Rocket features

[JonathanF]

Jim,

I'm really glad to see the Rocket coming in the near future. This will make our life much easier when posting.

One area we're interested in improving in our post workflow is when we go to compositing or other VFX post and need to convert footage to a format/gamut for VFX. Typically we use OpenEXR and then send it all back in either exr or dpx when we final the shots.

With a full Red production we now have an edl that's got entirely R3D footage conformed for timing with the exception of the exr or dpx data which is in a different format, etc.

What would be nice is if the Rocket could be used to convert the data BACK to R3D so we can avoid the issue where we're going to have playback hiccups in grading when we go from Rocket accellerated playback of R3D to a sequence of exr's or dpx files.

This would make life really, really nice and it seems the Rocket gives you everything you need to protect the codec etc.

Any chance of such a feature? I think you's make a lot of people really happy if it could be done.

Another question, will the Rocket have a read ahead buffer large enough to allow real time transitions? If now will you be able to put two Rocket cards in systems where you need multi stream playback capability (stereo comes to mind)?

Cheers!

:J

 

[Brook Willard]

How could RGB data be recompressed into RAW data? Or are you simply thinking of adding an additional layer of compression to make a "REDCODE RGB" esque format?

 

[Darren Orange]

Technically, I think what he is asking for would work. I'm likely completely wrong here but you should be able to take an RGB image and reverse the algorithm. If that is possible then you would be compressing the image back to its original format, but i seriously doubt it would ended up as "clear". I don't think its as simple as 2 + 2 = 4 then 4 - 2 = 2

But I could be wrong, and expect that I am to some degree not completely correct about the logic behind this.

 

[Curran Giddens]

The "REDCODE RGB" for RED RAY needs to be compressed somewhere. Would be great to have the ability to do much of the processing on the RED ROCKET. But I don't care much about doing it in realtime, as long as it is the best quality possible for the codec. Like the nVidia CX can do H.264 encoding in realtime, but the quality isn't as good as it could be.... (from what I've heard).

 

[JonathanF]

If you don't apply any debayer on the way out and only ship camera RGB to the conversion, going from RAW (camera RGB) to exr and back should not be a problem as near as I can sort it.

We've been doing this stuff for years with other formats. The only problem would be if you applied filtering on output when converting to EXR.

If your intention is to go back to RAW/R3D it should just be a matter of applying a color transform matrix to the output (say to linear) and then reverse it when going back to R3D.

Remember exr is 1/2 or full precision floating point so it can easily handle any data coming off the chip with room to spare.

:J

 

[Ramona Howard]

Like the nVidia CX can do H.264 encoding in realtime, but the quality isn't as good as it could be.... (from what I've heard).

This can have nothing to do with the actual Nvidia Quadros, rather the code written for the CUDA platform for the Nvidias... Quality can be quite amazing if you know what your doing.

That is the beauty about the CUDA platform, it does nothing to the bits, if you don't want AND it is all expandable. So if you can't get enough processing off one card, you strap two, three, etc....together.

Flexible, expandable and commodity (which means affordable). Heck they have $169 Nvidaia Cuda boards (won't do h.264 in realtime, but non real-time, excellent, sure.....

i.e there is code available "freely" to do h.264 within CUDA, not great, tweak it and you have great

*The have boards with 240 cores on them, making lots of processes possible in real-time.

Cheers,
Ramona

 

[JonathanF]

Yes, but Red is also protecting the codec. It's encrypted. So they are likely using the Rocket (guess here) to do all the heavy lifting when decoding the stream in addition to debayer.

If you watch your CPU now you'll see decoding the encrypted stream really whacks the CPU, this is likely the big issue when trying to do RT IO with R3D. But with the Rocket this issue likely just goes away.

What we are hoping for is to be able to both decode and encode. If we can get encoding we're going to rework our non-fiction pipeline for editorial and color timing to entirely work in R3D, especially after VFX.

One show we are doing now has a LOT of VFX in it and it's a pain when we reconform. Half of it's exr (all the VFX shots out of compositing), the other half R3D. It's really hard to stay fluid when grading wen the formats are mixed like this. It's also a pain because they are in different color spaces (but we can resolve this with a transform on output from comp). We could easily optimize the pipeline if we could get all our data back to R3D.

Cheers,

:J

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

There's been off and on mention of a REDCODE RGB or similar codec as a working format. This is what you're looking for. I'm sure the Rocket card will provide acceleration for more than just decoding REDCODE RAW camera files. I'd imagine that it will also accelerate encoding to supported formats, DPX, TIFF, EXR sequences, etc..

I guess we'll have to wait for all the specs to be officially announced, but I think the Rocket card is going to be a big deal for most peoples' workflows.

 

[Steven Caesare]

Out of curiosity, what leads you to believe the Rocket will accelerate other stuff?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Out of curiosity, what leads you to believe the Rocket will accelerate other stuff?

What leads you to believe that it will not?

I'm not expecting it to accelerate everything. However, I see acceleration of image sequences as a primary function that most any decent accelerator card will handle -- DPX, EXR, TIFF. Aside from that, it should accelerate all REDCODE formats, presumably upcoming RGB formats that have been hinted at.

...Would be nice if it does more, but we shall see...

 

[Steven Caesare]

The omission of any mention of accelerating besides REDCode, and the explicit statement that the Rocket should help anything using the RED SDK.

Perhaps other 3rd part app vendors could provide explicit interfaces in their code to utilize the hardware, but that would seem to be pure speculation, and down the road.

This is strictly IMO, but I suspect that this think is leveraging the ASIC development work the RED has done with the new camera platforms... which wold be rather specialzed and not necessarily applicable to other general codecs. (think debayering).

Of course, I'm not real smart and could be completely wrong.

 

[JonathanF]

What we want is a working format that allows us to conform for color grading with a common format. R3D would be our first choice, ESPECIALLY with the Rocket coming out soon.

Right now, when VFX shots are involved, we have to output to linear exr, which is a different color gamut than the ungraded R3D files in our edit (largely because the renderers like mental and renderman operate in linear space). If it wasn't for the VFX shots, we'd just conform the R3D's, but life's not that simple.

Problem is when you go from R3D to exr in the timeline you're going to have serious playback performance issues when you hit the exr sequence in your timeline.

Being able to convert the exr's back to R3D would eliminate this altogether and make life a lot nicer.

:J