OT: RED Epic and Scarlet

Okay, I was up late last night watching the reveals and have been on their users sites most of the day. Anyone else following this?

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Eric Harnden
Quintessential Studios
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[wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net]
[twitter.com]

Yes indeed. Fun stuff.

Yes, I saw you there! In fact, my friend WestEggProductions was VERY excited to see you there!

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Eric Harnden
Quintessential Studios
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[wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net]
[twitter.com]

I just read the summaries. The hundred-plus-page thread on Redcrack intimidated me.

The 617 sensor, I think I'm safe in saying, is ridiculous.

Outrageous perhaps, but not ridiculous. The imager is a bit bigger than twice the area of IMAX. Is it twice as ridiculous as IMAX? I think photographers who today enjoy large and medium format could produce stunning imagery with such a camera. Downsampled you'll have very low noise, very high resolution and amazing dynamic range. You could get fun with macro and tilt/shift lenses for all kinds of effects. Could be very powerful for SFX work. Hell, I'm sure someone will even do a YouTube video on it, just because they can :-)

Graeme

Just to be clear, Graeme, I meant "ridiculous" in the good sense.

I am curious, though: What's the business case for that 617 sensor? Sure, I agree with everything you said, photographers would be able to do some very neat things with it. But at $55,000 for the sensor alone, isn't that targeted toward a pretty tiny market? Maybe I'm just ignorant of large-format photography.

I think it's funny that the more they clarify things, the more questions there are!

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Eric Harnden
Quintessential Studios
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[wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net]
[twitter.com]

How about some freakin' links, fellas?!

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

scarletuser.com
reduser.com

I was at the Red event at Fox today and it was a lot of fun. They showed lots of footage (no, not from Scarlet or Epic) and talked about the new cams. Essentially there was no more info that is on their web site now. Saw an early prototype of the Scarlet/Epic brain. That is the big deal here. From a log size metal tube that is the Red One brain, the Scarlet brain is no bigger than 2 packs of cigarettes wrapped in gaffers tape. The new cams are modular meaning you can configure them in a trillion different ways depending on your needs. You can make it a still cam or a movie cam or a movie cam that shoots stills or a still cam that shoots movies or a kitchen sink that makes for good conversation. These cams are a combination still and movie cam. Just choose and configure.

Price is determined by the sensor size you choose. And all the parts that you need to configure your brain into a camera. The bigger the sensor the bigger the price. Difference in cams is no more than the size of sensor and frame rates.

The 28K sensor looks to be the size of a ruler. There is a 3D rendering of what this cam might look like once it ships on the Red web site. My initial impression is that this would be the camera Batman would design if Batman designed cameras. And yes there is a business model for this, and yes it is iMax. Who would not want to use a 28K Epic in place of an iMax cam? The possibilities here for big screen live events and extravaganzas are endless and the fact that the form factor is so much lighter weight and smaller than an iMax cam means you can put that cam where an iMax could never go.

The low end Scarlet with the fixed lens is enough for me. Have no idea what it would cost once configured. I'd guess 4 -5K but thats a guess.

Really amazing stuff here and congrats to Graeme and the Red team. Everything has just changed.

Michael Horton
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Hi Graeme:

If you are able to, can you tell us if you guys are working on some sort of solution to the rolling shutter artifacts? I have only used the RED One once but I have a lot of experience with the EX1 and the rolling shutter artifacts are a deal breaker for my work.

The new cameras look amazing but many of us are wondering if the technology is evolving to make rolling shutter artifacts a thing of the past?

Thanks,

Dan

Can someone explain "rolling shutter artifacts" as some of us don't have much RED experience? Links & reference pics would be appreciated.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

See links below, rather than this misinformed post, now edited.

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Eric Harnden
Quintessential Studios
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[wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net]
[twitter.com]

here you go Joe
[dvxuser.com]

Eric, are you sure that Russ shot that on a Z1 ... I thought that clip was shot with a CMOS based camera?

Who the hell is Russ?

