REDRAY and interactivity...

[Peter Majtan]

First of all I do not want to sound like I'm pissing on the parade - I am truly blown away with the REDRAY announcement and I have also already ordered one. This is amazing news for everyone indeed - kudos to Jim, Jarred and the rest of the team...

However I can't help but ask about the interactivity of REDRAY and .RED media...

This is 21st century and everything RED has put out is very much state-of-the-art. But passively feeding content to end consumer is so 90's. I would like to know whether RED is working on adding interactivity to the REDRAY and the .RED format. The potential there is endless. Imagine is for a second...:

I'm watching SAMSARA in 4K on the REDRAY in my home theatre on the (hopefully soon coming and affordable) RED CRIMSON 4K projection system. I see an amazing scene. I pause the playback and from the interactive menu I chose to see the technical information about this shot, as well as the geographical location where it was filmed. Perhaps even short behind-the-scene on how they have filmed this scene. I can see the information about the key crew members...

I can keep going on and on - but you get the idea. What really separated VHS from DVD was the interactivity of the DVD format. The basic (or very complex and beautiful) menus with all the alternative content and information. Ability to navigate chapters, etc... Apple has taken this concept into the non-physical media distribution with the iTunes Extras. I would like to see the REDRAY not missing this opportunity and at the very least planing to incorporate some interactive elements into the REDRAY and .RED format. QuickTime is a very good example of the simplest form. It would not be hard to encode some basic menu, navigation and interactivity into the format. Start a movie with a still menu where you can chose whether you want to watch the feature, or perhaps see some BTS, or additional info (inside more 4K stills and/or moving images)...

Step-up and an elegant solution (that would most likely require HW upgrade) is to introduce an Internet Browser capability. This way you could leave all the interactivity to the website that presents the particular content, with the REDRAY serving the playback role of the 4K content...

Either way some form of interactivity is a must and this will also have an implication on authoring the .RED media...

Just a thought...

What do you think?

 

[Matthew B]

Red team - If plans aren't in the works, PM me. I can help. (HTML5 custom video app / webkit developer).

 

[Stacey Spears]

This was asked a couple of times in the main thread. Here is one question along with Jarred's answer.

I know I'm a bit of a broken record, but I really want to know about the interactive/menu layer. Any info?

There is..but ODEMAX wants to demo that in person at the Sundance House at Sundance. You need to let your mind run free on this one.. if you look at the spec sheet and see that there is both a PROGRAM and a MONITOR output.. that should give you a bit of a clue just how far you can go with it...

I do hope that it will support still frames with a given duration as part of the interactivity. e.g. For the upcoming 2nd edition of our calibration disc, we used single frame encodes for a lot of the static test patterns. We would like to do the same thing here for the 4k version of the program. A step futher would be to actually have the patterns listed on the iPad app so that the user can select and have it displayed on the screen vs. an on-screen menu that the user navigates.

 

[Peter Majtan]

ODEMAX aside - I am sure they will have amazing front-end for the global distribution...

I am more interested to know about the actual .RED file format. I simply hope that the interactivity is not limited to ODEMAX-based distribution only...
Let say I create a project and I want someone to review it (like a client or another member of the team)...
Or I want to provide a direct download of my 4K project from my website to general public (well - anyone with REDRAY anyway...)...

It would be amazing if the .RED file could contain these still/motion menus (and other interactive components) that also show on the remote app...