red's codec accepted and integrated into current broadcast and post situations,
as well as providing conversion alternatives for web and run and gun broadcast situations.

I guess Red Ray is continuosly changing for the better, I wouldn´t be suprised if the specs are improved to full 4K 3D. For me to buy one I first need someone to make a sub 10$k 4K projector, so no rush.

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Originally Posted by Stuart English

As Graeme says, formal news when we are ready to say something, but it's going to be an exciting year for beyond HD distribution with all of these new flat panel displays and projection systems ....

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Having just returned from CES, it's even more clear that 2012 will be the watershed for 4K presentation, we all can welcome that.

And BTW, an amazing amount of recognition for RED as THE driver of 4K content creation - even though we didn't have a booth ...

... so hats off to you all (and Ted of course) for that.

New Red company T-shirts are needed.

Buzzsaw logo on the front.

"We Make 4K Happen!" on the back.

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Originally Posted by Jeremy Torrie

..and now that we're a couple weeks away from picture lock stage and hoping to generate a 4K master on my feature film Path Of Souls we would love to be able to lead the workflow charge so filmmakers can follow a legit, comprehensive end to end 4K pipeline, which would of course include RRP and Red Projector to take to the masses.

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Gee, I think there is a legitimate, comprehensive 4K pipeline available now, as long as you have the available time and money to use it. Many, many post houses around the world can handle this right now. I think it's more about time than it is money, just because of the sheer amount of data involved.

I see Red Ray as only facilitating one-off discs for dailies, film festivals, and similar venues. I think the theatrical industry is so wrapped up with DCPs, it would be very hard to pull them away from this specific encrypted JPEG2000 format. It took years and years just to get them to agree to one standard (which is really several standards in one). I think Red Ray could be useful, but I would be surprised to see it becoming widespread, unless Red licenses it to many other manufacturers. And the business seems to be getting away from physical media. It's a lot easier to plug in a hard drive and play back (or copy) a file, rather than a proprietary optical drive.

Anybody have some hard numbers on maximum data capacity of Red Ray? I'd be curious how the compression rate will compare to the other options out there.

Marc, by all accounts RED RAY is not about physical media anymore, it's about making a hardware decoder that can decode the RED RAY distribution codec, which reportedly gets high quality 4K playback down to around 20-30mb/s or less (that's megabits per second - so not that different from DV or XDCAM levels of playback speed would be required, which in high end broadband markets also means a rate that's not far off streaming. However in terms of compression rate that's pretty efficient for 4K resolution content!)

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Originally Posted by Marc Wielage

Gee, I think there is a legitimate, comprehensive 4K pipeline available now, as long as you have the available time and money to use it. Many, many post houses around the world can handle this right now. I think it's more about time than it is money, just because of the sheer amount of data involved.

I see Red Ray as only facilitating one-off discs for dailies, film festivals, and similar venues. I think the theatrical industry is so wrapped up with DCPs, it would be very hard to pull them away from this specific encrypted JPEG2000 format. It took years and years just to get them to agree to one standard (which is really several standards in one). I think Red Ray could be useful, but I would be surprised to see it becoming widespread, unless Red licenses it to many other manufacturers. And the business seems to be getting away from physical media. It's a lot easier to plug in a hard drive and play back (or copy) a file, rather than a proprietary optical drive.

Anybody have some hard numbers on maximum data capacity of Red Ray? I'd be curious how the compression rate will compare to the other options out there.

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RED RAY data rate is about 1/10th a DCP / DCI delivery package - 20 Mb/s on average for a 4K 24 fps movie.

And we test encode quality by A/B v's DPX master files viewed on our 40 ft screen from a SXRD Sony projector.

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Originally Posted by Stuart English

(...) from a SXRD Sony projector.

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And hopefully also beginning testing on a little something something that we also hope is coming along well. :)

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Originally Posted by Roberto Lequeux

And hopefully also beginning to testing on a little something that we also hope is coming along well. :)

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But of course ...

... as Mark has already seen; and what's crazy is what he saw is the worst that combination will ever look :-)