- Is the rule of thirds a lazy sham? http://jakegarn.com/the-rule-of-thirds/ (via @5tu) #
Archive for April, 2009
Twitter Updates for 2009-04-29
April 29th, 2009 by Chris Kenny
Twitter Updates for 2009-04-28
April 28th, 2009 by Chris Kenny
- Geared tripod head for $4000: http://bit.ly/181m80 Usually one rated for that weight is a rather more expensive item. #
- @wingrove The ASA of a camera is determined by how much noise you tolerate, which is somewhat subjective and partially dependent on subject. in reply to wingrove #
- http://bit.ly/1Ofxq David Mullen on fill light, deep blacks, and exposure. I love deep blacks with clean footage; makes things feel “silky”. #
Will RedRay usher in the age of consumer 4K?
April 25th, 2009 by Chris Kenny
My guess is, probably not.
The computer industry will certainly push for higher resolution displays, mostly because ~200 dpi allows for vastly better text rendering. I tend to think that the technology will be in place for reasonably priced consumer 4K within the next four years or so, but that there really won’t just be much consumer demand. You have to sit almost comically close to a 50″ TV before you start wishing you had more detail than 1080p provides. Consumer 4K stands a good chance of ending up like SACD and DVD Audio; most people thought CDs were more than good enough, so these formats went nowhere. In fact, the formats that eventually did largely replace the CD — MP3 and AAC — were [I]lower[/I] quality, but more convenient.
Maybe if TVs keep getting bigger… but I think they may already be large enough that most people don’t really want something bigger in their living rooms, so there might have to be some big change in technology for that to happen. (“Screen paint” that turns walls into screens or something. Give it 20 years.)
Now, maybe I’m wrong about all this, and consumer 4K will be the big summer hit of 2014. But I suspect if Red wants to make a play for the mainstream consumer distribution market, what they should do is develop a version of the RedRay codec optimized for 1080p Internet streaming. If what happened with music is any guide, Blu-ray won’t be replaced by a higher quality physical media format, but by a substantially more convenient (and possibly somewhat lower quality) downloadable and streamable format.
I see RedRay’s primary use being on Red productions, in Red post facilities, on the festival circuit, in art house theaters and other indie venues, and possibly for wider theatrical use if it supports some sort of copy protection.
RedRay: is that really possible?
April 25th, 2009 by Chris Kenny
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.
