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Epic-w 8k downscaled to 4K Prores Question?

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Rich Miro

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New to the community just received my epic-w stoked. Anywho, let's say I wanted to shoot in straight 8k downscaled to 4K pro res(no r3d file). We know that I can shoot at a max 30fps @4k. The specs on Red says I can shoot at 120fps @2k in prores. how is this achieved? Is it only cropped? Even cropped @ 2kws prores will only do 90fps. Is this a feature to come ?
 
Jarek Zabczynski said:
You can't doing 120fps in 8k mode, even if only recording to prores. Switch to 6k or less for more framerate options.
Click to expand...

Thanks of the info. It doesn't make sense why the cam can downscale prores to 4k and 2k @ 30fps max, but all the sudden it has trouble @ high fps. I'm hoping they will release something like that in future updates. To me it seems like a programming issue not necessarily wether or not the cam can handle it.
 
Rich Miro said:
New to the community just received my epic-w stoked. Anywho, let's say I wanted to shoot in straight 8k downscaled to 4K pro res(no r3d file). We know that I can shoot at a max 30fps @4k. The specs on Red says I can shoot at 120fps @2k in prores. how is this achieved? Is it only cropped? Even cropped @ 2kws prores will only do 90fps. Is this a feature to come ?
Click to expand...

I don't think it is a camera limitation. More like a industrial mass scale licensing issue with Apple folks. Maybe Apple is asking a premium dollar amount per seat.
 
Neil Abeynayake said:
I don't think it is a camera limitation. More like a industrial mass scale licensing issue with Apple folks. Maybe Apple is asking a premium dollar amount per seat.
Click to expand...

I think it's a camera/data limitation-to not limit r3d + ProRes as much.
If there's a "premium" then Atomos must have a great deal to record 2k 240fps with the Inferno, and Convergent Design must be splitting a Apple "premium" with the other licenses to shoot the same.
 
Chris Kennedy said:
I think it's a camera/data limitation-to not limit r3d + ProRes as much.
If there's a "premium" then Atomos must have a great deal to record 2k 240fps with the Inferno, and Convergent Design must be splitting a Apple "premium" with the other licenses to shoot the same.
Click to expand...

I will have to agree with Neil. I don't think it's a Camera Limitation. What we are talking about isn't shooting r3d+prores simultaneously, but ProRes only. We are talking about a downscaled 8k res to 4k or 2k at a higher frame rate. The camera has the power to do it. The question is, why isn't it being done? I think it's a programming software issue or possibly Neil's suggestion that it's a licensing issue.
 
Rich, I think there's a confusion here about how the camera shoots ProRes. There's actually 2 frame rate limits at play here - there's the ProRes codec max fps, and the camera RAW max fps at the given source resolution - and you can only record using the lower value of the two.

The actual 4K ProRes recording limitation is 30fps, regardless of the source resolution. For 2K, it's 120fps.

Then there's the camera's RAW max fps (limited to the maximum readout speed of the sensor and internal data rate of the body). The Epic-W cannot shoot more than 30fps in 8K in RAW - so even downscaled to a 2K ProRes which is capable of 120fps, you can still only record at 30fps. Just because you're recording to a 2K codec, doesn't mean the camera can magically read 8K pixels at 120fps.

If you change the source resolution to, say, 6K FF, and set a higher framerate than 30fps, ProRes recording will be disabled. Found out the hard way.
 
The Epic-W cannot shoot in RAW more than 30fps at 8K FF. So, if it cannot do raw it wont be doing prores or anything else more than that. Now the Weapon can actually go further (60-75fps), and even then it cannot generate more than 30fps at 4K in prores. So there's probably some hardware limitation, since I don't think they would be limiting their higher end camera (weapon). And there's also DNxHR which can go only up to 30fps, and I don't think Avid is as aggressive as apple in its licensing.
 
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Just realised that it could be a hardware limitation also. Based on this bitrate calculator, 60fps 422 is already 284 MB/s, which is already above the Epic-W's max data rate (275 MB/s). And that's not even including 422HQ which might potentially exceed Weapon's 300 MB/s.

Bitrate Calculator 4K 60fps
 
I don't think it's hardware Homer. the data rate is misleading because even at 1080p it's really high. again, I don't think it's a hardware limitation but a software one.
 
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