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Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks

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Re: Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks

#31

Post by davidjohnstone »

stephen_g wrote: post #27
davidjohnstone wrote: post #11

As desirable as the specs are, this comment on Canon Rumors balances things up: "To those fawning after the Red...sure, it looks nice, but the poor color rendering, impossible proprietary workflow, and constantly-in-need-of-updates software make the camera a nightmare, imo, to use. Canon's footage has nicer skin tones than I've ever seen out of a Red. There's a reason so much tv is shot with the Alexa, rather than th…

From someone who has processed and edited a lot of RED footage, this is pretty much complete hogwash. RED cameras use a RAW codec called REDCODE, which records the raw sensor data with lossless compression. Almost every other camera records RGB data that has been through gamma correction, a colour curve, sharpening (ugh..), and a whole lot of other image processing. These other cameras therefore give you very little…

I'm pleased to be corrected by somebody who knows what they're talking about :-)

Re: Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks

#32

Post by georgieporgie »

nobody31 wrote: post #9
winestock wrote: post #5

I did a little searching and found that Panavision rents its Genesis line of digital cameras for $4,000 per day . Granted "no one pays book rate," and that price includes accessories, and the two cameras may not be equivalent. Nevertheless, why hasn't Panavision been disrupted a long time ago? Are their cameras really that good?

so we are shooting a $500M movie, $star$ is costing us $250M of that and the advertising budget is another $300M Can we see if we can get a deal on the camera rental?

We can look forward to better looking independent films and pornography, at least.

Re: Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks

#33

Post by unwind »

bgentry wrote: post #25
davidjohnstone wrote: post #11

As desirable as the specs are, this comment on Canon Rumors balances things up: "To those fawning after the Red...sure, it looks nice, but the poor color rendering, impossible proprietary workflow, and constantly-in-need-of-updates software make the camera a nightmare, imo, to use. Canon's footage has nicer skin tones than I've ever seen out of a Red. There's a reason so much tv is shot with the Alexa, rather than th…

impossible proprietary workflow I know this wasn't your comment, but what exactly is impossible and proprietary about their workflow? AFAIK Redcode RAW is supported by Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Avid, etc..

Reading up a bit on REDCODE (simply by hitting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDCODE) the fact that the audio is uncompressed amused me. With the bandwidth spent on the video content, I guess 4 channels of 24-bit PCM at 48 kHz just doesn't matter. :)

Re: Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks

#34

Post by tincholio »

rorrr wrote: post #23
protomyth wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much, but both cameras can use the cheaper Canon lenses, and these cameras aren't the ones you are putting $40k lenses on unless you are renting. If you are buying the $40k lense you are buying an Epic, Alexa, or high end Sony. $15k for a complete Red rig is pretty good and can be used to do some serious work.

Most canon lenses can only be used in manual focus mode, the motors make way too much noise. That's why good cinematic lenses are so expensive.

Well, that's the way they would be used with this rig, as it doesn't support AF.

Re: Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks

#35

Post by jermy »

stephen_g wrote: post #27
davidjohnstone wrote: post #11

As desirable as the specs are, this comment on Canon Rumors balances things up: "To those fawning after the Red...sure, it looks nice, but the poor color rendering, impossible proprietary workflow, and constantly-in-need-of-updates software make the camera a nightmare, imo, to use. Canon's footage has nicer skin tones than I've ever seen out of a Red. There's a reason so much tv is shot with the Alexa, rather than th…

From someone who has processed and edited a lot of RED footage, this is pretty much complete hogwash. RED cameras use a RAW codec called REDCODE, which records the raw sensor data with lossless compression. Almost every other camera records RGB data that has been through gamma correction, a colour curve, sharpening (ugh..), and a whole lot of other image processing. These other cameras therefore give you very little…

As only a minor nitpick (my excuse is that this is my day job), you've got it the wrong way round - REDCODE is actually storing data as RGB, whereas 'every other camera' is almost certainly using a MPEG-based codec and storing it as YUV with chroma subsampling - somewhere between 4:1:1/4:2:0 to 4:2:2 depending on the camera in use.

As with any lossless compression, it's a compromise between having almost all of the data shot to work with versus pretty much having to always do a full grade on any content you get and the additional online storage space needed in post-production.

Re: Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks

#36

Post by jermy »

bgentry wrote: post #25
davidjohnstone wrote: post #11

As desirable as the specs are, this comment on Canon Rumors balances things up: "To those fawning after the Red...sure, it looks nice, but the poor color rendering, impossible proprietary workflow, and constantly-in-need-of-updates software make the camera a nightmare, imo, to use. Canon's footage has nicer skin tones than I've ever seen out of a Red. There's a reason so much tv is shot with the Alexa, rather than th…

impossible proprietary workflow I know this wasn't your comment, but what exactly is impossible and proprietary about their workflow? AFAIK Redcode RAW is supported by Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Avid, etc..

The REDCODE format is proprietary - any of the above need to have the Red quicktime or AMA plugin to access the content.

