RED RAY - larger optical media / PINK RAY :)

[laguun]

Different from the RS232/422 comment which seems to get pretty clear feedback ( http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=11849 ,seems everyone wants it), this topic is something from the "nice, but not necessary" department.

I cant help myself, but i wonder why red wouldnt want to benefit from the blu-ray system. I would gladly pay more if red ray would be also offered with a blu-ray/Dvd player option instead of DVD.

Some reasons for this:
- blu-ray will be totally commonplace in 2009. Prices probably will reach the mid $$ space for drives by then, Hybrid bluray players/DVD recorders are already in the €€ pricerange.
- Longer playback times. For installations, museums, poi, festivals and many excellent red ray areas of use, the 50GB on a blu ray might be more fitting.
- if possible: higher datarates, therefore even better image quality.
- gossip. as bizarre it might sound, there -will- be folks who say: "I dont want a dvd, i want a blu-ray, thats HD". Never underestimate the power of morons
- media quality (my MAIN reason). DVD has plagued us since the beginning. Just yesterday we got two new "frisbee"-dvd from a dolby sound studio which contained bad files due to bad burning quality. blu ray was, different from the whole DVD, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+/-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD+/-RW, DVD-RAM mess, designed as -one- recordable media, and after using blu-ray recoders almost since their market intorduction, i yet have to burn a frisbee. The same is valid for the blu-ray basing XDCAM system. DVD-media quality and recoder-specific compatibility is, and probably will, an area of concern. I would hate to have an employee send out an "last-minute-festival" red ray disc which then stutters (or worse) as the subpar burning quality of a media/recoder incompatibility is requiring the error-correction to lower readout speeds.
- non-red customer demand. Now, almost *any* studio today has at least DVD playback. However, i still find *many* studios not supporting blu-ray. If the red ray would also work as an external player (via USB or FW) in order to avoid tricky HDCP *inside* the red ray, it would add many benefits for usual studios (and the HUGE majority of all apple customers from 2006-late 2008) as it would serve them besides the red ray function as "simple" blu-ray player.
- better revenue for red. red could easily charge several $$$ more for the blu red ray.
- probably easy R&D. If red is using, and i suppose thats a given, a regular off the shelve SATA DVD drive, a $$ blu-ray drive should basically have no, or at least no complex further R&D.

I am curious to hear what the other fellow redusers thoughts are on that topic. Finally, let me say that i think this is an less important, nice-to-have, functionality, while i consider VTR/REMOTE/RS232 an extremely important feature.

 

[sparkhope]

could it have to do with licensing & sony?

 

[laguun]

could it have to do with licensing & sony?

i dont think so.
pioneer, lg, liteon etc all manufacture blu-ray drives and red certainly will not design or manufacture their own dvd or blu-ray drives but buy on the world market.

 

[Sven Seynaeve]

To me after some research on the blu-ray format for my own I see sony finally moving to an somewhat more openmind lately then when they've released blu-ray. They start allowing more partners to join their marketing strategy. But Still not enough manufacturing plants support the system because the future isn't sure. Some people (even their own salesmen) can't give a clear answer of what that future really will be and how long it will stand.
As we all know 4k via some kind of hd or other master won't be to far of if you really want to spend money on a great display, as with the anouncements of some 4k products it even scares some of us who really want to get the best quality possible out of a system. But indeed i suppose the reason chosen from RED by now must have something to do with their licensing as that and the encryption system seems to be very important to them to assure the blu-ray and manufacturers to keep to much piracy away for now.

 

[Randall Nott]

I remember before Blu-ray and HD-DVD, WMVHD from Microsoft was supposed to be the next big thing. It was recordable onto regular DVDs but they never got together a decent authoring system for it. They were able to add it to both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD player specs, and it still exists (they even have stagnant web pages for it on Microsoft) but it just kind of sits there. Maybe they'll piggy-back it onto Red Ray next and tout it as the only universal HD format (as if RED would go for that).

 

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

Or PURPLE-RAYn..

And invite Prince to bless the new tech with his purple voice.

 

[laguun]

To me after some research on the blu-ray format for my own I see sony finally moving to an somewhat more openmind lately then when they've released blu-ray. They start allowing more partners to join their marketing strategy.

The Blu-ray Group has the following founding members:
Panasonic,
Pioneer,
Philips,
Sony,
Thomson,
LG Electronics,
Hitachi,
Sharp
Dell then joined in march 2004, Apple in 2005.

until today,
Marantz,
Mitsubishi,
Sharp,
Lite-On,
Funai,
JVC,
Loewe,
Denon,
Daewoo,
Samsung
also came aboard.

