Needed: REDCODE HD module

[Rudi Herbert]

RED team,

REDCODE is as much a revolutionary product as the camera itself, but why limit it to RED acquired images only? There are tons of HD cameras out there recording different flavors of compressed HD to tape, flash cards, hard rives, etc. The heavy compression, be it AVCHD or MPEG, they use makes their images almost unusable in post. Ironically, most of those cameras have HDMI or SDI ports that allow an uncompressed image to be recorded to a much much better format. But nobody makes a portable module. Cineform had announced such a portable module recording in their proprietary format long ago, but they have yet to deliver, unless you count their $10K Wafian recorder. Convergent design has announced the Nano Flash (http://www.convergent-design.com/CD_Products_nanoFlash.htm), but frankly, at $3K, it costs far more than is worth, keeping in mind that it is still meant to be used with prosumer cameras.

So how about it RED? I'm talking a camera-mounted module recording to compact media, taking an HDMI 1080i/p signal and converting it to REDCODE for use on FCP, CS4, Vegas, whatever. It would be intended for HD footage, so no need to worry about 2K or 4K, thus leaving you with the relatively easy task to downsample HD through the excellent REDCODE to a high quality, low compression image. I know this wouldn't be a product made directly to support a RED item, such as a camera, but I think REDCODE deserves to be marketed on its own merits too, and there are tons of producers who'd love such a piece if equipment. I know I would, and since I cannot replace all the HDV cameras we own for Scarlets, not now that those HDV cameras have already paid for themselves and are perfect for low profile gigs, but I would still love to extract as much quality out of those sensors as possible. Any takers?

 

[Vico Martin]

1080 HDMI to Redcode why... ?

1. Redcode is a awsome compersion but needs (at least until Redrocket) toons of process to work.

2. The HDMI out of a HDV cam is (Correct me if I'm wrong) HDV (MPG-2) Codified out. You can´t get more than this.

3. The real power of Redcode is to encode raw (unprocessed) material.

4. Mr. Graeme is practicing black magic to get more blue chanel info from another dimension but... even Mr Graeme can fix the result of a MPG2 crusher.

Or.. I´m wrong and the HDMI out of a HDV is before the DSP??

 

[Rudi Herbert]

Not quite,

The HDMI out of all the cameras we own, Sony Z-1, EX-1 and Canon HG-20, are all pre-compression, so you could get a much better image if you had a recorder using a highly efficient codec like REDCODE, which is not necessarily any better at compressing RAW than anything else. And you know, REDCODE on CS4 is not at all difficult to handle, I'm having a blast with it, so I can only imagine how much better it would be with just HD images instead of 4K. And for some of us who have invested so much on these small cameras, it makes a lot of sense to want to make them perform as good as possible.

 

[M Most]

But nobody makes a portable module. Cineform had announced such a portable module recording in their proprietary format long ago, but they have yet to deliver, unless you count their $10K Wafian recorder.I'm talking a camera-mounted module recording to compact media, taking an HDMI 1080i/p signal ...Any takers?

Have you not heard of the AJA Ki Pro, which records to ProRes? I would say that for all practical purposes, ProRes - or, for that matter ProRes HQ, which is also supported by the Ki Pro - is every bit as efficient as a Redcode RGB implementation would be. Which, by the way, does not exist at this point in time. The only Redcode variant available at the moment is the one in the camera that is designed specifically to compress RAW information prior to RGB image creation.

If you want the closest thing to what a Redcode RGB implementation would be, I suggest you look at either Cineform or JPEG2000, both of which are remarkably similar to what Redcode does.

 

[Rudi Herbert]

Have you not heard of the AJA Ki Pro, which records to ProRes? If you want the closest thing to what a Redcode RGB implementation would be, I suggest you look at either Cineform or JPEG2000, both of which are remarkably similar to what Redcode does.

Mike,

I don't use FCP, so until I can use ProRes on CS4 (likely when hell freezes over) the Ki Pro is not for me. Cineform is an excellent codec, BUT it is not available in a small form factor, portable recorder that could be attached to the back of a car mounted camera, or put inside an underwater housing, or strapped to a skydiving helmet, as those are the applications I had in mind. But you're right, there's no RGB REDCODE yet anyway, so I guess I'm out of luck.

 

[M Most]

Cineform is an excellent codec, BUT it is not available in a small form factor, portable recorder that could be attached to the back of a car mounted camera, or put inside an underwater housing, or strapped to a skydiving helmet, as those are the applications I had in mind.

It is if you're shooting with an SI 2K camera. I'm just sayin....

As for why Redcode is limited to Red images, well, that's because the codec was designed specifically for the images coming from the Red's Mysterium sensor. It is based on wavelet techniques that are also available in JPEG2000 and Cineform, but it is specifically tailored to Red's individual needs. THAT's why it's limited to Red images.

 

[David Newman]

Rudi asked me to comment.

We do plan a light weight portable recorder for HD source, but our first design got shelved when the DSP vendor we were using went belly-up. Our codec is extremely light for CPU load, so it would fit within low cost FPGAs, but more interesting are Atom CPUs (to us as software guys,) which we are already encoding over 15 fps now (1920x1080p 10-bit 4:2:2) on a single core netbook -- just a few more tweaks and that is a powerful, portable encoding platform. Yes we are thinking about this a lot. However, this is not quite the same as CineForm RAW or for that matter REDCODE RAW, as the feeds coming from HDMI or HDSDI are preprocessed into 4:2:2 YUV, therefore easier. Raw compression is much more of a black art in which Red and CineForm are still the only players.