Future of the Red Rocket?

[Joseph Mastantuono]

With the upcoming release of the RedRay, which can decode (unless I'm misunderstanding something) 96 frames of 4k .R3D per second (48fps in stereo) for 1500$, it seems a little ridiculous that the Red Rocket is still selling at 5K$ for what is seemingly an inferior piece of tech.

Is there a new version of the Red Rocket in the works? That's has more performance and or cheaper? essentially putting the innards of the RedRay on a PCIe card? Is there a reason why that wouldn't work / is stupid?

Personally I think the future is likely to be just that RED encode/decode leverages the GPU to do your de-bayering, but since that hasn't happened yet I wonder if there big tech hurdles for this?

Anyone out there better informed than me have any ideas?

 

[Arnaud Paris]

.R3D and .RED files are not the same, RedRay is made for .RED format (though also compatible with .MP4).

RedRocket has no alternative so far...

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

.REDs are a 2.5MB/s display codec.

.R3Ds are a raw recorded camera wavelet compressed format.

Worlds apart.

 

[Matt Ryan]

With the upcoming release of the RedRay, which can decode (unless I'm misunderstanding something) 96 frames of 4k .R3D per second (48fps in stereo) for 1500$, it seems a little ridiculous that the Red Rocket is still selling at 5K$ for what is seemingly an inferior piece of tech.

Is there a new version of the Red Rocket in the works? That's has more performance and or cheaper? essentially putting the innards of the RedRay on a PCIe card? Is there a reason why that wouldn't work / is stupid?

Personally I think the future is likely to be just that RED encode/decode leverages the GPU to do your de-bayering, but since that hasn't happened yet I wonder if there big tech hurdles for this?

Anyone out there better informed than me have any ideas?

.RED files are already encoded from the R3D's by your computer. You take the R3D's, encode them to .RED, then load into the player for playback. So your workstation is doing the encoding...

 

[Joseph Mastantuono]

Well I feel dumb. I usually don't miss things like this.

I'm going to have a GREAT TIME when I get clients that conflate the two constantly.

Still though. I feel like the red rocket is long in the tooth. Is there a future for that product line? Do we think that everything's going to just move to GPU Accelerated software decoding?

 

[jimhare]

The Red Rocket has made my business viable for the last 3+ years. Without it I simply couldn't offer the services I do. For that reason a $5k investment equates to nothing.

CPU power can not do what the Rocket does at this time. What I can do in 1/2 day would still take 1/2 week without it.

I'm not talking about editing or realtime playback, which are working pretty well now, but fully debayered, high res outputs. For this the Rocket continues to be a lifesaver.

 

[Steve Sherrick]

The Red Rocket has made my business viable for the last 3+ years. Without it I simply couldn't offer the services I do. For that reason a $5k investment equates to nothing.

CPU power can not do what the Rocket does at this time. What I can do in 1/2 day would still take 1/2 week without it.

I'm not talking about editing or realtime playback, which are working pretty well now, but fully debayered, high res outputs. For this the Rocket continues to be a lifesaver.

Agreed! Until something else comes along that can spit out footage from R3Ds at a faster rate, then this is the tool to get it done. Rendering for days/weeks is not an option for a lot of people. They would go out of business.

Having said that, I won't be disappointed if something new comes along at a lower price.

 

[Jason Rivera]

The Red Rocket has made my business viable for the last 3+ years. Without it I simply couldn't offer the services I do. For that reason a $5k investment equates to nothing.

CPU power can not do what the Rocket does at this time. What I can do in 1/2 day would still take 1/2 week without it.

I'm not talking about editing or realtime playback, which are working pretty well now, but fully debayered, high res outputs. For this the Rocket continues to be a lifesaver.

Do you mind elaborating a little on this because I was under the impression that the real time playback (in 4K) was equal to the fully debayered, high res output (meaning playing back 4K in realtime from an NLE timeline for example)?

At what stage in the post process are you referring to when you say "high res output?" Just trying to get a feel for the experience you've had with the RRocket. Thanks!

 

[Zach Swena]

I would not expect an update to the rocket until after they have solved the .red encode process.

The speed right now to compress to .RED files (via software) is pretty slow...

We are not sure where it will end up yet.. now that we have the image quality locked down they have just started on optimization and then being assisted by hardware.

The being assisted by hardware phrase makes me think that would be a part of any Rocket replacement or refresh, whether it be GPU acceleration or custom hardware. I seem to remember RED hinting about a software encoder using GPU acceleration to take some of the load off of the rocket also. My prediction is the rocket will be replaced with custom hardware for R3D debayer and .RED encoding that is also assisted by GPU for things that work good with it, probably within the next year or so.

 

[Terry VerHaar]

Do you mind elaborating a little on this because I was under the impression that the real time playback (in 4K) was equal to the fully debayered, high res output (meaning playing back 4K in realtime from an NLE timeline for example)?

At what stage in the post process are you referring to when you say "high res output?" Just trying to get a feel for the experience you've had with the RRocket. Thanks!

Think of .RED files as a playback codec like h.264 - very efficient playback but really suck to edit because of temporal compression (as much as anything). Meanwhile, R3Ds are like ProRes, terrific to edit with but not small enough to stream for playback. Not a perfect analogy but perhaps you get the idea. Dot- RED files are relatively small, R3Ds not so much.