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Eric Harnden
Quintessential Studios
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[wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net]
[twitter.com]

dear god that is one 'funky' effect on that poor video... On a Z1 though yeah that doesn't sound right?

Hey Eric,
According to the info posted here that video was shot by Russ Andersson, of Andersson Technologies, makers of SynthEyes, whom I assumed to be your mate as you posted that "a friend sent me a clip from some Sony Z1 shot he did" and it appears to be the same clip. That article I linked suggests that the footage was shot on a CMOS based camera (not a CCD based camera like the Z1). Hence my question. Perhaps the article got its facts wrong, or possibly I've misread something myself?
Andy

Outstanding news, incredibly good R&D in a very short time. How the big guys (especially Sony) could have missed the trend of photo and moving pictures merging is hard to understand. This marks the end of video as we currently know it, while setting a new benchmark for the high end. A truly remarkable achievement.

And finally, imho the key to the whole revolution: really good glass.

I'll take a case of Scarlets, and look forward to seeing all the other rather insufficient systems we've had to deal with in the past few years (HDV, DVCProHD, P2, HDCam, AVCHD, XDCam etc.) to fade into obsolesence asap.

So, now should be the time for a FinalCutStudio 3 release with full RED support in all the ProApps (especially Color!).

And, really curious about when we get to see a 28K Cinema Display.


Clay

Michael, I totally get the whole "617 is the new IMAX" idea. Shooting such a huge format and then downsampling it for presentation would undoubtedly produce remarkably clean, noiseless images.

But Redcode 500?? Seriously? Are the Red guys honestly expecting post technology to advance so far in two years that we'll be able to handle two and a half times the bandwidth of uncompressed HD? Sure, storage is cheap and all that; my facility just bought 75 TB for about $40,000. But even that mini-monster storage system can barely do 600 MB a second. It could, maybe, if everything went perfectly, play back one stream of Redcode 500. Assuming we had a computer that could decode it in real time.

The FF35 bodies, because of their lens mounts, seem less useful to me, although I'm definitely not a cinematographer so maybe I'm just ignorant. The S35-format Scarlet body with the PL mount seems like it'll be the way to go for most production, maybe swapping it out for an S35-format Epic body on days when you need to shoot off-speed.

It's definitely neat-looking stuff. I hope it all works as advertised.

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But Redcode 500?? Seriously? Are the Red guys honestly expecting post technology to advance so far in two years

Yep... the technology is already here Jeff and its getting faster and cheaper all the time...

HDD based: [www.dulcesystems.com]

I've also heard of systems using 24+ disks that run over 1000MBps on an HDD array but couldn't find a link just now.

However SSDs are going to be the order of the day for high-level sustained transfer...

Solid State: [www.superssd.com]

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Assuming we had a computer that could decode it in real time.

PCIe 1.1 (which I believe is in the MacPro on the expansion slots) does 250 MBps per lane so on a 4x its up to 1GBps and 8x its 2GBps... The PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot does up to 4GBps

The MacPros have a memory bandwidth of up to 16GBps so would think they would happily eat RedCode 500 for lunch - maybe Mr Nattress can confirm whether this is the case in practice!



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Rolling shutter is causes by how the rows on the CMOS are read out in sequence. Ideally they are read out so fast that you don't see any temporal changes as the readout flows from top to bottom.

What you can see if you do get to see the effect, is one of two things: skew which means objects tilt over as you pan, and jellocam, which is where the image wobbles and shakes on up-down movement as the image gets squashed and stretched.

In the recent builds of RED One firmware, the speed of the readout on the sensor has been increased, so that skew is eliminated for all practical purposes. It's still there, but not much. I know that can still causes some people issues, however.

So, on the new cameras, it's reduced still further, by another significant amount. I doubt you'll now see any artifacts from it in practice.

Now, other things to remember is that film also has this issue. As the spining mirror shutter that causes skew, but it's a very fast shutter, so you don't often see the effects.

