Red unexpectedly demoed the RedRay, their 4K player, to an unsuspecting audience at the recent Red Party in Las Vegas. I, unfortunately, was on the other side of the country, but reports are the results were impressive.

The player can output 4K, 2K and 1080p. The Red demo was a reel (material shot on the Red One, of course) compressed with a new RGB codec designed for the RedRay, with a data rate of just 10 Mb/s. That’s 4K at 1/3 of the bit rate of a typical Blu-ray disc, which would be a substantial advance in compression technology. Sufficiently substantial that there has been a fair bit of skepticism about it, in fact.

I’d like to address a bit of that here. As I pointed out in this post over on Cinematography.com, while the advances embodied in RedRay are quite impressive, they’re technically plausible. Blu-ray runs at around 30 Mb/s, but this is mostly because it can; Blu-ray discs offer room to spare. Respectable 1080p video can be delivered with the H.264 codec at as little as 10 or 11 Mb/s. See Apple’s trailer site for many examples. 4K is around 4x the number of pixels of 1080p (just a little more, actually), so this means Red’s new codec is perhaps 4x as efficient. That’s about the same improvement factor that H.264 offers over MPEG-2, the codec for standard-definition DVD. The upshot is, we’ve seen codec improvements on this scale before.

There is, of course, no such thing as a free lunch. And in the case of dramatically improved video quality at a given bit rate, the cost comes in the form of computational overhead. H.264 requires much more processing power to decode than MPEG-2, and I suspect that the RedRay codec requires so much that real-time software decoding will be impossible for the next several years, and you’ll have to use a dedicated hardware device with an appropriate ASIC (a specialized processor) to play the footage.

Fortunately, the RedRay, which is precisely such a device, is supposedly going to be priced under $1000, making it a very handy tool for Red productions and post facilities, and probably of considerable interest on film festival circuits and to art house theaters.

The amount of fear mongering and disinformation in this thread is pretty astounding.

We have Red #404. We got it February, and have shot quite a lot with it. I’m with the camera virtually every time it’s used.

I’ve never seen the camera overheat.

I’ve never seen a Red Drive drop a frame, even in fairly jarring handheld use. We had a shoot a couple of months ago with the operator basically running through the bottom floor of a house doing whip pans — no frames dropped over about 20 takes. About a month ago we were using the camera handheld on-stage at a rock concert. I was keeping a close eye on the frame drop readout because sound becomes a real physical force at those intensity levels, but the drives held up fine. Red Drives are known to drop frames when there’s substantial mechanical vibration, such as with vehicle mounts. The simple solution is to not use them in those applications. It’s not as if Red doesn’t provide alternative recording mechanisms.

I have seen occasional boot failures — maybe one in 20 times the camera will freeze during boot. But you can tell that it’s frozen about 10 seconds into the boot process, and a quick power cycle resolves the issue. Total time lost, maybe 15 seconds.

As far as workflow goes… there have been perfectly workable Red workflows from the beginning. If you’re finishing in an HD video format, a $3500 Mac Pro tower can convert 4K Red footage to 1080p ProRes, DNxHD or uncompressed video at a rate of about three hours per hour of footage using the “Half Res High” decoding mode (which I believe is the same thing as “Standard” decoding in RedCine). On most shots this is nearly indistinguishable from doing a 4K debayer and downscaling, except that it’s about four times as fast.

Three hours per hour of footage means that you have your footage in online quality by the next morning.

For DI-style workflows, 2K DPX transcoding takes about the same amount of time (assuming you’re writing out to disks fast enough to write about 8 2K DPX frames per second — which isn’t all that hard these days).

A 4K DPX transcode might be more like 12 hours per hour of footage, but hey, two frames a second is, as far as I’m aware, a lot faster than any 4K film scanner in the world. And you could build a commodity hardware cluster which could do such transcodes in real-time for under $50K, probably, if you were so inclined, which is rather less than a 4K film scanner.

There are, of course, post houses which will provide these transcoding services if you don’t want to keep the infrastructure in-house. Though it would be a little silly for an individual or organization working with footage from high-end cameras to not keep a recent-model workstation in at least the $4000 range kicking around.

And, you can, of course, work with the footage on any Intel Mac (any Intel Mac with non-integrated graphics, for RedCine). You probably don’t want to transcode hours of footage on an iMac, but there’s nothing stopping you. And a MacBook Pro is pretty standard equipment on Red sets of checking footage on-set. You can play back 4K as 1K and output full-resolution stills. And play with one-light grades in real-time in RedCine to check if you can push the footage the way you want to.

The reason there’s so much discussion about Red workflow isn’t because there’s no practical workflow. It’s for two reasons.

One is that, because the model for the camera is to shoot in a proprietary format and then transcode, and because the camera is used for a wide range of productions, there is no one obvious workflow. This isn’t DVCPRO HD, where the standard workflow is to capture tapes (or download cards) and drop into Final Cut. You might want an HD workflow (compressed or uncompressed), or a DI workflow. You might want an offline or an online workflow. You might be happy with a workflow that requires you to transcode all the footage you shoot, or one that only requires you to transcode the shots you use in the final edit, or maybe only with one that only requires you to transcode the specific frames you use in the final edit. All of these, in many combinations, are possible, and they have different implications for quality, cost, and technical ability.

The second reason Red workflow gets discussed so much is because a lot of people aren’t happy with traditional HD and DI workflows, when they can see that Red’s compressed raw capture makes something better possible.

If you just transcode all of your footage to an HD video format, you lose the full range of the raw files before you’ve even started. You can do some grading in RedCine before you convert, but RedCine is pretty far from being a fully-featured grading environment.

You can mostly avoid this problem by transcoding to 10-bit (log) DPX or 16-bit (linear) TIFF, but workflows based around those formats require tens of terabytes of very fast storage and many commodity-priced software tools can’t work with them, so costs can quickly escalate to traditional DI levels as soon as you start to go this route.

What many people have been waiting for is the ability to work with all the data in those compressed raw files without having to transcode them into an unwieldy uncompressed format before feeding them into editing and grading tools. This has taken a lot longer to emerge than I think some people expected, which may have more to do with third-party vendors than Red itself, but has nonetheless been unfortunate for Red’s customers.

But in the last couple of months — last couple of weeks, for Final Cut — we’ve finally started to see this.

As of a couple of weeks ago, after I edit 1K or 2K proxy files (of 4K footage) in Final Cut Pro (an old capability), I can then send the edit to Color (the Final Cut Studio grading app), grade in a fairly capable environment with full access to all the data in the raw file, and then render out in any format up through 2K DPX.

And while it’s certainly nicer to do this on a $5000 8-core Mac Pro at the office, I can also do this on my $2000 laptop. I could do it on a $1200 iMac. With no external disks other than consumer-priced external FireWire 800 drives. And no software other than Red’s free tools and Apple’s $1299 Final Cut Studio.

It’s now not at all implausible to take a feature through the editing, grading and conforming processes, ending up with a 2K DPX conform, with less than $10K worth of hardware and software.

That’s the workflow everyone has been waiting for. And while there’s still room for quite a bit of refinement, it’s here now on the Mac with Final Cut, and while I haven’t kept such close tabs on the Adobe side of things, I gather things are moving along there as well (on both platforms).