New Arri Digital vs. Scarlet?

[Blaire Johnson]

I mean onboard in the sense of how cameras have tape decks built in (not the srw1) and how Red has CF cards, not a 3rd party box that attaches to the camera, which are great solutions btw.

But to make compression a thing of the past, uncompressed recording needs to be able to plug into the camera with a form factor of a tape/card/drive. So again, we're about 10yrs out before RedCode/other recording codecs are useless.

 

[Ace]

If your'e anal enough to be shooting uncompressed in 10 years time, then you'll be anal enough to be shooting 128K Stereo @ 60fps. Which will require compression I assure you.

Good compression is good. Useless? I think not.

 

[Andrew McCarrick]

i always had the impression you could buy an arri camera only at arri. i think they have resellers e.g. for stuff like matteboxes, ff or lights, but cameras?

best wishes,
martin

hmm... you're right. I was thinking more of Panasonic, Sony, JVC, Canon, ect.

I'm thinking Arri is going for the higher price because other cameras are priced at that range.


Silcon Imaging is relatively cheap and has no resellers.
Arri seems to be the oddity.

Panavision (and Dalsa) are (were) only rentals so.

 

[M Most]

Silcon Imaging is relatively cheap and has no resellers.

Not true. Band Pro in Burbank are the authorized SI reseller for the US.

 

[I Bloom]

I mean onboard in the sense of how cameras have tape decks built in (not the srw1) and how Red has CF cards, not a 3rd party box that attaches to the camera, which are great solutions btw.

But to make compression a thing of the past, uncompressed recording needs to be able to plug into the camera with a form factor of a tape/card/drive. So again, we're about 10yrs out before RedCode/other recording codecs are useless.

Compression is here to stay.

It's a mistake to look at compression as taking from an image, in fact it's giving more apparent information to the same amount of data by focusing on the data that is most important to your visual system. The limitation is in the throughput of the recording media and availability of storage. So once 2K 10 bit uncompressed becomes really practicle with desktop computers, 9K 16bit compressed will be available and look much better... and when 9K uncompressed becomes practical then... and so on ad infinitum.

IBloom

 

[Irri]

I think I disagree with most people about compression. Sure there are diminishing returns, but I think of it like music. Some people are happy with listening to mp3s. I think it's worth listening to uncompressed FLAC. It's five times as big and doesn't sound 5 times as good, but I think it is worth the extra space. Then there are some people who feel that digital isn't good enough and will spare no expense to use to an analogue format.

As with many things, you can get 90% of the way there for half the price.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

Irri, what you say is interesting and does have a validity to it. But...

Think of MP3 to uncompressed CD. But really, in the music world, CD is standard def. Take nice 192khz/24bit recordings - they're much like the 4k RED does, taking the visual analogy back to audio.

Fact is, good visually lossless REDCODE RAW compression on 4k looks oh-so-much better than uncompressed SD. A good lossy audio compression on 192/24 would sound better than uncompressed CD.

Graeme

 

[Harry Lipnick]

The last three posts have been very informative to put compression in perspective in a way I'd never thought of before. Thanks IBloom, Irri and Graeme. Cheers!
Peace,

-Harry

 

[Michel Hafner]

Irri, what you say is interesting and does have a validity to it. But...
Think of MP3 to uncompressed CD. But really, in the music world, CD is standard def. Take nice 192khz/24bit recordings - they're much like the 4k RED does, taking the visual analogy back to audio.

The absoute level to what we can see/hear is off though. CD is far better than standard def, rather like 4K, while 192/24 bit is Super IMAX. SD is very compressed MP3.

 

[Pietro Impagliazzo]

128 kb/s aaaarrrgh!

I can't say much though... My sound equipment only allows me to go to a 320 kb/s MP3, more than that is not really discernible for my ears/card/speakers.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

Visual / auditory analogies are always fraught with issues. One thing with visuals is you have to account for viewing distance (and the angular size the display makes).

 

[Steven Caesare]

Visual / auditory analogies are always fraught with issues. One thing with visuals is you have to account for viewing distance (and the angular size the display makes).

