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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 :)

Is Red Really 4K?

laguun said:
In one thing ikegami is correct: red doesn´t supported 4k10bit RGB editing, but only 2k8bit RGB or 2KfloatYUV editing as of now, which is limited by Apple Final cut pro. The realtime 4k editing/finishing systems (as iQ/Pablo or dvs clipster) and 4k10bit RGB softwares (as Adobe Premiere) aren´t supported as of yet.
Click to expand...

Oh? I would never claim SCRATCH is an offline editing system (it isn't) but it is realtime 4K finishing... at 32 bit float RGB.

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA
 
What's JJs stance on this?

Everything I've seen from the red is far better than any other camera to date. Even if it was really wasn't 4K it produces better images than film according to visual tests done before release and even now as we are seeing on a daily basis. People are just upset that their camera can't get the quality the Red is producing. Honestly, the Viper and Genesis are out of a Job once the kinks are worked out.
 
mezmo said:
Hi IBloom,
So you will have to render out at some point a 4K DPX, or other
4K flavoured file for final finish of the project. How do you plan on doing
this and on what hardware?
Cheers Mezmo
Click to expand...

You may never have to go to 4K DPX. If you final destination is a DVD or HDDVD these uncompressed files might never exist. The system can render, downrez and output. Scratch is the first to natively support redcode, others will follow.

In any case you won't be able to do 4K DPX in realtime on a standard system. But you can most likely do the entire finishing process without using uncompressed 4K, even if your deliverable is for a film recorder.

A 90 minute feature at 4K RGB should fit on a 2 TB drive. These are costing around $700 at the apple store on 5th Ave Manhattan. (they are open 24 hours per day)

Either way, just remmember, this all happens after picture lock. At that point my feeling is anything is doable.

IBloom
 
I chuckle a little at the thought of any non pro doing a 2k dpx conform let alone a 4k dpx conform. Also Graeme yes it is much more expensive. IF you 4k out to film it takes longer on an Arri laser recorder, and if you have any intentions of digitally projecting 4k at the moment, well thats a terribbly expensive proposition as well. VFX, Render time, even your own debayer is faster at 2k. Thats time I have to charge for, and do.
 
Jeff Brue said:
I chuckle a little at the thought of any non pro doing a 2k dpx conform let alone a 4k dpx conform.
Click to expand...

What do you define as a non pro? If you mean somebody who normally works with a DV camcorder in iMovie I'd agree. If you mean somebody who works professionally editing SD and HD video, but normally only gets film material telecined on tape and delivers on tape, I'm not so sure. Of course I say that because I fall into the second category :)

It is perfectly possible to do a 2k DPX conform in Color. I don't think I'd really want to try it for a feature length project, but I'd be willing to give it a go for a commercial, or even a short. Of course you need to get your monitoring properly calibrated, and work very closely with the people doing the actual film out, but it would be possible.
 
luki said:
Oh? I would never claim SCRATCH is an offline editing system (it isn't) but it is realtime 4K finishing... at 32 bit float RGB.

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA
Click to expand...


Now i am confused - for 4k realtime, you need 4*DVI or 8*HD-SDI (as clipster) and i was under the impression that scratch can only handle 4k data in rt? How would one attach a T220 or a Sony SRX 4K to a clipster?
 
laguun said:
Now i am confused - for 4k realtime, you need 4*DVI or 8*HD-SDI (as clipster) and i was under the impression that scratch can only handle 4k data in rt? How would one attach a T220 or a Sony SRX 4K to a clipster?
Click to expand...

laguun said:
The realtime 4k editing/finishing systems (as iQ/Pablo or dvs clipster) and 4k10bit RGB softwares (as Adobe Premiere) aren´t supported as of yet.
Click to expand...

I was just responding to your original statement that realtime 4K editing/finishing systems aren't supported as of yet. Projection and how you actually look at 4K is a separate discussion.

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA
 
Nick Shaw said:
If you mean somebody who works professionally editing SD and HD video, but normally only gets film material telecined on tape and delivers on tape, I'm not so sure. Of course I say that because I fall into the second category :)

It is perfectly possible to do a 2k DPX conform in Color. I don't think I'd really want to try it for a feature length project, but I'd be willing to give it a go for a commercial, or even a short.
Click to expand...

