Can you get a 2k live feed out of the red?

[aidan]

Im doing live visuals with a camera and computer, and high res projectors.
but I was concerned that the resolution would be too high to be usable / acceptable by projectors and stable using a computer.

can I get full res going straight to a high res projector? (via some kind of cable)

can I play red's full res smoothely and reliably out from a decent mac to a projector?

I am excited by the detail and colour that red offers but I dont want to get stuck with something that doesnt work for my application.

any help is much appreciated.
thanks, a

 

[Brook Willard]

No, you cannot get 2K out of the camera live. The most you can get is the 720p preview feed over single-link HD-SDI as of today.

From a "decent" Mac, no. Even a high-end one [Evin just bought an 8-core Mac with 12GB of RAM] wont' be fast enough to decode the 2K proxies at high quality in real time. Your best bet would probably be a Scratch seat with hardware acceleration and dual-link HD-SDI outputs... and I don't know enough about that to tell you if it'd really be a full-quality debayer. All of the 4K screenings I've seen have been from RED footage transcoded to DPX and played from some serious heavy hardware at roughly 1GB/s [that's bytes, not bits].

 

[Dj Joofa]

No, you cannot get 2K out of the camera live. The most you can get is the 720p preview feed over single-link HD-SDI as of today.

From a "decent" Mac, no. Even a high-end one [Evin just bought an 8-core Mac with 12GB of RAM] wont' be fast enough to decode the 2K proxies at high quality in real time. Your best bet would probably be a Scratch seat with hardware acceleration and dual-link HD-SDI outputs... and I don't know enough about that to tell you if it'd really be a full-quality debayer.

What hardware acceleration is Scratch providing that cannot be taken advantage on a Mac? Many softwares, such as FxPlug, take advantage of hardware acceleration on a Mac. If the decoding of 2K proxies is being provided through software only (RedAlert/RedCine) on a Mac, can't the software be written to take advantage of hardware acceleration?

 

[Brook Willard]

Trust me, I'm a huge Mac-head... I'm not even sure if Scratch is the best solution for this problem. I don't know the quality that Scratch can debayer in real time. What I do know is that Apple writes all of their own graphics card drivers and they haven't written drivers for the NVidia SDI cards that Scratch relies on.

As it stands, I don't think there's a realtime solution for playing 4:4:4, pixel-perfect 2K or 4K REDCODE files out of a Mac or PeeCee. I could be wrong - I'm more of a camera guy than a post guy - but that's been my understanding.

I've done presentations up to 4:4:4 2K with RED footage on a Mac by converting the R3D files to another video codec and playing it back on the Mac. As long as you have either a beefy enough graphics card or a dual-link card, this should be possible.

But for 4K... that's eight lanes of HD-SDI and MASSIVE data rates. I forget what sort of data storage RED uses for their playback, but it's big and fast... and not cheap.