uncompressed recording

[mtseng]

Are we gonna see umcompressed recording with red flash drive?

isn't there and easy and cheap option to recording with ethernet gigabit
output?
like a ethernet output module

 

[David Battistella]

Why is there a fixation with uncompressed?

david

 

[Dylan Reeve]

I'm pretty sure GigE isn't fast enough - if my quick calculation was correct, uncompressed 2:1 4K 12bit @24fps is about 7.5Gb/s... So there's there issue of getting it off the camera, and then the issue of what the hell do you record that with?

And then... What on earth do you do with all that data? I'm pretty sure FCP won't play it.

 

[nellie22]

I can totally see the want for uncompressed footage. I think what Dylan said about GigE and that isn't probably gonna be fast enough at all for 4k uncompressed is true. I shot with the viper and it has a pretty cool 444 RGB set up in 2K that records to a D-mag Stwo digital magazine capture system. I think if you were able to use something like that with the red uncompressed would rock. I am not sure if that would be what you are asking for, but as I know that system set up isn't set for red.
Back to the GigE, we have servers set up in our post office and to be able to start looking at 4k uncompressed footage we need to have quad 4-Gbps Fibre Channel cards...and even with that the bandwidth is still iffy.

I am all for just having the ability to do uncompressed if I wanted to though.

 

[Dylan Reeve]

Personally I think recording uncompressed RAW is unnecessary and hugely cumbersome.

The uncompressed image has a place in the post workflow, where multiple compression cycles should be avoided. But in acquisition that amount of data is a huge headache and largely unnecessary in the face of efficient and high-quality compression.

 

[nellie22]

I can totally see your point dylan about storage and huge files, but I am not sure if that is a total reason to just throw out the fact of uncompressed footage. The data capture guy on our shoot was showing me that with shooting raw he was able to see all the highlights the post side would be able to pull out if needed and still have it look natural...this was due to shooting in 444 rgb. I know you can somewhat do this without shooting raw, but you were seeing if you were safe or not the whole time during the shoot.

 

[Dylan Reeve]

The compressed REDCODE is a raw image. The same things are possible with REDCODE. The entire RED image is recorded as a raw image.

What is lost with the compressed image is high-frequency image detail, although I've not seen any noticeable or objectionable compression artifacts in the RED images I've worked with. While, they will exhibit differences compared to the original uncompressed image, without that original for comparison I'd say it'd be hard to point out those 'losses'.

 

[CK Olsen]

VFX work loves uncompressed...

VFX work loves uncompressed...

It's just the truth. From pulling green screens to matching practical image textures, to building HDRI maps, or just for scaling, cropping, and copying bits of one plate to build into another, if you could choose to have no compression, that'd be pretty awesome. This is not to say that you won't work with what you can get, but in general terms, the bigger and cleaner the source image, the more fun you can have with it.

On the flipside, I certainly would not choose to shoot uncompressed on my next "40+ hours of source footage " documentary...
-sk

 

[Chris Nuzzaco]

The compressed REDCODE is a raw image. The same things are possible with REDCODE. The entire RED image is recorded as a raw image.

What is lost with the compressed image is high-frequency image detail, although I've not seen any noticeable or objectionable compression artifacts in the RED images I've worked with. While, they will exhibit differences compared to the original uncompressed image, without that original for comparison I'd say it'd be hard to point out those 'losses'.

I wouldn't say Redcode RAW is the same thing as true RAW. I'll take Redcode over the other compression options though, but I still want the true RAW capabilities the camera was originally designed to have. I haven't had a chance to work with the camera up close yet (thats coming soon though), so I'm speculating, but I think colorists could find lots of reasons to shoot uncompressed. At the end of the day, you can only throw so much away before it starts affecting the image and what you can actually do with it. I remember a while back that some people were complaining about dirty shadow details in their footage (sunny day, high contrast footage). Apparently the noise was very "digital" looking, and thats the Redcode. Uncompressed shadow noise just looks like tiny dots, not big squares. Red says they are improving the image though... so we'll have to wait and see how refined it is after Build 16.

 

[Andrew M.]

I had RAW port originally on order from RED but I dropped it.
Looks like technology will not be there in reasonable price for next two years or so to support 9.6GBits/sec RAW rate from RED.
You need sustained 10GB to get it out. By the time the technology will catch up the RED will be supported by most of the post workflows and for high end editing RAW RAW port will be probably most often the standard.

 

[Chris Nuzzaco]

I agree, Red is ahead of its time. I've been shooting with Andromeda... and when that came out a few years ago it was WAY ahead of its time, just like the Viper was in terms of data transfer rates, storage sizes, etc... Whats even more interesting though, is how the debayering improved over time, so old images could be rendered out using better math, but thats only available if you shoot true RAW. One of my biggest issues with Redcode is that once you throw stuff away, thats it, no more room for improvement, so future image improvement of old footage is out of the question to certain extent.