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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

720P and 1080P... losers

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Stephen Webb said:
And I imagine that's probably the main reason for many who want to use B4's. And a perfectly good reason it is too, I was just wondering if there was any qualitative difference is all.
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We'll know shortly at the LART testing if there is a qualitative difference between B4 adaptor/2/3" HD lens setups and S16mm setups. My guess is that if the 2/3" HD lens is a good one (newer generation) matched against the results of a good S16mm lens, that results would be comparable.

There will be times for certain projects and production values, when shooting 2k, where I may choose a S16 lens over a B4/2/3" HD lens. I think for versatility sake (and revenue potential), the needs of each project should be analyzed individually - then the best equipment for that project chosen and available.
 
Jannard said:
I think recording these formats is a waste of time. I'm voting to delete them from the recording options. You can always "downrez" to get these, but shooting these formats seems counter-intuitive and a waste of FPGA space. Remember that shooting 2K REDCODE RAW is only about 7MB/sec. Maybe we should add a You Tube option? :-)

What thinkest thou?

Jim
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I will drop to shoot HD compressed or uncompressed in 720P or 1080P either.

There is only one way Shoot 4K REDCODE or 2K.

As all we here are RED one holders , and Why we are using the nearly 5K sensor to make just HD formats ?

I 'm with you JIM, not supporting you but myself as an Independence Content Creator.

Cheers,

STEWART
FOUNDER and 4K/2K Content maker
HKG / CHINA / Thailand
 
Andrew Young said:
Red is the first cam in a long time that makes sense to me as an owner/operator precisely because it accommodates most formats. It would be a real bummer after investing all this money in Red to have to go out and rent an HD camera, because that's the format that the client wants and I don't have time to convert my Red footage.
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Well said, and true for myself as well. 2K@96fps scaled would be fantastic, cropped would be acceptable, but losing 1080p will minimize the jobs I can put the camera on.

As others have said, we need to know time estimates for various RedCine transcodes to really make decisions about this.

C'mon, RedTeam! Chime in already!
 
I know many of my clients will want to walk away with a hard drive. Currently the majority of them also want the footage in 1080 (but some still use 720). Downrezing in the field may be an issue unless it can be done really quickly. If I can't supply my clients with what they need when they want it, the camera becomes a liability, not a money maker for my business. Losing these formats may force me to use other cameras...which would be a major bummer. My bread and butter clients are EFP, doc and some commercial. I won't be making major motion pictures with this camera...I'll be making a living.
 
getken said:
I know many of my clients will want to walk away with a hard drive.
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Isn't that funny? I remember when the HVX was debuting, a lot of people were freaking out about the client "demanding a tape at the end of the day." If they're already comfortable with/expecting footage on hard drives, perhaps they can deal with 4K REDCODE RAW footage vs. presampled RGB clips. One would think they'd want the best quality masters they could get anyway.

I know this will take time and it's certainly not a blanket solution... but it is pretty amusing to me how many clients seem to have gotten used to hard drives in a very short time when that was a big issue just a couple of years ago.
 
Haakon beat me to it... But that's exactly the point I was going to raise. This whole discussion came about with the HVX and P2 workflow and clients "demanding a tape at the end of the day". You know what I had some clients like that too... They learned to cope once they saw the improvement of 720p over regular DV.

Sure, there are ENG type situations or time-crunch issues where the footage just has to be handed over 10 minutes ago, but I see solutions that work for that too. We haven't got to test all the intricacies of these workflow issues yet so we don't know. But there's lots of factors to consider here... The REDCODE QT system creates real-time proxies in 1K and 2K res, provided the system can handle it. Doesn't it seem reasonable that on a capable system, a 1080p or 720p down-res of 4K or 2K could be created in real-time or even faster? Like with a P2 workflow, it's VERY RARE that clients actually get handed P2 cards as many got so used to with DV tape. They have to wait for the footage to be transferred to HD for them in most cases. Are you going to just hand over a RED DRIVE or a handful of CF cards or a RED RAM to a client? I suppose that will happen if the client brings his own record media or pays a refundable security deposit to hold on to mine.

There are lots of possible solutions here, but for now I think a lot of the "gotta get the footage out ASAP" crowd is over reacting a bit. Just as what happened with the HVX and P2, it has turned out to be no big deal. 2 years ago, we were looking forward to 720p on P2 cards and people were stressing over the same things, combined with "can my computer even edit 720p?".

The way I look at it is, the client can cope with the lag time to deliver a quality product. After all, in most cases, it's usually just the client being a pompous ass rather than actually needing that footage right then. But if that need arises and the client wants it right now instead of waiting for full quality, I'll be happy to shoot with my HVX in DV mode and hand over a 480i DV master and still charge him the same rate.
 
