RED Processor Upgrades?

[Gavin Greenwalt]

The canon XL1 was good enough for steven soderbergh... not saying the RED is poor... or Steven Soderbergh has a poor choice in technology. But there's a lot that's "good enough" for Steven Soderbergh. An admirable quality if you ask me.

 

[REDHKSC]

Wow. There is an uncompressed raw option. But most people will not want to deal with the bandwidth. So the magic pixies created RedCode. Now you have 4k to a CF card instead of a fridge. It's good enough for Steven Soderberg. Sure, I want improvement as much as the next guy, but, let's count our blessings. There was nothing like this camera a month ago, and and there wouldn't be for quite some time if Jim hadn't been obsessed with it. Constructive critisism is one thing, but wow. If I were Jim and I read some of these posts I would loose hope for humanity.

Oh, and there is 60P in 2k to a CF card (to REDHKSC). 2K has been good enough for DI for years. Personally, for playback, 24p is the cat's meow.

I made 2 days 9 Live HD cameras + Vision Mixer to record uncompressed
720p/50 3-hour non-stop Live concert in HKG during HOLDIDAYS mid last year.

I said I need 4K60 or 2K100, and I leave 2K 60 to you for Holidays usage.

STEWART
REDHKSC
HKG / CHINA

 

[Teague Kennedy]

I made 2 days 9 Live HD cameras + Vision Mixer to record uncompressed
720p/50 3-hour non-stop Live concert in HKG during HOLDIDAYS mid last year.

I said I need 4K60 or 2K100, and I leave 2K 60 to you for Holidays usage.

STEWART
REDHKSC
HKG / CHINA

as far as I know there is no camera cabable of 4k at 60 (besides the red with raw port.) - even genesis and dalsa don't do that i believe and if they did it would be in a WHOLE different price range. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you need you may need a time machine to get.

 

[Tom Lowe]

The problem though with "upgrades" is that in the case of an FPGA it's not usually designed to be popped out like Pentium chip. It's soldered onto the board in all likelihood and if you are going to get an upgrade it's probably going to be changing a significant amount of the board design in the process.

So you might see a processor upgrade but it might be dramatically more cost effective to simply purchase an external DSP attached through the serial port outputing any number of formats. Much like a Codex box to an HD-SDI.

Here you have struck on the key question. Is the processor upgradeable? I guess only the RED guys can tell us?

 

[Brent J. Craig]

Constructive critisism is one thing, but wow. If I were Jim and I read some of these posts I would loose hope for humanity.

Yes. Heaven forbid anyone should think about the future or offer suggestions on what we might like to see a few years down the road.

Good enough is always good enough. Why strive for more?

 

[Teague Kennedy]

Yes. Heaven forbid anyone should think about the future or offer suggestions on what we might like to see a few years down the road.

Good enough is always good enough. Why strive for more?

I think that Jim's attitude is far from "good enough is always good enough." I also think suggestions are great, but when the Wright brothers took that flight on the beach in Kittyhawk, I don't think anyone standing by said. "I wish it would go mach one." It might have sort of been out of place.

 

[Jarred Land]

The canon XL1 was good enough for steven soderbergh... not saying the RED is poor... or Steven Soderbergh has a poor choice in technology. But there's a lot that's "good enough" for Steven Soderbergh. An admirable quality if you ask me.

xl1 was used by soderbergh to give a very different look to 35mm for the feature he used it on.. they shot on film and used the xl1 when he wanted it to look degraded, so thats not really a fair assessment to say... as the xl1 (to canon's sorrow) was "good enough" to look like crap.

 

[Dominic Jones]

That's a fair point Jarred, but it's also true that Danny Boyle shot (not personally, of course) the DV sequence in "28 Days Later" (the bit with London's South Bank deserted) on an XL-1s, to be intercut with 35mm. A bold decision (and one forced upon him by shooting schedules), but it did come off ok.

I shot a project years ago on 16mm that had sections that were supposed to be the PoV of a security camera and elected - both for budget and artistic reasons - to shoot those scenes with a digital camcorder. Having never used one before (and not being a big fan of digital at the time) I figured a "prosumer" camera would be the right balance of digital-looking footage and slightly better than terrible image quality and we shot with an XL-1s, iirc. The irony was we spend ages in CC trying to downgrade the footage enough to look like CCTV footage - it was just way too good!

