2K full sensor ?

[Mattias Andersson]

Hi RED crew,

How come there isn't a setting for 2K that uses the full senor?
Is it possible for you to take only every other pixel on every other row and save that into a 2K image, or use 4 pixels and merge them into one pixel?

Often on a shoot when you are doing multiple images that will overlay suddenly the director changes his mind and wants to do 50fps instead of 25fps, then you have to change from 4K to 2K or 3K. But if there where a "2K full sensor" it would have been less difficult because you would have the same field of view.

Mattias

 

[Nils J. Nesse]

Because 4K-realtime-downsampled-to-2K @50fps is much more difficult to do than 4K @50fps.

 

[Patrick Tresch]

There have been numerous discussion about this topic 1 year ago... but RED definitly decided not to implement this on the One... Perhaps because of required processing power or CMO/quality issue I can't remember.

Nils, Mattias is not speaking of downsampling but pixel skipping.

Patrick

 

[Brandon Fraley]

it was determined that it took too much processing power to scale in real time. Considering you can always get scale after scale in post, RED decided it didn't make sense to try and implement it.

 

[Ben Holmes]

RED have made repeated and vague mention of a 1080p full-frame mode in the RED One, and never respond when asked directly if they still plan to impliment it.

Given that considerably more RED projects are likely to be finished in 1080 than film resolutions, I (and every other broadcast professional I speak to) find this baffling. I can only assume it's down to a technical limitation, although they have never confirmed this.

I am aware (before the flaming begins) that you can record in dualHD or resize from 4K 16:9. This is still not the best solution for broadcast, by a long shot. Apart from anything else, it makes the RED workflow for broadcast look like a fudge to a large base of would-be RED producers and editors. 1080p full-frame would open up considerably more people to using RED - whether you agree with their assessment or not.

Mention of full frame 1080p on the specs of the new cameras only confirms that RED feel the same way about this.

I realise this is slightly off-topic - however, I assume it's all part of the same technical issues to which this thread refers.

 

[Nir Shelter]

Another problem would also be related to heating. As it is now sampling the chip and processing it can result in very high temperatures. Adding an additional processor heavy stage before the footage gets stored onto media will add that much more to the already easily overheating body's rising temperatures.

 

[Radim Schreiber]

It would be useful to have 1080p down sampled 4k image right out of camera. This way we could record longer scenes on the drive and wouldn't have to go through lengthy computer processing.

I can see that technically this is challenging. CPU power necessary to downscale 4k footage on the fly would be huge and preserving RAW data from the chip might require different algorithm.

 

[jbeale]

This was discussed (heatedly) for some months about a year ago, and there was another energetic discussion before that. The upshot was (as I recall) Jim said it would take a special dedicated firmware build to do 1080p, and that it was not possible to have both 1080p scaled output or recording and 4k recording in the same firmware, due to a limitation of their hardware. Moreover he thought 1080p was a low priority and he wasn't especially interested in it himself ("I'll never use it") and he despite what people were saying, he didn't believe anyone else would actually use it either given that they'd have to give up 4k recording. So, perhaps 1080p is still in the queue but obviously Red is also busy doing other development, in the meanwhile.