We are a small/boutique, mostly broadcast production company (Red res. no. 271). Unlike some dp's on this forum most everything we shoot we edit. On occassion we hand over tapes to clients to post elsewhere but not typically. So we are not handing over various format deliverables regularly upon completion of the shoot. We're not making movies, mostly tv spots. While we shoot 720 with a HD100, 99% of our work still goes out SD. Most of our work is broadcast and in our market good old analog beta sp is still the most common and preferred deliverable. But that will change eventually.

So when Jim first mentioned losing 720/1080 I was a bit suprised. After all this is the camera that originally was designed to scale from 720 to 4K, allowing and enabling companies like ours to grow with the scalability of the camera.

With that said I took some time to really think about this before posting.

For years facilities like ours have chased both the film look and higher resolution. We've dabbled with 16mm, bought film-look software, rented varicams, purchased lossy HDV cameras, etc. And while some of these are good alternatives, it's still not the best it can be. 35mm quality and depth of field is the gold standard that many of us have dreamt of working with for years. When Red was announced it seemed I could soon have that holy grail in my very own hands without having to dodge boulders and bandits.

Without 720/1080 we would now approach everything we shoot at 2K. If the Red codec is as efficient as I've read, even at 2K it seems we get the best of both worlds. A very high quality 2K image with all the depth and clarity we've only dreamed of and a codec that hopefully is easily extensible and useable. And while a high over/under crank speed would be nice, that is very secondary to our work in comparison to the extreme quality that 2K would provide.

If supported in Final Cut I would hope we could import the 2k RedCode footage just like some of you do now with DvcPro HD100 P2 clips. Hopefully our drives that now support uncompressed SD and compressed HD will work just fine with the Red codec at 2K. So we then edit away in a 2k timeline and in our case let our Kona cards deal with any downconvert issues for 720/1080/SD. Or alternatively use the Red software suite to convert 2K to 1080/720/SD prior to post.

Is this an uneducated or naive outlook?...am I mising anything?
 
CraigFPG said:
Is this an uneducated or naive outlook?...am I mising anything?
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Craig,
NOt naive at all.

I am in a very similar situation with the same tools. You could work in a 2K timeline but that is still many pixels to push. 4K REDCODE will allow you to work in 2k or 1k proxies (for a sample 1K proxy resolution have a look at the crossing the line clip). So, for the 35mm depth of field you are looking for you could shoot 4K (using the full sensor) and then edit with a 1K proxy of the 4K file. The codec does the down convert with the help of on board computer CPU power. (sort of like prorez, it's a hardware dependent codec)

You could then have the Kona board (provided all of this is FCP enabled and KONA drivers are updated, which will happen) do all of the HD or SD downconverts to what ever format HD or SD format you like.

I'd have to do some digging about how the Kona will handle the down conversion but I imagine it is not dissimilar to any other QT codec you might use.

David
 
The other thing that may help allay fears for clients not getting a deliverable in their usual format, is to have RedCine available to them at no cost, so that they can have the highest quality master and then do their own adjustments to output their chosen format, IF RedCode isn't available to natively edit in their chosen NLE.

My planned workflow on set for clients is to have a laptop making straight copies of the footage shot on RedDrive or CF cards onto a normal SATA 3.5" HDD encased in one of those silicone sleeves for protection. This is then handed to them at the end of the day along with (hopefully) a copy of RedCine on CD-R, after which they can do what they like with the footage as they now have the original "negative" in the best possible format. As a company we will be creating an additional backup copy on to our own hard drives for storage at our office, just in case of the event that something happens to the client's footage in transit or in post. I'm fairly certain that most producers will see this workflow as beneficial and not get all up in arms over not having a tape per se.

The only part still needing confirmation for me is the status of RedCine and whether or not it will be freely available to hand out to clients, but I have a feeling Red will see the benefit of this and not make it exclusive to only Red camera owners.
 
I'm afraid this thread will be the most popular since the genesis but it will end with the poorest rate ever seen. It already was 4, later 3 and now 2 stars.

Hey, I swear I didn't vote there! :)
 
As people state, the fps is the issue, not the rez.

Just did a greenscreen gig where I would much rather have some 720 @ 120 to key elements in. They would still be full rez in the finished comp.

720 could still be pretty usefull, even for 4k work.

But, like everybody and his grandma said:
2k @ 120 fps ain't that bad either...

Gunleik
 
Hey Gunleik, you found the way to home? :) Check your mail = PM box ;-)
 
your forgetting that you lose dof

your forgetting that you lose dof

CraigFPG said:
35mm quality and depth of field is the gold standard that many of us have dreamt of working with for years. When Red was announced it seemed I could soon have that holy grail in my very own hands without having to dodge boulders and bandits.

...am I mising anything?
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Craig, your forgetting that you lose dof. 2K is S16 size.
 
I know there's a lot of good discussion in here, but we have 4 or 5 threads going and this one seems to be slowing down. So.... Closed.
 
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