But your point is taken, and I don't think anyone in their right mind is going to be comparing the Red to an XL-1!...

 

[Jarred Land]

true Dominic.. but i wasnt talking about Danny Boyle.. the comment was about Soderbergh saying the camera "was good enough"

 

[Shawn Nelson]

I have said before that it would be great to start thinking about a Red Two or Red Professional.

Well to start out suggesting that the Red One is "Red Amatuer" or "Red UnPro" doesn't fly right. We already have Red Pro.

The reason we placed our reservation was Ted explaining the concept of not having to buy new cameras constantly. Jim has repeatedly explained how Red isn't much more expensive than an HVX200 when you figure that in the next 5 years you will buy no more Red bodies but you'd have to buy three HVX200's (and its successors).

I hope Red continues to upgrade parts like mad. But to see a new entire replacement in under 5 years would be to go against their founding ideas.

 

[Dominic Jones]

true Dominic.. but i wasnt talking about Danny Boyle.. the comment was about Soderbergh saying the camera "was good enough"

Indeed, I totally understand mate - that's why I started my post with "Fair point...etc", it is a very fair point!

Sorry if I de-railed your post a bit, just wanted to point out that the XL-1 isn't exactly a "crap" camera, in it's day it was a great bit of kit (and that coming from someone who is, was and always will be to a certain extent a film acolyte)...

And Shawn, I completely agree - upgrade not replace is a far better way to go, especially for us, the end users. The only possible other camera option I can see being of interest from Red in the medium-term is the much-debated OVF-based body, which could easily be virtually identical in nearly every other respect.

 

[Greg David]

Yes, this is what I don't understand about "upgradeability" about the RED. How can you upgrade it very much without ripping the guts out?

 

[Rocco Schult]

Jim's 3K post in recon got me to thinking again about the bottleneck that is apparently preventing 4K@60fps onboard. If I am not mistaken, the processor is the component that is too slow to crunch the data at 60fps at 4K so it can be recorded onboard. If this is the case, it would seem that a processor upgrade would solve the problem.
..

Kurzweil invents high-tech products similar to the RED, but what he does is PROJECT what technology will be available two or three years down the road, and then designs his products with Moore's Law fully in mind from the beginning. ..

Nothing against Kurzweil, don't get me wrong. But RED has projected largely, even if maybe not wisely (no pun intended) but every delay helped in working with the even newer generation of tools, CPUs etc.

And what you seem to forget, while I think qhat you're saying applies also to the innerds of the RED (think of the sensor), is that there's engineering time.

From the point of availability of the exact parts existing (and not planned or in development), you can just start finishing design and integration processes - NOT BEFORE.
These parts have specs changing, bugs etc.
You can project to available processing power and storage space, but not to bugs and dropped/changed developments.
Maybe the availability of the FPGA changed, due to higher economical powers than RED taking 6000 of them. And you might have to redesign the most important board in the RED, because some big vendor bought the factory...

What the heck do we know...
This is really pretty up-to-date stuff.
Do I hear anyone else saying 4k compressed in an affordable camera ?

 

[Bing Bailey]

it strikes me as funny that so many people "seasoned pro's" don't get RED's philosophy of upgrade rather than replace. I guess sony, panasonic , canon and jvc did a bang up job of brainwashing you to want to constantly buy a whole new kit.

I think its time for some deprogramming around here. its a new world guys. changing the old ways is a beautiful thing just don't throw out the baby with the bath water

Bing

 

[Axel Mertes]

Jim's 3K post in recon got me to thinking again about the bottleneck that is apparently preventing 4K@60fps onboard. If I am not mistaken, the processor is the component that is too slow to crunch the data at 60fps at 4K so it can be recorded onboard. If this is the case, it would seem that a processor upgrade would solve the problem.

[..]
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6140406219828000794&hl=en

I am not quite sure from which post you derive that. I've read all posts from Jim in that forum and can't find the point you are on.