But Still not enough manufacturing plants support the system because the future isn't sure.
Some people (even their own salesmen) can't give a clear answer of what that future really will be and how long it will stand.

blu-ray shall (and probably will) do to DVD, what DVD did to CD.
Once the price difference is ~10-40 bucks, and thats not years, but months from now.

The prices to manufacture blu-ray drives or dvd drives will be pretty similar already in 2009, the price difference for a combo blu-ray player/dvd combo recorder to a dvd recorder is at 60-70 euros right now now.

I suppose its pretty certain that in 2009 most mid and upperclass pcs, be it with osx or win, will have bluray drives. price difference should be rather ~20-30 eurobucks by then.

I am not certain, but i suppose that when red ray will be sold, the average 500$-750$ pc will offer a blu-ray player/dvd-recorder combo.

As we all know 4k via some kind of hd or other master won't be to far of if you really want to spend money on a great display, as with the anouncements of some 4k products it even scares some of us who really want to get the best quality possible out of a system. But indeed i suppose the reason chosen from RED by now must have something to do with their licensing as that and the encryption system seems to be very important to them to assure the blu-ray and manufacturers to keep to much piracy away for now.

blu ray as media is completly open. HDCP copy protection is optional. By default, it works as a regular 25 or 50 GB media, the usual media sells 7-8 bucks here. Pretty much the same as DVD with or without CSS.

Red doesnt need to license blu-ray to sell blu-raydrives.
Everybody can buy (and resell) them, every little computer shop around the corner does that.

 

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

"eurobucks" .

25-50 Gb is a lot of space.

With proper encoding...

 

[Michael Schrengohst]

It's all incremental. When you sell millions of anything,
making another buck or ten per unit is huge.
They will keep the capacity going up so that the net
cannot match it. CD is dead and DVD will be next.
The studios will now push Blu-Ray and pull back from
HD file release.

All I want to know is when will Apple get off theit iPhone
and release Blu-Ray authoring & burning.
Before NAB I got a "customer" call from Apple wondering
if I was using FCS . I said yes I was and was editing
while I was on the phone telling her yes I was.

She asked "what could Apple do to serve you better?"
I told her to tell Steve to quit blowing the guys at AT&T
and get off his iPhone long enough to tell the developers
for DVD SP to crank it out.

Because my next purchase will be the Adobe Suite,
I have the corporate dweebs now "wanting Blu-Ray".....

 

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

The studios will now push Blu-Ray and pull back from HD file release.

It doesn't matter if they pull back or not.

They don't run the show anymore.

 

[laguun]

It's all incremental. When you sell millions of anything,
making another buck or ten per unit is huge.
They will keep the capacity going up so that the net
cannot match it. CD is dead and DVD will be next.
The studios will now push Blu-Ray and pull back from
HD file release.

Because my next purchase will be the Adobe Suite,
I have the corporate dweebs now "wanting Blu-Ray".....

Adobe CS, with Premiere and Encore work nice for blu-ray. In fact you can master web (flash), tv (dvd) and blu-ray at once within encore.

 

[Robin Balas]

...
- non-red customer demand. Now, almost *any* studio today has at least DVD playback. However, i still find *many* studios not supporting blu-ray. If the red ray would also work as an external player (via USB or FW) in order to avoid tricky HDCP *inside* the red ray, it would add many benefits for usual studios (and the HUGE majority of all apple customers from 2006-late 2008) as it would serve them besides the red ray function as "simple" blu-ray player.
...

I think you will find if you read up and listen to the NAB interviews, that the RED-RAY is proposed to only be the external player you refer to, nothing else. It will be able to play either RED CF's, RED drives nativly or DVD-ROM's with a red-compressed R3d movieclips/movies. It will play out via multiple HDMI or HD-SDI and you could ingest that somehow into another data carrier.
Currently it seems that the DVD-ROM format is chosen as data carrier although I think BD-ROM could just as easily have been chosen based on functionality.
But forget playing these discs, no matter what they will be in 2009, in another blue-ray player or DVD player. The Red-ray is to me 'just' a mediaplayer. And there is no support for 4K, 3K or 2K in the blue-ray spec, so forget the movie blue-ray and movie DVD in relation to Red-ray. Its just a data carrier for RED's own special compression.
All this is based on speculations so I might be totally wrong, but until I read or hear something else from the RED team, I don't see any other explanation at this time.
MHO:detective2:

