Red Rockets Dumb Cousin

[Tom Gleeson]

I think Red would be well served by a cheap and dumb RR card version. Something that would allow 1/2 res good playback and transcodes between 1/4 to 1/2 realtime for Epic footage. Something cheap enough and easy enough to use that smaller Post facilities would have no excuse not to buy. If it was an external thunderbolt box I would buy one just to give to recalcitrant clients so they could easily digest Red RAW. While a super powerful card is an essential tool for many I believe many others would be happy with a solution that would allow decent monitoring and reasonable transcode speeds. If this could be achieved for under $1,000 many more projects could go down the R3D path.

[Mike Zinner]

Agree 100%. I guess it's time for a new version of the RR card anyway - the current one is quite old already (measured by moore's law :) ). Maybe we are going to see not only a RR II card but also a RR Mini Box.

[Scott Crawley]

Interesting idea, but it seems to me that a relatively low powered processing card such as that would be obsolete in a fairly short time. 1 or two generations of PC processors should be able to handle same, no? I wouldn't be surprised if off the shelf PC's were able to do this come Jan. '13.

[Tom Gleeson]

Whilst obsolesence would be inevitable Red is moving forward as well from 4K to 5K and soon 6K. Also people and companies often run their Edit suites for many years before upgrading. A low cost card would not require the same ROI and I'm certain would get many years use even if it was just keeping older machines viable.

What is a modern good quality PC rendering out premium 5K renders at? Are they getting anywhere like real time. My aging 2008 Mac tower does about 1 frame every .75 second with 4K.

[Kevin Marshall]

Interesting idea, but it seems to me that a relatively low powered processing card such as that would be obsolete in a fairly short time. 1 or two generations of PC processors should be able to handle same, no? I wouldn't be surprised if off the shelf PC's were able to do this come Jan. '13.

As Tom pointed out above me - while you may be right, not everyone upgrades their computers so quickly...especially Mac Pro users (by lack of choice more or less). Also, the people having trouble working with R3Ds probably aren't keeping up on computing technology - hell, I just did some consulting for an Epic production where their main machine is a G5 (no RedCine for PPC), and they're running FCP 6.

The other problem we face is Blinn's Law: while a mini Rocket would be great now, and while processors may catch up to Epic soon, then we have 6K Dragon not long after to keep the overhead fairly constant. It's definitely a tough issue.

[Ruff]

I agree. It needs to be a small, affordable, external solution thats rugged enough for travel.

When I bought a PDW-700 I also bought a PDW-U1 USB XDCAM Drive. Any workflow questions and I would courier the drive to the client / post house / editor.

It was built into my pricing, and really made XDCAM an easy format to work with in the early days.

The question of the Red Rocket still comes up on most jobs... it's a major bottleneck, not just in workflow, but in client acceptance of shooting on Red.

[Rob Ruffo]

I agree. It needs to be a small, affordable, external solution thats rugged enough for travel.

When I bought a PDW-700 I also bought a PDW-U1 USB XDCAM Drive. Any workflow questions and I would courier the drive to the client / post house / editor.

It was built into my pricing, and really made XDCAM an easy format to work with in the early days.

The question of the Red Rocket still comes up on most jobs... it's a major bottleneck, not just in workflow, but in client acceptance of shooting on Red.

Cheaper RedRocketLite for clients to get for themselves (or even that I could buy for them and eat the margin loss) would solve a LOT fo problems. Sometimes from Red I hear a lot of macho talk about "You need professional gear to do professional work" and so on, but where would I get the money to upgrade my client's suites to what Jim and Jarred call "professional', let alone my own. The budgets are not there. Many of us, even at the higher end, have terribly thin margins on jobs - I can't invent cash flow that does not exist.

[James Falco]

You are missing the fact why a RR card is so expansive in the first place.
Its not that a piece of plastic with some electronics on top have such a big material value.
Its the D&R that goes into it, and the fact that the marked that drives it is extremely small.
So making an other card based on the same technology won't make it cheaper, because developing the technology is what determines the price point in the first place.

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[joe hedge]

I think Red would be well served by a cheap and dumb RR card version. Something that would allow 1/2 res good playback and transcodes between 1/4 to 1/2 realtime for Epic footage.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product...o-4000-us.html

$750 last time I checked

I get transcodes of about 18 frames a second on a 2010 MacPro, from 5kHD 8:1, with half-good debayer to 1080 in DaVinci Resolve - which is free.

Unless you have to have full-res debayer, you don't need a RR card

[Gunleik Groven]

The rocket is old and expensive and doesn't do 5k in realtime.
It needs a replacement, and preferably in house production.