RAW Port

[Gavin Greenwalt]

If I were to hypothetically be shooting a spot and needed 60fps 4k. What would I need, how much would it cost to rent and is there even a RAW port in existance to rent it?

 

[Andrew McCarrick]

As far as I know there is no longer a RAW Port being released (so none exist) meaning no 60fps at 4k at all.

 

[Andrew Antoniewicz]

No 4K at 60fps from what I have seen as well. You can shoot 3K at 60fps, what is the hypothetical application which requires 4k?

From everything I read, the camera is now to the point of bandwidth saturation given the available storage options. To change this, Red will probably need to re-design a fairly serious chunk of the current system. The sensor may be able to handle more bandwidth, but either the compression system or the storage bus is where the bandwidth limit is being forced. So, you get 4k @ 30fps, 3k @ 60fps, 2k @ 120fps which all have nearly identical compressor/storage bandwidth requirements.

/wag: Hmm the more I think about it, the more I believe we are looking at a compression limit. If the storage was the only limit, Red could put out a (theoretical) Redcode 20 or 24 which would allow higher frame rates at the cost of more compression.

 

[Chris Kenny]

My understanding is that it is, in fact, largely a processing limitation. Lighter compression generally has lighter processing requirements, though, so it's at least possible that if Red built a recording medium that could handle, say, 100 MB/s (and the SATA interface on the camera should be fast enough to output at that that speed already), they could use a less demanding compression algorithm and sidestep the current bottleneck.

Mind you this is all highly theoretical, as I've got no idea exactly what hardware is in the camera and my experience implementing wavelet compression algorithms on real-time imaging systems (or anywhere, for that matter) is best described as completely nonexistent.

 

[Omnius]

We initially opted for the RAW PORT. It was part of our order for both cameras to have the RAW PORT, but after some careful deliberation and consideration we changed our order.

The RAW Port sounded great until we woke up from the dream and realized we could have been heading to a little bit of a nightmare

 

[Andreas Fernbrant]

I'm going to say this again!
RED SPEED RAM!
You hook it up to your RED - it shoots out data directly from the sensor as fast as possible (or at your chosen speed) the data goes directly to the RAM memory. When these are full your recording stops. The RAM memory data goes back to the CPU to be processed at a rate comfortable for the processor and eventually to your storage solution.

Not a real time solution but still a solution. Who really need to shoot big chunks of slowmo anyhow?

 

[Andrew Antoniewicz]

I'm going to say this again!
RED SPEED RAM!
You hook it up to your RED - it shoots out data directly from the sensor as fast as possible (or at your chosen speed) the data goes directly to the RAM memory. When these are full your recording stops. The RAM memory data goes back to the CPU to be processed at a rate comfortable for the processor and eventually to your storage solution.

Not a real time solution but still a solution. Who really need to shoot big chunks of slowmo anyhow?

Is 10 seconds enough?

For the sake of argument lets say we can disregard the technical challenges of moving 754MB/sec (4k x 2k x 1.5bytes x 60fps) from the sensor to your RAM disk. If your RED SPEED RAM had 8GB of memory, you would get all of 10 seconds of 4K at 60fps. On top of that you would have to wait another 3.7 MINUTES while the RAM disk is dumped to your CF or RedDrive at 36MB/sec.

Is that 4K RAW quality really enough for your slo-mo when you could shoot 6 minutes of 3k at the same 60fps in Redcode 36 with today's camera?

 

[Jarred Land]

no RAW port anytime soon.. sorry. We are recording to REDCODE RAW to compact flash now, something we didn't think was even possible back when the RAW port was conceived .

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Is 60p 3k comparable to redcode 27 in quality but is 36MBs or is it the 36MB (4k @24p) quality?

Operating off of datarates is going to get confusing really fast. Perhaps we need REDCode HQ and SQ.

 

[Peter Karlsson]

Jarred... Any thing similar in progress? I would love to being able to send data from the current eSATA output to a larger RAID array with much less compression that current redcode allows.. Something in the 50-x00MB/s area? It would be super handy at studio shots (greenscreen etc.) to be able to avoid as much compression artifacts as possible where datarates arent such an issue.

 

[Mitch Deoudes]

I would love to being able to send data from the current eSATA output to a larger RAID array with much less compression that current redcode allows.. Something in the 50-x00MB/s area? It would be super handy at studio shots (greenscreen etc.) to be able to avoid as much compression artifacts as possible where datarates arent such an issue.

I'll second this sentiment. I hope additional compression levels are still on the Todo List for future builds. Even just for 24/30fps. It'd be great to be able to crank the compression down whenever the noise (and attendant compression artifacts) for a particular shot get to be obtrusive. Same way you might choose to go to 2k to get a higher framerate for a particular shot, etc.