For amusement, see 'Baselight Kompressor' for what a linux-based grading system has to do to handle red content.

Re: Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks

#37

Post by zokier »

jermy wrote: post #35
stephen_g wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From someone who has processed and edited a lot of RED footage, this is pretty much complete hogwash. RED cameras use a RAW codec called REDCODE, which records the raw sensor data with lossless compression. Almost every other camera records RGB data that has been through gamma correction, a colour curve, sharpening (ugh..), and a whole lot of other image processing. These other cameras therefore give you very little…

As only a minor nitpick (my excuse is that this is my day job), you've got it the wrong way round - REDCODE is actually storing data as RGB, whereas 'every other camera' is almost certainly using a MPEG-based codec and storing it as YUV with chroma subsampling - somewhere between 4:1:1/4:2:0 to 4:2:2 depending on the camera in use. As with any lossless compression, it's a compromise between having almost all of the d…

The Wikipedia page of REDCODE claims that it contains the Bayer-patterned subpixel data, so it's more comparable to RAW images than rendered RGB images. But according to that page, it's also lossy format, which makes it quite interesting technically.

Re: Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks

#38

Post by archangel_one »

wmf wrote: post #6
winestock wrote: post #5

I did a little searching and found that Panavision rents its Genesis line of digital cameras for $4,000 per day . Granted "no one pays book rate," and that price includes accessories, and the two cameras may not be equivalent. Nevertheless, why hasn't Panavision been disrupted a long time ago? Are their cameras really that good?

In some sense the Genesis and its ilk were already disrupted by the Red One, although I question how price-sensitive this market is. Does Peter Jackson care about the difference between $4K per day and $400 per day?

I bet Peter Jackson cared about $3600/day when he filmed Bad Taste. Or even for LOTR, that would have cost $1.5m over the trilogy, which is about 0.5% of their budget (or possibly more since they would have needed more than one camera) - so not that significant, but money that could be better spent elsewhere.

Re: Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks

#39

Post by stephen_g »

jermy wrote: post #35
stephen_g wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From someone who has processed and edited a lot of RED footage, this is pretty much complete hogwash. RED cameras use a RAW codec called REDCODE, which records the raw sensor data with lossless compression. Almost every other camera records RGB data that has been through gamma correction, a colour curve, sharpening (ugh..), and a whole lot of other image processing. These other cameras therefore give you very little…

As only a minor nitpick (my excuse is that this is my day job), you've got it the wrong way round - REDCODE is actually storing data as RGB, whereas 'every other camera' is almost certainly using a MPEG-based codec and storing it as YUV with chroma subsampling - somewhere between 4:1:1/4:2:0 to 4:2:2 depending on the camera in use. As with any lossless compression, it's a compromise between having almost all of the d…

Are all the MPEG codecs YUV? I know MPEG2 is but I thought MPEG4/H.264 wasn't. Now that I think about it, you're probably right about that part (as for other codecs, I know the ProRes codec that the Alexa typically shoots (unless you use the ArriRAW recorder but hardly anyone does yet) definitely is YUV, but the HDCAM tapes that some of the more expensive Sony cameras shoot isn't).

But the point still stands that RGB and YUV codecs aren't RAW like REDCODE is.

REDCODE itself isn't exactly RGB. It actually is pretty interesting - it does store the red, green and blue pixels separably, but it's not usually classified as RGB since it stores two green channels for every red and blue channel (because of the way the bayer filter on the sensor is arranged - there's twice as many green pixels as red and blue), and because those channels haven't been demosaiced/debayered[1].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing

Re: Red Digital Cinema announces Scarlet X -- 4K resolution, $9750, Ships in 2 weeks

#40

Post by vilya »

ck2 wrote: post #26

How large is a two hour 4K datastream? Hmm 50 megabytes per second x 7200 seconds = 352 gigabytes That actually seems manageable these days with a RAID10 of 2TB drives? I guess you could have up to ten hours of footage cut down to two.

I'm not sure where the article got that 50 Mb/sec figure from, but it sounds a bit low. Uncompressed, it's more like 50 Mb per frame - 1.5 Gb/sec (4096x2160, 3 channels, each channel is 16 bits, up to 30 frames/sec).

According to their tech specs page* there are two compression options: 18:1 and 3:1. The former gets it down to about 84 Mb/sec, but it's difficult to know what kind of a quality hit you'll be taking. With the latter it's still 500 Mb/sec.

Film-makers generally want to capture source footage at the highest quality possible so I'd guess most will film at the 3:1 compression level. If that assumption holds, 2 hours of footage is approximately 3.5 Tb of data.

That is still a fairly manageable amount of data though. For comparison, The Tale of Despereaux - an animated movie which came out in 2008 and started production several years before that - filled up a 192 Tb disk cluster.

* http://www.red.com/products/scarlet#product-tech-specs

Edit: I think I might have made some incorrect assumptions about the REDCODE raw format, so my figures above are probably wrong. Sorry for any confusion!

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