 

[Noah Kadner]

I'd be happy with a hard drive player with ethernet, esata and firewire 800. Not sure optical media is really 100% needed to make it work out as a distribution model. In a few years all disc media for movies/music/games etc will be supplanted by all downloads anyways. It's already there just not 100% legal in all areas. It's just a question of upping the download speeds- and with FIOS on the way to worldwide proliferation you can see the writing on the wall. :construction: :construction: :construction:

Noah

 

[Jeff Coatney]

Red Ray beats Blu Ray four ways:
1. Rugged, portable, production ready form factor (I've not seen a Blu-Ray player yet that could drive a nail).
2. 1080p pipes out (just like Blu-Ray) PLUS 4K! (Blu-Ray wishes it could fill the screen in your average cineplex) and 5.1.(Beyond HD imagery looks better when it sounds great)
3. You get all the above via the DVD burner you already own. No need for specialized codecs, Blu-Ray disc burners or complex authoring schemes.
4. Optical drives have skip protection and less fragile moving parts than a hard drive. I'm sure the optical drive on the Red Ray will accept a blu-ray disc, why not? I'm sure Ken Burns would like to screen his next marathon-documentary in 4K without swapping discs.

 

[Peter Majtan]

Given the current attitude of RED against SONY (and vice versa) and knowing personally the top-level SONY's VIP who actually make such a decision - I don't see SONY licensing Blu-Ray to RED in foreseeable future. And even if they did (which I doubt) - I don't see Jim accepting it...

I also believe that optical media will eventually die out (as did tape) and all will go towards solid state memory. Future generation of CF or SD cards will easily handle the capacity of a Blu-Ray disc without its size, fragility and other related issues. Not to mention the unlimited re-recording ability and scratch resistance...

Solid state memory is the future - Blu Ray is just the small evolutionary step. HD-DVD may still have its last laugh after all...

Video on demand and video for download are future-proof technologies and do not required "fixed" storage format. Just see what is happening around the world already...

 

[laguun]

Given the current attitude of RED against SONY (and vice versa) and knowing personally the top-level SONY's VIP who actually make such a decision - I don't see SONY licensing Blu-Ray to RED in foreseeable future. And even if they did (which I doubt) - I don't see Jim accepting it...

Sorry, bu that is complete nonsense.
a) DVD and CD have been designed by Sony and Phillips, and you dont need a license to sell it.
b) The same is valid for blu-ray. And as with DVD and CD, there is an Association behind it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_Association

I also believe that optical media will eventually die out (as did tape) and all will go towards solid state memory. Future generation of CF or SD cards will easily handle the capacity of a Blu-Ray disc without its size, fragility and other related issues. Not to mention the unlimited re-recording ability and scratch resistance...

Tape is the #1 media still for TV.
25 GB are at 7 bucks now on bluray, and will probably go down to less than 1 buck per media.
Flashmemory cant be rewritten unlimited, and if you intend to send 100 copies out by 2008, 2009, 2010 i think one might prefer optical media, because the same capacity would cost $$.$$$ in CF, while $$$ in optical.

Solid state memory is the future - Blu Ray is just the small evolutionary step. HD-DVD may still have its last laugh after all...

HD-DVD has ended, the group dissolved, toshiba is ending all activities.
Solid state is one of the future medias which can follow harddisk and optical, but dont expect that within the next decade.

Video on demand and video for download are future-proof technologies and do not required "fixed" storage format. Just see what is happening around the world already...

In the long run, central servers and media streams will certainly be an interesting option. But today and for many years to come, terrabytes will be harddisk, and 50 GB standard blu-rays (and 9GB DVDs at <1$ each) will stay as common as digital beta and hdcam tapes.

 

[laguun]

I dont see red ray as direct competition to blu-ray or dvd or DCI servers. Its offering new posibilities, but will not nearly be as common as dvd or blu-ray - both formats sell millions of players, both format drives cost $$, not $$$.

Red Ray beats Blu Ray four ways:
1. Rugged, portable, production ready form factor (I've not seen a Blu-Ray player yet that could drive a nail).

A blu-ray drive is as small as any dvd drive, fits in 1/4 height notebook 5.25 slots or regular standard height 5.25 drive bays.

