Good enough...

[Nick Grow]

I'm sorry I wasn't around when Jim was awake to ask some questions. Shame on me in prefering to rest this last night!

I hope you excuse my ignorance on this, but in Jim's posts he mentioned a lot of times the word "Freudiana". What does that stands for? Is the movie Jim is directing? :lurk5:

My theory is that Jim was making references to the theories of Sigmund Freud when he cited Freudiana.

 

[Steven Caesare]

This is pretty interesting to me in regards of buying a Scarlet. Although storage is cheap nowadays buying a few Terabytes of harddrives to back up a project sounds a bit intimidating to me.

How much storage space would one hour of RAW Scarlet 3K footage take? Approximately of course and depending on compression settings used but I can't even guess to put it in the ballpark of 1TB or 1GB

Assuming Scarlet is 12 bit, a second of uncompressed raw would be just under 192MB. 11GB a minute. 688GB/hour.

Alot.

-sc

 

[Steven Caesare]

There are some incredible projects planning on shooting EPIC... the highest level.

I have to tell you that EPIC will likely been known as the "tipping point".

Freudiana.

Jim

Freudiana.

The collections of Einstein that inspred him?

-sc

 

[Tim Morten]

There are a lot of horses in this race, but my money is on the horse whose team is passionate enough to be up answering questions from fans/customers at 3:30am. I believe that kind of passion goes beyond mere communication: people who care that much make a materially better product.

There's been a lot of talk along the lines of "can't we all get along", and yes, I think that we can. But like many here, my money is going to go to only one camera company at the end of the day. That's why this discussion of "good enough" matters to me.

The only other camera in this market that is real right now is Alexa, so like many here, that's what I'm most interested in comparing. On paper, Alexa is inferior in every way, except DR where it's comparable, and ProRes which is not part of my workflow. When I say "every way" I mean resolution, frame-rate, modularity, weight/size, and cost (to name a few). And when I say inferior, I mean inferior in ways that are truly meaningful to me: less detail, less ability to overcrank, less adaptability to diverse shooting circumstances, more cumbersome to deal with, and substantially more expensive.

Paper specs matter less than image. Fair enough. But I have a hard time believing that the image of a lower resolution camera with an unknown raw format (is WB baked in or not?) is going to look better. Could there be some secret sauce in Arri's image? Perhaps. No one can truly judge without shooting side by side, but honestly, there is no reason to expect that there will be at this point. Expected best-case is that Arri's image looks almost as good.

For those who feel that ProRes output is the greatest thing since Megan Fox: are you willing to accept all these other compromises AND pay two to three times as much to avoid a transcode? Wow. I'm not. But then I don't need to transcode before I edit: there are workflows available that offer R3D with no compromise, and frankly I don't miss Final Cut.

Arri has a deserved reputation for making great cameras. However, based on what I know so far, Alexa is not a competitive product for MY dollars. Red is an upstart. Red doesn't have 100 years of history. But Red's degree of passion is generating products which I believe will be VERY hard to beat. Maybe when Jim and company take that well-deserved break there will be a lull for others to catch up. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Just my opinion...

- Tim

 

[Felix van Oost]

Is 4K the way to go? Definately. But I think it's only a stepping stone for larger resolutions. The real question is, when will enough be enough?

What I would really like to see is the resolution for web-based content distribution increased. I've been trying to push 1080p to my viewers but for many it doesn't seem to matter. YouTube and Vimeo now support 1080p, but at relatively low bitrates so your content can't really 'shine'. There's not really much reason for 720p anymore - internet download speeds and storage space aren't major problems anymore, and although not many people have 1080p screens, almost everyone has a screen bigger than 1280 x 720.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

There is something very appealing to me about a very high resolution vision-filling image. 4k is one of the steps towards that as is higher fps. I'm thinking sorta beyond-home-IMAX kind of look. It me, the immersive qualities of such a moving image would exceed current stereo, and not need glasses.

