While RED has been pretty tight-lipped about its
planned RED RAY product, some footage shown off at RED's NAB party gave a sizable hint that RED RAY could be much more than meets the eye -- specifically a $1,000 device that can play cinema-quality 4k video off of standard DVDs. At the party they played an uncompressed showreel of 4k footage on a Sony 4k projector, which clocked in at 1.3GB per second, and then showed that exact same footage under the "RED RAY" codec at a mere 10Mb/s (megabits, not bytes; about half the bitrate of SD DV), at a compression rate of 700:1. Attendees claimed they could see zero visible compression, though a projector in a ballroom isn't exactly the best case scenario to test that sort of thing. Unfortunately, there's little other info about how they're achieving this (we hear "wavelets" come into the equation at some point), or to what nefarious aims, but with compression like this the implications for content distribution are pretty stunning: 1080p+ streaming for all. Naturally, the down side of all of this is probably some pretty hefty processing power on the consumer end, but we'll cross that I/O bridge when we come to it.
[Thanks, Ben H]
posted April 25th 2009 3:48PM
The ratio of 770:1 seems right, if you use the correct original bitrate, Paul didn't in the piece.
Read the linked forum post for the details.
or 700:1 without the typing FAIL.
I want to go to there.
NAB itself is easy to get into. You can get into the exhibits for free with only a little Googling for a free registration code. Trust me, there's plenty of college kids and 'prosumers' there already. And there was plenty of room for you this year. I'd say booth space was down 10-15% and attendance a little over 15% down. And hotel rates were as little as half what they were last year. As far as getting into the exclusive RED stuff, that's up to you. Every day there's invite-only stuff going on at most of the hotels. I, however, spend my free time at night at the pinball hall of fame.
NAB is easy to get into. Just find a registration code online and register. the RED event wasn't actually at NAB this year, it was sort of a separate affair held in the Amazon Ballroom at the Rio. Anyone interested was let into the RED event/party. The companies had set up booths displaying lenses, equipment, and color correction tools on demonstration. Then individual rooms were set aside to show off the RED work flow in Final Cut, Premier, Avid, ect.
I do agree that it seemed as if attendance was way down from last year. Plus many companies didn't really have anything new and exciting to show off in terms of new cameras really.
Nice pun at the end!
WANT
I wish I could afford RED equipment
Sarge from Red vs Blue came up with this long before now in one of their PSA vids
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-N2VNyl-Xg ~2:08
I was there in the ballroom at the Rio on Wednesday when they showed the footage. While both reels shown weren't 100% the same (one was last years footage reel and the other was an updated one) The footage was so clear that I wouldn't have even thought it was compressed at all, plus it was RED on a 4k projector. When the man told everyone that we had just seen the RED Ray codec off a DVD we were quite impressed. A part of me didn't believe it.
Also, the conditions where not perfect, it wasn't just a projector in a ballroom, it was a rear projector in a ballroom.
RED has delivered on a lot of their promises, they just take a long time to release anything : )
I am quite jealous right now :(
consumers are hardly rushing to bluray yet. not needed. will go nowhere.
Dude your totally missing the point - first its a pro tool not a consumer good, seccond the interesting bit is in the compression - its just a plain ol' dvd otherwise.
People didn't "rush" to DVD either until the cheap players hit. Wait until we get mass market $50-$80 Blu-Ray players, then you'll get adoption. Oh, and once people get jobs.
yah but it didn't take that long for dvd players to get cheaper and even so most people aren't rushing and there aren't any $100 blurays that i know of. Even so netflix streaming is decent and streaming non phyisical movies where the market is headed. i get you're point that i miss the point. Ok maybe. But my point is that most people have no interest now in buying a new format or new hardware for it. Additionally when most people don't care about compression and can't tell between a bluray and a good upscaled dvd as a consumer product there isn't demand for this. now like you said it's not a consumer product but should they try to use it in one it will have the same hurdles.
I want my Scarlet that much more now.
Not really. I've seen 1080p h.264 transcodes fit on a single DVD layer that worked excellently. There may be artefacting, but what you have to bear in mind is that:
a) The transcodes we normally see (or don't see, because I'm sure no one here would ever agree to participate in illegality) are made from pre-compressed sources, meaning what you see has been through two compression passes: the first pass throws out data the second pass wouldn't necessarily agree to. Uncompressed sources will work better.
b) Artefacting gets a lot less discernible to humans as it decreases in size (i.e. blocking and ringing don't look as bad when an image block is only 1cm square instead of 2" square).
c) Postprocessing actually does help, and it may be helping here.
d) As mentioned, the projection here doesn't make it the final word on telling quality
e) As mentioned here, H.264 isn't exactly the be all and end all in possible codec design. Avenues are still open like wavelets, smarter object based motion compensation and image transforms, in-loop noise filtering/reinsertion, extending transforms into the temporal domain etc. Having said that, as bandwidth decreases and the visual discernibility decreases there's been little impetus to really improve this stuff recently.
f) Not sure, but typical real world image compressibility likely increases with resolution. E.g., One image recorded at 4X SD resolution should get better quality per bits than the sum of 4 different images at SD resolution, i.e. there's a lot of commonality between the low resolution and additional resolution that makes it more compressible.
Meant as reply to Mako
I don't care what they're selling, their hardware designs are freaking SEXY!!!
If Toughbooks, Hummers, Tanks, and Jeeps are "sexy".
