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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 :)

RedAlert

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cadzow

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Have a couple questions on RedAlert for someone. I assume when I save 2K from RedAlert its pulling from the 2K extraction from the wavelet file, correct? Or is it always pulling from the full 4K file. In Redcine there are options, but none in red alert.

thanks!
 
No, it's 2k from the 4k data. I'm actually working on make it look even better, but it's pretty darn good for now.

Graeme
 
Perfect, thats what I thought was the case (based on time it took alone), but wasn't sure. I know RC/Scratch will do it, but are there plans for being able to extract dpx files from the 2K or 1K in the wavelet?
 
Graeme, so RA! always demosaics 4k on TIFF/DPX render? I assume that since the QT wrappers are 1/2 res, 1/4 res, etc. that demosaic level carries through when I drop those QT wrappers into Compressor?
 
No plans for 2k or 1k rapid DPX. Why do you want that, may I ask?

QT wrappers don't currently demosaic at all - just extract.

Graeme
 
Graeme Nattress said:
No plans for 2k or 1k rapid DPX. Why do you want that, may I ask?

QT wrappers don't currently demosaic at all - just extract.

Graeme
Click to expand...

forgive my confusion ... but does the demosaic happen in the quicktime component - always from 4K .r3d file - then the QT wrapper extracts based on parameters in the QT (wrapper)?
 
There's currently no demosaic in QT. a) because it's not written for QT yet, and b) because we're only doing 2k and going for fast playback at the moment. This should change though for high quality transcodes / exports in the future.

Graeme
 
Im also confused Graeme, isn't the demosaicing a necessity to view the data?

I was under the the same assumption Mark had.
 
Well, there's demosaicing and there's demosaicing. For 2k and below you can rapid extract, which you could think of as a monkey ass simple nearest neighbour "demosaic", but basically you pretend the colours all line up with each other and treat 4k as a 2k image and voila, you're in RGB colour. It's not as noise free as a full demosaic which takes into account surrounding samples and takes care to co-site the resulting RGB, but it's bloody quick.

Graeme
 
Oh I see, so are you saying in a future release we'll have monkey as simple demoasicing for viewing Quicktimes on the fly and full demoasicing if transcoding that quicktime to another codec? That would be sweet.

Currently the only way to get best quality would be to export a 4k image sequence and then scale to 2k in shake or AE?

As most people will inevitably be working in 1080p ProRes for commercials, music vids, industrials, episodics, etc. having the ability to get full quality from that 2k quicktime would be brilliant.
 
The plan is to move to the full quality decode in the QT codec for transcode and as requested by certain pixel types for certain apps - like Shake or AE.

The best current way to get best images is 4k image seq and then scale in shake or AE.

Graeme
 
Good to hear this is all still on the radar. Getting 4K into Shake without having to go uncompressed would be great. As would getting full-quality 2K (i.e. scaled from a full 4K demosaic) into Final Cut for 2K online conforms.
 
1) actually there is a rapid 2K decode for DPX/TIFF in REDCINE

2) highest quality outputs are full demosaic in RED ALERT! or REDCINE at the moment

3) As Graeme indicated, the QuickTime codec is doing a high-quality wavelet decode, but without a demosaic. Thus you could see some stepping or down sample artifacting. A future version will have very high-quality output with a 4K extract + downsample as well, but that will obviously be quite slow (compared to the other modes)
 
So currently the QT codec cannot produce an 'online quality' result? Even with the better quality version off the codec it is still doing eg 4 pixel averaging to produce the 2k?

I assume that this means that until a version of the codec comes out with a full de-mosaic, the Quicktime decode should not really by used in the online workflow. I think that point should be emphasised to all the current owners. I get the impression from some people's description of their workflow that they have been using the codec to transcode from REDCODE to ProRes.

It seems at the moment that for full quality you should take a path like rendering from Red Alert to DPX, using something like Blackmagic Framelink, or the AJA equivalent, to turn the DPXs into an uncompressed Quicktime to work with in FCP.
 
Well, the HQ 2K QT looks very nice. Sure, it's not as good as full on 4k and downscaled, but it does look very nice.

Graeme
 
OK - so does this mean that QT wrappers are doing "monkey ass" in 2k always? Is the "monkey ass" demosaic at 2k quality even if my QT is 1k or .5k?
 
That's "monkey ass simple", emphasis on the "simple". QT wrappers are currently being simple. They won't always be simple in all circumstances. They'll be able to do a very high quality, if slower, decode too.

Graeme
 
Graeme Nattress said:
That's "monkey ass simple", emphasis on the "simple". QT wrappers are currently being simple. They won't always be simple in all circumstances. They'll be able to do a very high quality, if slower, decode too.

Graeme
Click to expand...

great - the qt wrappers will help in many many scenarios. they will be windows and osx, correct?

p.s. congratulations on the 72fps btw - that will be such a creative expansion to our hdcam work of the recent years. The new hdcams btw all switch back from 4:4:4 to 4:2:2 if you go to 60p.
 
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