Graeme

 

[Daniel Browning]

I'm not even sure how you'd burn white balance into a RAW CFA image since, by definition, it's not even a color image yet. You'd think only an RGB image could then be white-balanced.

That would be common sense, but the unfortunate reality is that applying white balance before writing the raw file can and does happen. For example, Nikon boosts the red and blue pixels digitally by about 1/3 stop in all of their DSLRS, clipping red/blue highlights (if any) and increasing posterization in the process. In most images (e.g. daylight), this makes the images closer to white balance, where green is often a full stop higher than the red/blue pixels anyway.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

I'm not even sure how you'd burn white balance into a RAW CFA image since, by definition, it's not even a color image yet. You'd think only an RGB image could then be white-balanced.

Because the white balance operation is independent gain on the individual RGB channels, it's perfectly possible to do it on RAW Bayer CFA data.

I can't, however, understand why you'd want to do this before recording. Surely the whole point of RAW is to leave such an operation until later, and just record intent via metadata.

Graeme

 

[Michael Brennan]

There is something very appealing to me about a very high resolution vision-filling image. 4k is one of the steps towards that as is higher fps. I'm thinking sorta beyond-home-IMAX kind of look. It me, the immersive qualities of such a moving image would exceed current stereo, and not need glasses.

Graeme

Here here.
99% of the time when we see something interesting we want to have a closer look.
Availability of large screens will drive the next phase of camera development.

Wall filling, immersive screens may not have a place in a narrative for decades, given the conservative nature of the development this genre, but for everything else....

Mike Brennan

 

[Robert Frank]

There is something very appealing to me about a very high resolution vision-filling image. 4k is one of the steps towards that as is higher fps. I'm thinking sorta beyond-home-IMAX kind of look. It me, the immersive qualities of such a moving image would exceed current stereo, and not need glasses.

Graeme

I couldn't agree more.

One comment that keeps coming up when showing people hi-rez photos was that they looked 3D and lifelike.

I want my motion images to have that same effect.

In my opinion it goes like this 5K>4K>3D>2K(HD)

 

[Michael Hastings]

There is something very appealing to me about a very high resolution vision-filling image. 4k is one of the steps towards that as is higher fps. I'm thinking sorta beyond-home-IMAX kind of look. It me, the immersive qualities of such a moving image would exceed current stereo, and not need glasses.

Graeme

We've talked about this a little before, but I totally agree. A year or so ago I bought the Planet Earth DVD set for my BluRay. There was a shot in there where they set up some kind of vertical track among the trees in the rain forest and I swear it felt 3D - and only 1080P. (and just started a pretty active high frame rate thread yesterday.)

I am excited about eventually shooting my nature and underwater stuff in 9K - 645 (already bought a nice used 645 superwide lens!). One of the huge tipping points here is that jumping from pretty good (S16mm), really good (s35mm) to super good (IMAX) no longer means exponentially higher film costs and equipment size (check out the imax underwater housing-which besides being extremely cumbersome needs a film change every few minutes). Switching from Epic S35 to epic 645 in our underwater housing may not require any change at all - but definitely won't change the overall size - which is smaller than a housing for a Sony Z1.

And the same goes for backpacking a 645 into the wilderness - not really different from the S35 - and just a little more weight than a prosumer camcorder.

Great days ahead.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Assuming Scarlet is 12 bit, a second of uncompressed raw would be just under 192MB. 11GB a minute. 688GB/hour.

I'm coming up with over 26GB/min for uncompressed 5K2:1 @ 12bit....

 

[M Most]

Well as a relatively vendor neutral Data Manager, (I work with Sony, RED, Viper etc) its because you have people like Grahame who make REDCODE, I think many would agree that its not really the RED One that makes RED very special, its REDCODE. There is nothing like it in the industry at the moment.