If this is for real, couldn't it do for movies in the next dozen years what mp3s did for music - SDVD-quality mainstream file sharing, entire DVD collections on one or two hard drives, etc.?
Does nobody use Wikipedia anymore?
Wavelet Compression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_compression
Wavelet Series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_series
Wavelet compression is currently used in Bink Video (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bink_Video) which is used in pile of console games, so almost all of use have already seen compression JUST LIKE THIS. RED's compression is undoubtedly slightly more processor intensive than Bink's is, but it's still the same style of compression.
No, I use the homeless guy down the street, just as credible information.
impressive
So does this mean Sony et al are starting to get a bit concerned over their Blu Ray investment? If they do eventually feel a bit squeezed these guys they will get bought out for a paltry sum and this technology IP will rot in some secure back room filing cabinet. Pity...
Well, Jannard has a lot of money and no investors to answer to, so unless he wants RED to get bought out, they won't get bought out.
Jannard did not like losing control of Oakley (going public), he took the company private again. But then later he did sell them off to Luxxotica, presumably when he saw no more growth future for the company.
RED stands little chance in their chosen marketplace. It's just too capital intensive. They will be unable to compete with bigger companies on sensors and custom chips.
How do you guys know this stuff? I am impressed with your fact finding know how...seriously.
Red rules. I got a couple of their T-shirts today.
Are they just as expensive as the hardware?
No but you buy an x-small size and it fits xx-large. Its Amazing!
The T-shirts are $20 each, plus shipping. Panavision cameras rent for about $25,000 per month (est.). Those are the $17,000 RED camera's competition..
Do you think that if Blu and Red Ray got married their child would be Purple?
Wait, they have the same last name?! Inbreeding?
now combine that with metal gear ray and now you're talking
Are you printing this directly off a RED press release?
No self-respecting videophile would be at all shocked that there is a more efficient compression than DV. DV video is enormous. This is because the DV compression is so old IT DOESN'T DO ANY FRAME DIFFERENCING. Not only that, it doesn't do any redundancy elimination either. It just does RGB->YUV and then throws out most of the color data.
Every compression is better than DV. Even MPEG-2 is an order of magnitude more efficient!
I can assure you RED has no compression scheme which exceeds H.264 or VC-1 in quality.
Also, the link your article refers to specifically mentions in the last sentence that there were visible artifacts.
It is not surprising that the quoted bit rate for the RED product is about the same as the HP Remote Graphics Software Bitrate for similar content sent over a LAN from a server to its client - This lossless software was developed by HP for the NASA Mars Explorer mission and all those pics and videos we saw came down the wire using that codec.
For the last three years we have all been able to use the commercialised version of this software for next to nothing thanks to the HP RGS release and it is how many big AV production suites run their content from servers to their remotely located editing suites with full local computer connectivity.
I am using RGS with HP Blade PCs and servers to run an A320 simulator using HP T5730 Thin Clients as the remote connection to the backend. Seems like the RED guys have hung around enough big editing suites to see the power of that kind of codec and made some hardware / software to save the
You cannot compress video as much as is done here without losing data. It's even mathematically provable. Look up entropy.
RED's compression, like nearly all other recent compression schemes is lossy.
continued...
...to save the stream to DVD for playback. Great stand alone solution and congratulations to RED.
gk
That's awesome!
Btw, are videophiles as annoying and pretentious as audiophiles?
Very much so. Pedophiles on the other hand...
WIN the Red Scarlet Camera by entering a 1 minute short film to http://sKarlets.com
They made a 720p video available on their website of the video they demoed, which looks great in it's own right. It is big at about 450MB for 8 minutes.
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showpost.php?p=409535&postcount=21
Guys, there's nothing new to see here. This isn't some major leap in video compression. If there was, you'd have already seen it in the underground video release scene. This is where new compression technology has always debuted, and I doubt things have suddenly changed.
Those people that can't tell a difference between DVD & BD probably haven't been to see the eye DR. in 10 years.
700:1? Bullshit.
Too good to be true... until I see it with my own eyes.
This is simply the power of wavelet compression - lots of the other codecs out there are seriously old & creaky with pretty obvious artifacts. RedCode RAW is based on JPEG 2000 and is "visually" lossless (largely thanks to the genius of Red's Graeme Nattress, who many of you might know through his Final Cut plug-ins). In a similar way the camera can record at 4K which would create huge file sizes if it wasn't compressed, but the resulting file sizes are comparatively tiny (1 minute of 4K = roughly 1.5 GB).
Now somebody needs to come out with a HHDDVVDDBVD player!
While everyone here is talking about it, i'm out snapping up domain names with the word redray in it. It's like when bluray first came out or even the bluetooth device. Smart people snapped up domain names to build online stores around. Now its next to impossible to get a decent domain name with the word blueray because they are all gone. I'm gonna make a profit off this. Yes, it may be a few years out before anyone sees any actual products or devices on the market but in the meantime i must be ahead of everyone else especially when it comes to registering the domain names. Then when the time comes i can either set up online stores or sell the domain names for huge profits. names like getredray.com, buyredray.com, redraystore.com, redrayinfo.com, shopredray.com, redrayplaza.com, i own them all! It could be a few years but one day i may be a main online seller of these things or sell a name or two for a few grand or perhaps both. When blueray first came out people were skeptical then too but try and find a domain name with the word in it today!
Eric