2. 1080p pipes out (just like Blu-Ray) PLUS 4K! (Blu-Ray wishes it could fill the screen in your average cineplex) and 5.1.(Beyond HD imagery looks better when it sounds great)

blu-ray features
14 channels of discreet audio with Dolby True HD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_TrueHD
and 7.1 with DTS HD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTS_HD
Having 4K playback is awesome, but the usual cineplex is equipped in >98% of the cases with a 1080p/2K projection. 4K still is rare (landmark has some).

3. You get all the above via the DVD burner you already own. No need for specialized codecs, Blu-Ray disc burners or complex authoring schemes.

blu-ray doesnt need specialised codecs or complex authoring. You can use MPEG2 and only files if you want to. If you prefer H264 or VC1, you should get a $$-$$$ software (as Adobe encore or cyberlink).

4. Optical drives have skip protection and less fragile moving parts than a hard drive. I'm sure the optical drive on the Red Ray will accept a blu-ray disc, why not? I'm sure Ken Burns would like to screen his next marathon-documentary in 4K without swapping discs.

Yeah. thats my main point - i dont care about blu-ray (or DVD) playback, its the possible higer datarate (and quality) and the higher capacity which i think would fit red ray better. I dont see any competition between all these formats, they all are for different applications. Redray would benefit from blu-ray as media, and hey, the bluray players are all backward compatible - and the price difference is only some dozens of dollars.

 

[Peter Majtan]

Sorry, bu that is complete nonsense.
a) DVD and CD have been designed by Sony and Phillips, and you dont need a license to sell it.
b) The same is valid for blu-ray. And as with DVD and CD, there is an Association behind it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_Association

According to Your link:

"The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) is the industry consortium that develops and licenses Blu-ray Disc technology"

RED is neither in the "Board of Directors", nor the "Contributors", nor the "Members" group. SONY is major decision maker about who "gets in" whether You like it or not, or whether it is "fair" or not...

And as I've said - given the current relationship between the two - Jim will most likely stay away from Blu-Ray just to make a point...

Tape is the #1 media still for TV.
25 GB are at 7 bucks now on bluray, and will probably go down to less than 1 buck per media. Flashmemory cant be rewritten unlimited, and if you intend to send 100 copies out by 2008, 2009, 2010 i think one might prefer optical media, because the same capacity would cost $$.$$$ in CF, while $$$ in optical.

Show me "affordable" uncompressed or "raw" tape recording media...
For multiple copies one would use digital transfer rather then shipping physical media - as it is already the case with Digital Cinemas...

Main issue I have with optical is the scratch-non-resistance. More so with higher density optical media such as Blu-Ray. When was the last time You have scratched solid state memory???

HD-DVD has ended, the group dissolved, toshiba is ending all activities. Solid state is one of the future medias which can follow harddisk and optical, but dont expect that within the next decade.

I have never said otherwise - what I was referring to was the fact that Blu-Ray has just celebrated their "win" over HD-DVD, but that doesn't mean that they have won the "war". I can see Blu-Ray dying out fairly soon to "portable digital formats" not linked to physical media creating loses far exceeding that of Toshiba... Time will tell... (but certainly not decades...!)

In the long run, central servers and media streams will certainly be an interesting option. But today and for many years to come, terrabytes will be harddisk, and 50 GB standard blu-rays (and 9GB DVDs at <1$ each) will stay as common as digital beta and hdcam tapes.

Not for digital cinema industry - which by the way is what this forum is all about... HDD and solid state memory is way forward. Forget optical... (with the exception of consumer distribution - but even that for how long? Not much I believe)

I guess we have different opinions and vision of the near future. I am not saying that You are wrong - I just believe something different. Time will tell...

 

[Peter Majtan]

Sorry, bu that is complete nonsense.
a) DVD and CD have been designed by Sony and Phillips, and you dont need a license to sell it.

One NEEDS LICENSE to manufacture & sell, whether it is CD, DVD, or BLU-RAY (unless You are in India or China and don't give a crap about patents and related issues and can get away with it...). Which planet do You live on?

 

[laguun]

One NEEDS LICENSE to manufacture & sell, whether it is CD, DVD, or BLU-RAY (unless You are in India or China and don't give a crap about patents and related issues and can get away with it...).

Any OEM business can buy and resell CD, DVD and bluray drives without any license. You buy the drive for 70 and resell for 80. There is nothing more.

Red certainly doesnt plan to manufacture drives, be it DVD or blu-ray. For this one would need a license.

Which planet do You live on?

Earth, 2008. Where are you from?