The main problem is when it's all so bad that you can hardly avoid seeing it, as here: [www.dpreview.com]

Hope that explains it all,

Graeme

On top of everything Graeme said, it's also worth noting that skewing and jelloing are two things you will not see unless you're shooting handheld or Steadicam. If you're on sticks or a jib or a crane, you're simply not going to be moving the camera fast enough to see noticeable rolling-shutter artifacts.

So why do people really care? Because even rolling-shutter artifacts that are too subtle to notice with the naked eye on moving footage can make 3D trackers scream and hide under the bed.

It's possible, with a combination of the stuff Graeme talked about and simple camera control to minimize the effect of a CMOS shutter, but it's not possible to eliminate it. It's a side-effect of the technology, and we all just have to live with it.

I guess in a way you could say it's like hairs in the film gate. They happen, that's life, you deal with it by checking the gate. It's just a limitation of the technology of filmmaking.

Oh, it's possible to eliminate it - you just won't like the trade-offs into much lower dynamic range, or moving to a CCD with it's vertical flares on bright objects. Obviously, if the rolling shutter is as fast as film's mirror shutter, it doesn't pose a practical problem.

Even on stabilized cameras you can still see skew - just have a static camera and a bus drive past it fast...

Graeme

Hi Ben,

starting to make sense now what those super ssd's might actually be useful for. If everybody chips in...

Meantine I figure I'll need at least a couple of these

www.seamlessdisplay.com/products_radius320.htm

to edit the 28k output.

Maybe some roller skates too to navigate across the edit desk.

Best,
Clay

Thanks Graeme

Just what I needed to see.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

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But Redcode 500?? Seriously? Are the Red guys honestly expecting post technology to advance so far in two years that we'll be able to handle two and a half times the bandwidth of uncompressed HD?

Graeme can speak to this much better than I since he is the codec monkey at Red, but even at 28K this is not uncompressed. It's Redcode raw, a wavelet codec. As to how to work with it in post you simply use proxies as you would with all versions of the Red cam. I wonder though if all these cams will have different versions of the codec and if all of them will be compatible. Might be a stupid question, but I'm betting someone is asking it.

Michael Horton
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Well, the beauty of the wavelet stuff is extraction of lower resolutions at faster speeds.... Just theorizing, but 28k should be extractable as 14k, 7k, 3.5k, 1.25k and the last two should be, theorectically, reasonably fast. I don't see any reason why 28k should not be semi-practical now, and reasonably practical by release.

Graeme

I see, I guess what my friend sent me wasn't his....

Stick with the article.


Andy Mees Wrote:
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> Hey Eric,
> According to the info posted here that video was
> shot by Russ Andersson, of Andersson Technologies,
> makers of SynthEyes, whom I assumed to be your
> mate as you posted that "a friend sent me a clip
> from some Sony Z1 shot he did" and it appears to
> be the same clip. That article I linked suggests
> that the footage was shot on a CMOS based camera
> (not a CCD based camera like the Z1). Hence my
> question. Perhaps the article got its facts wrong,
> or possibly I've misread something myself?
> Andy

--
Eric Harnden
Quintessential Studios
---------------------------------
[wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net]
[twitter.com]

I dunno, Graeme. I want to have faith in Red, I really do. If nothing else, you guys are pushing the industry in new directions, and that's good.

But the more I study what's been released so far and think about it, the more questions I have. I was really surprised to look closely and see that the new Monstro sensor is only going to be available at Vistavision size or larger. I would have thought ? and again, not a cinematographer here ? that a 4K, 16-bit sensor with 13-odd stops of dynamic range would be a killer in the Super 35 format.

I guess it makes more sense if you think that Monstro is really meant to be a stills sensor ? the 3:2 aspect ratio leads one to this tentative conclusion, seeing as how there are gonna be a lot of wasted photosites there when one shoots for theatrical presentation.

I know it's all very early, and I know very little has been said out loud so far, but the big picture just doesn't quite seem to make sense yet. I don't know if you're in a position to offer clarifications, Graeme, but I sure wouldn't mind reading some.