Nick,

Of course you could learn to do it and do it. :) I think Jeff is saying that there is a whole new world out there waiting for you in doing 2K DPX conforms. The problems and challenges you face in doing a DPX-based conform are unique to the datacentric world, and are things you've never dealt with in a tape-based world.

Just to give some examples:

1) Is the DPX header metadata correctly inserted?
2) What field in the header are you going to get TapeID from, since there is no standard?
3) Are there any breaks in the file sequences? Bad files?
4) If there are no headers, how are you going to assign timecode?
5) Mixed media? How do you insert other formats with DPX? How do they conform?
6) Where are you getting the EDL from? Are comment lines properly formatted?
7) Log/Lin? Are you mixing colorspaces? How do you deal with that? What is the delivery? Where are the LUTs coming from?
8) Video output - how are you going to resize and output DPX? Mixed resolutions? How about pan'n'scan?

There are more which Jeff can gleefully provide. Anybody can learn how to do it... pros or non-pros. But a lot of people make the mistake of thinking, "I've done video online for a long time. How much different can it be?"

The answer is... it is a completely new animal, and a lot of the skills and tricks you've picked up doing video and tape-based conform and online are null and void.

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA
 
ibloom said:
Either way, just remmember, this all happens after picture lock. At that point my feeling is anything is doable.
Click to expand...

Not necessarily.
With iQ or clipster, you don´t have to picturelock, you can originate from them as 4k servers with stations attached.

basicly there are 3 different 4k online approaches.
a) starting uncompressed 4k online with RT and serving, attaching stations for VFX etc. Systems start at ~€60.000 and go up to $$$.$$$, typical products are Quantel iQ and DVS Clipster. These products have additional extremly powerful hardware. However, their creative toolkit is typically less powerful than the one of

b) the DI / finishing systems. These don´t offer 4k RT monitoring, have no 4k i/o and are mainly used -after- picturelock, reading the movie from edl or data. Most of these systems have are very powerful toolkit. Typical products are Mystika, Iridas Speedgrade, Assimilate Scratch, Matrix Chrome, discreet smoke/lustre and the newer products of poogle and davinci. These systems are only software and use a Nvidia Geforce Chip (Quadro branded with different drivers). Some, as mystika, which uses a DVS board or smoke, which uses an aja board, communicate through HD-SDI with this additional hardware, most systems however use the Nvidia GPU and its HD-SDI board to do so. These systems start at ~9.999€ and range up to ~$$$.$$$.

c) the desktop software with attached VFX programs. That would be in 4k Adobe Premiere with AE or combustion. with the plugin "Automatic duck" you can send the Premiere timeline to combustion, to ae its direct. Monitoring is, as in the di/finishing systems in 2k, done with blackmagic design decklink or aja xeno/koona boards. using a 3hrd party codec (as cineform) allow working fast with these sytems, if you don´t use that you will want to use proxy as premiere will be -extremly- slow. And you will want rendernodes in the background. Final cut pro, sadly, isn´t able to work in 4k and in >8bit rgb. Hopefully Apple will catch up with Adobe soon here, but i am afraid this will take at least one upgrade.

There are also some exotic systems which offer excellent possibilities,filmlight baselight is one of them. they use several computers at once, slicing the 4k data across several workstations.

We here are still undecided between mystika, scratch and speedgrade, but i would -love- to see a 4k proxy in Premiere Pro or, if apple adds 4k, in FCP.
 
luki said:
I was just responding to your original statement that realtime 4K editing/finishing systems aren't supported as of yet. Projection and how you actually look at 4K is a separate discussion.

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA
Click to expand...

After ibc, i was under the impression that assimilate, iridas and mystika recommend working with 2k proxy and doing a 4k render at the end? It was really sad that you weren´t in Amsterdam, i had many unanswered question after seeing scratch. I had a good demonstration of the toolkit however, and hey, that really improved, i (and the other employees) liked it very much.