While Redcode is certainly well evolved now, and has proven to be very effective (much more so with the M/X, due to the significantly lower noise content), I would point out that Cineform RAW is not only "like it," it is almost exactly like it, with the only exception being that nobody has designed a 4K capable camera around it yet. Of course, there may be a good reason for that, perhaps the ability to encode at real time with a larger frame is not quite there. But within the 2K world of Silicon Imaging, Cineform RAW gives you just about everything Redcode does, albeit in a slightly different way and with some different parameters.

Not criticizing, just offering some fact checking.

 

[Elsie N]

There are a lot of horses in this race, but my money is on the horse whose team is passionate enough to be up answering questions from fans/customers at 3:30am. I believe that kind of passion goes beyond mere communication: people who care that much make a materially better product.

There's been a lot of talk along the lines of "can't we all get along", and yes, I think that we can. But like many here, my money is going to go to only one camera company at the end of the day. That's why this discussion of "good enough" matters to me.

The only other camera in this market that is real right now is Alexa, so like many here, that's what I'm most interested in comparing. On paper, Alexa is inferior in every way, except DR where it's comparable, and ProRes which is not part of my workflow. When I say "every way" I mean resolution, frame-rate, modularity, weight/size, and cost (to name a few). And when I say inferior, I mean inferior in ways that are truly meaningful to me: less detail, less ability to overcrank, less adaptability to diverse shooting circumstances, more cumbersome to deal with, and substantially more expensive.

Paper specs matter less than image. Fair enough. But I have a hard time believing that the image of a lower resolution camera with an unknown raw format (is WB baked in or not?) is going to look better. Could there be some secret sauce in Arri's image? Perhaps. No one can truly judge without shooting side by side, but honestly, there is no reason to expect that there will be at this point. Expected best-case is that Arri's image looks almost as good.

For those who feel that ProRes output is the greatest thing since Megan Fox: are you willing to accept all these other compromises AND pay two to three times as much to avoid a transcode? Wow. I'm not. But then I don't need to transcode before I edit: there are workflows available that offer R3D with no compromise, and frankly I don't miss Final Cut.

Arri has a deserved reputation for making great cameras. However, based on what I know so far, Alexa is not a competitive product for MY dollars. Red is an upstart. Red doesn't have 100 years of history. But Red's degree of passion is generating products which I believe will be VERY hard to beat. Maybe when Jim and company take that well-deserved break there will be a lull for others to catch up. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Just my opinion...

- Tim

Tim, I pretty much agree with all you said, and will only offer this one additional thought:

If Sony or Canon or Arri or any other camera company should catch Jim fliying his jet upside down under a bridge (which is illegal) and actually have it on video as evidence to be used against him... and if they should come to him and say that he's going to go to a Federal Penitentiary (where conjugal visits are not allowed) unless he turns Red Digital Cinema Camera company over to them, what do you think would happen to the program. Would they fire everyone there and bring in their own people? Would they start charging for camera firmware updates? Would Redcine be spun off to another division as a boxed for sale app?

In other words, would this camera company fall back into the pack?

Without the organization behind it, current RED cameras would be frozen in time like the '56 Buicks running around today in Castro's Cuba.

 

[Meryem Ersoz]

In other words, would this camera company fall back into the pack?

Without the organization behind it, current RED cameras would be frozen in time like the '56 Buicks running around today in Castro's Cuba.

Actually...something far worse would happen. The entire camera industry would return to its trickleware business model. Industry-wide innovation would slow because there would be no one pushing the boundaries of what is possible in imaging or forcing these kinds of price breaks. Your EPIC-X would be a safer investment than ever.

 

[Shawn Nelson]

Since we bought RED Studios Hollywood, the plans for Las Vegas have changed and scaled down.

Jim

That's an interesting point. I presume you still have the 80 acres? I had read this article http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/jun/04/commission-gives-blessing-80-acre-movie-compound/

I'm curious your changes, was Las Vegas ultimately less than accomodating? Or did you realize that "Hollywood in Las Vegas" wasn't in your best interest? I still really dig the idea of a "Red HQ" like Nike's HQ here in Beaverton, that place is a mecca of sports, to have a comparable place for Red and cinema would be just awesome :thumbsup:

 

[AL ZACHARIAS]

agreed!

agreed!