All we know is that the current firmware allows the use of 3K @ 60 Hz, plus the choice of two compression levels.

When we started discussion about 2K scaled a while back, Jim insisted on us to not ask for 2K scaled full sensor at 60 Hz, but 4K at 60Hz REDCODE instead! Thats an important point to recognize. Please re-read Jim's recent posts and how much he defeats all 2K scaled 60 Hz full sensor ideas, saying clearly that THIS will never come. He is not blind enough to defeat a 60 Hz full sensor read out for the masses (which we all thought might be only possible in 2K scaled). Try to read between the lines

Further remember that at the same time the decision was made to change back 100 early cameras for different reasons, one being "a new more powerful DSP". Further it was many times elaborated on the availability of the RAW port. Jim did not officially deny on it, but its said to be at least indefinetly delayed, but Jarred did also deny on it, saying it'll never come due to few demand. Maybe that was a young boys early mouth (hey, thats a compliment, isn't it?), or just a mistake, or whatsoever. All the three informations together - at about the same time - from Jim and Jarred - lead me to only one assumption and hypothesis:

We are about to see a 4K @ 60 Hz full sensor REDCODE RAW encoding, soon.

I stand with this hypothesis until otherwise declared officially by RED themselves as "not possible".

I consider build 15 to be interesting for this, at least worth waiting and discuss from there.

Come on, why put so much fire into the discussions at this point. I - honestly - don't want them to stop developing on RED ONE in favor of a "better" RED TWO. Because then they will be no different from Sony & Co. anymore.

Bottom line:

If you want more than RED ONE can deliver, go for a Phantom 65 or the like and check it out. Not saying its better, but it has some of the demanded features you are asking for...

Axel

 

[Axel Mertes]

it strikes me as funny that so many people "seasoned pro's" don't get RED's philosophy of upgrade rather than replace. I guess sony, panasonic , canon and jvc did a bang up job of brainwashing you to want to constantly buy a whole new kit.

I think its time for some deprogramming around here. its a new world guys. changing the old ways is a beautiful thing just don't throw out the baby with the bath water

Bing

I fully second that point of view!

Axel

 

[Rocco Schult]

I made 2 days 9 Live HD cameras + Vision Mixer to record uncompressed
720p/50 3-hour non-stop Live concert in HKG during HOLDIDAYS mid last year.

I said I need 4K60 or 2K100, and I leave 2K 60 to you for Holidays usage.

Thats why it was only 720.
And 50p is why it looks like video.

Not to my taste and no interest in achieving this look respectively.

 

[REDHKSC]

as far as I know there is no camera cabable of 4k at 60 (besides the red with raw port.) - even genesis and dalsa don't do that i believe and if they did it would be in a WHOLE different price range. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you need you may need a time machine to get.

I don't need a Time Machine for Holidays but I will have a 6GB/s read and write to handle 4K 60 or even higher to store that data stream.
View attachment 3106
May be I am crazy but I am that wrong you think.

Take Care and the world is getting small in the RED map world.

STEWART
Gardener & Founder
REDHKSC / WOW Holdings
HKG / CHINA / Thailand outside Japan and Korea in ASIA

 

[Michael Booth]

That's a fair point Jarred, but it's also true that Danny Boyle shot (not personally, of course) the DV sequence in "28 Days Later" (the bit with London's South Bank deserted) on an XL-1s, to be intercut with 35mm. A bold decision (and one forced upon him by shooting schedules), but it did come off ok.

The whole film minus the closing scenes were shot with the XL-1s by the way. Closing scenes were shot on 35mm. I'm sure there was no actual intercutting between DV and 35mm.

 

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

Thats why it was only 720.
And 50p is why it looks like video.

Not to my taste and no interest in achieving this look respectively.

Yeah, if something is shot 50p and played at 50p, it looks video-ish.

I read that's the case even for film.

24-25 fps seem to be the optimum for that film feel.

But what about... variable playback speed?

24p base speed and going up for specific shots, to avoid pan and fast-movement problems...

Sound crazy and would be damn hard to synchronize, but...

I wonder if it would make any sense.