Sadly there was no redcode demonstration at all for us, we came 3 days in a row but the redcode station wasn´t working or did run the wrong software (or whatever).
 
luki said:
Nick,

Of course you could learn to do it and do it. :) I think Jeff is saying that there is a whole new world out there waiting for you in doing 2K DPX conforms. The problems and challenges you face in doing a DPX-based conform are unique to the datacentric world, and are things you've never dealt with in a tape-based world.
…
The answer is... it is a completely new animal, and a lot of the skills and tricks you've picked up doing video and tape-based conform and online are null and void.
Click to expand...

Oh I'm under no delusions that it's easy. I'm just saying it could be done. One of the reasons I said I would only like to try something short form is that I would imagine there would be a lot of trial and error, and a lot of stuff would have to be done manually.

The reality is probably that in a small facility like mine I would only normally finish at 1080p HD, and if a 2k or 4k finish with film-out was required, I would go to a larger facility, preferably one with a Scratch system. On which subject, how many Scratch systems are there in London? Lucas, can you give me any names? I am not in a position to buy one myself at the moment. But in the future, who knows…
 
ibloom said:
A 90 minute feature at 4K RGB should fit on a 2 TB drive. These are costing around $700 at the apple store on 5th Ave Manhattan.
Click to expand...

A 90 minute feature is over 6TB.

48MB per frame * 24fps * 60 seconds per minute * 90 minutes = 6.22TB.
 
Hi Laguun,
Thanks for all the info on 4K online approach.
Is it possible to use Framecycler DI as a conform
and basic grade system then move up to a bigger
system for final grade & film-out?
Like a cheaper mid line system for conform & checking
DPX files at 2 or 4k.
I would be going out to IQ and Pablo.
Mezmo
 
Redcode RAW is 133.2 GB/hour.

So depending on what you used to do the final render, you could have a 90 minute feature to fit on a 300GB HDD easily.
 
ChrisLyon said:
Redcode RAW is 133.2 GB/hour.

So depending on what you used to do the final render, you could have a 90 minute feature to fit on a 300GB HDD easily.
Click to expand...

Chris, to deliver you probably won´t be able to use redcode.
DCI digital cinema is XYZ space, most filmrecorders want lin or log RGB, HDCAM, BR and HD-DVD want YUV - and none wants raw.

Therefore, even when you finished editing in redcode, you will want an uncompressed or at least mastercodec out.

Also, debayering images on the fly through the GPU will not give the maximum quality and/or speed.

Also, for multigeneration VFX, subtitles (festivals?) etc you probably don´t want to reduce the images again and again.
 
Okay, so maybe not in Redcode. I work in a D-Cinema theater. Our movies come down at somewhere between 2-3 hundred gigs. It's likely J2k Motion.

Check out Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinema#Savings_in_distribution

This, of course is a 2K D-Cinema system, for reference. 4K is on the rise, but is more commonly use for DI sources for VFX and timing. Only a few dozen 4K projectors exist in the market while a little more than 1400 screens are in 2K.
 
ChrisLyon said:
Okay, so maybe not in Redcode. I work in a D-Cinema theater. Our movies come down at somewhere between 2-3 hundred gigs. It's likely J2k Motion.

Check out Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinema#Savings_in_distribution
Click to expand...

If you are working in a DCI compliant D-Cinema, its a DCDM-container with J2K.
going to the necessary XYZ-cie colorspace and packaging the DCDM for DCI requires as of now an intermediate.

The packaged DCI-stream contains, besides image, several audioformats, subtitles, DRM and encryption etc. Its a challenging process to generate this package, especially if it shall run on any server internationally. An simple é in french can result in many surprises regarding copyprotection....

http://www.dcimovies.com/DCI_DCinema_System_Spec_v1_1.pdf
lists the actual formats.

right now, the dci spec has been presented to SMPTE for review.
 
ChrisLyon said:
Only a few dozen 4K projectors exist in the market while a little more than 1400 screens are in 2K.
Click to expand...

forgot to add:
Its over 4000 2K screens and still below 100 4K screen as of sept 2007.
rollout rate of 2k screens is at ~400/month right now.
 
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