My background is as a 25 year veteran music recording engineer, and like many of us, I've alway been about the quality of sound and the recording medium.

The quality standard that is the audio CD is far below what is possible with digital audio. Every attempt to to introduce a higher quality consumer deliverable (mainly DVD-A) has been met with consumer indifference.

When people had their music collection on cassette tapes, it was not difficult to convince them to purchase the CD, because the benefits were obvious. Hardly anyone perceived DVD-A as being enough of an improvement in spite of greatly improved sonics and 5.1 surround. It didn't commercially matter, and in fact the way music is sold (or not sold) today is in the form of the online MP3 which sounds even worse than the CD. I watch TV shows online.

I see this repeated in the slow acceptance of Blu-ray. I may rent or purchase a new Blu-ray, but most people are not likely to replace 10 years of DVDs.

This shouldn't keep us from using the best acquisition formats possible. But history tells me there is a point from a consumer standpoint that is good enough.

STeve

That's pretty much what I thought - except for one point. As a former addict to sonic excellence and music club owner equipped with an immense sound system I would say what matters to some trained people is an exceptional perception of quality. And these people don't represent the masses for which commercial products are made.

But - You can decide whether you want to deliver what might be good enough for others, or want to achieve results that you can discern from mediocre ones. Watching close, listening focused is a training for your senses. It's like playing. And you're getting better.

In the audio world there are qualities that seem to go beyond audio. I heard systems where I literally watched out for the sounds, because they were like 3-dimensional plastic shapes in the room. And these systems were made by people with a passion. That - I hope - is what RED is about.

In the visual word the obvious limit for perceivable quality is the human eye. And when discussing about SD, HD, 2k, 4k bear in mind this limit! Good enough for what? A kelloggs commercial, a web movie, an indiscernible representation of reality, or your next project?

I just spent a month in India with a Canon 5dII and Nikon primes capturing some truly indian moments. Also shot pictures with it. Now I would be happy, if I would have taken a Red with me, and for the pictures my old Nikon F4 with a good positive film.

Al

 

[Martin Weiss]

Jim's posts he mentioned a lot of times the word "Freudiana". What does that stands for?

Cough, cough, google, cough.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Freudiana

 

[Jordi Figueras]

Already find it in "Wikipedia". It was suposed to be the eleventh album from Alan Parsons Project. It became a musical around the 90s so... Is Jim doing the movie? :spam: (just kidding!)

Just didn't get the time to write back, sorry and thank you, anyway.

 

[Rick Burnett]

That's pretty much what I thought - except for one point. As a former addict to sonic excellence and music club owner equipped with an immense sound system I would say what matters to some trained people is an exceptional perception of quality. And these people don't represent the masses for which commercial products are made.

The problem is, with SACD and DVDA there were many blind test studies and people did not chose SACD or DVDA as being better in these cases. The difference was so subtle to the average listener that the cost differential was not worth it. From tape, the sonic difference was huge to the untrained ear.

I know people who have paid $1k for a power cable from the wall to their amp. I also know that the wiring in the wall is standard copper code. I flat out told them they are out of their mind.

It's the same reason I don't buy monster cables. When they released gold plated optical cables, that was it, I lost what little (and I mead little) respect I had for the company.

The same thing is true with video. The difference between 480p and 1080p is HUGE. I have NEVER met a person that didn't jaw drop when they saw the difference.

Having never seen 4K in person on a 4K LCD, I can't say how it would look, and I think a lot of people here have not seem 4K on a home bound panel either. My gut feeling is that it will look absolutely amazing given how I found ePaper to look amazing in terms of compared to reading text on conventional LCD panels. Until these things are readily available for comparison, most people can't make a factual decision.