And you can't pause a specific "frame" of audio and critique it ad nauseum as folks tend to do with video.

-sc

 

[Graeme Nattress]

Yup, darn hard to "pixel peep" audio

 

[Peter Hoare]

I had heard a while ago that some production companies / studios had banned the use of RED cameras. If this is still the case, then I think that these are the only people that will truly be able to consider the new ARRI cameras. I had overheard at the BSC show a few grey haired, seasoned cinematographers scoffing at the Red One, but I think that even people like that will have to take notice if the Epic can beat the newer Arri cameras.

 

[Irri]

Irri, what you say is interesting and does have a validity to it. But...

Think of MP3 to uncompressed CD. But really, in the music world, CD is standard def. Take nice 192khz/24bit recordings - they're much like the 4k RED does, taking the visual analogy back to audio.

Fact is, good visually lossless REDCODE RAW compression on 4k looks oh-so-much better than uncompressed SD. A good lossy audio compression on 192/24 would sound better than uncompressed CD.


Graeme

I’m sure you’re right that lossy encoded 24bit music would sound better than lossless 16 bit music, but lossless 24bit music would sound better than lossy encoded 24bit music. I’m certainly not going to use lossy compression on the 24bit music I have on my NAS to save some space.

In any case, if we were comparing sensor resolution and compression to audio, wouldn’t 192/24 lossy Vs 96/24 lossless be a closer approximation?

But, as you say…

Visual / auditory analogies are always fraught with issues. One thing with visuals is you have to account for viewing distance (and the angular size the display makes).

I guess you’re right. I do think that one thing that is true in both audio and video is how sensitive humans are. We notice things even though we can’t really say what they are. I recently read about people hearing a difference between FLAC and wav. They contain the same information so how is that possible? The equipment manufacture said that FLAC makes the processor work harder and wav uses the network interface more. This affected the PSU, which would account for the change in sound. It’s amazing how sensitive we are.

The only complaint I have heard about REDCODE was from a compositor who said there were compression artifacts. In all honesty, I got the feeling he was really trying to find artifacts rather than having a problem with them.

And you can't pause a specific "frame" of audio and critique it ad nauseum as folks tend to do with video.

-sc

You could look at the wave though.

128 kb/s aaaarrrgh!

I can't say much though... My sound equipment only allows me to go to a 320 kb/s MP3, more than that is not really discernible for my ears/card/speakers.

Seems to be the case for most people these days. Two speakers a foot apart with an iPod in the middle is classed as Hi-Fi.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

The problem with human perception is that it's utterly human. That means it's complex, and like complex numbers has real and imaginary parts. It's very easy to see how "priming the pump" will induce expectation bias in listeners to hear things that are just not there. The placebo effect is very real. Happens with visuals too, but I don't quite think to the very same extent as does in audio.

Graeme

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

One thing to keep in mind though is that not everything we do with motion pictures is done by the human. Compression can cause artifacts when you run it through software which the eye would have never seen.

As to a future without compression... that's silly. At the very least you can usually get 2:1 lossless compression on any data source. Shooting uncompressed would just be masochistic.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

You can usually get around 2:1 on visual images that are not excessively noisy. But there is no guarantee of any compression at all on arbitrary data.

Graeme

 

[Bill Anderson]

A side note: one of the worlds leading percussionists, Evelyn Glenie, is deaf, has been since she was a kid. And yet she can set up harmonics like your ears have rarely heard, and your body rarely felt.
Talk about oversampling. ( :

 

[Steven Caesare]

If I can only see it as a waveform on adevice, but cannot perceive it as different when it's being played back, that's fine with me.

Out of curiosty Irri, have you done any blind listening tests with your high res audio?

I have, and good down sampling, and/or compression is VERY difficult to hear, if you ar being honest with yourself and methodology.

And that doesn't even take in to account the difficulties even VERY GOOD equipment has in approaching 24 bits of resolution or what "nuances" 192Khz sampling (i.e 4+ times higher than what even the best of human ears can hear) are supposed to impart to recordings.

-sc