Redcode Lossless

T

ThomSteinhoff

Member
I have every confidence that Grahame is going to deliver a stunning redcode that will be just fine for 95%-99% of us but I still see a lot of people trying to figure out a lossless workflow and I can imagine the Peter Jacksons of the world will insist on perfection and therefore never allow shooting of anything less than digitally perfect.

It got me thinking... Currently, there are now two options: Raw (all bits) that requires big pipes and big drives and Redcode Raw (compressed, visually lossless) that is compressed far enough down to make the datarate of off the shelf drives while still maintaining the best quality possible.

Could there be a third option? "Redcode Lossless" Still require bigger pipes and bigger drives, but because it is compressed just far enough to be "digitally lossless" we still should be able to cut the pipe size and file sizes dramatically. Think "Apple Lossless"--still cut the size by 5-10x (what Apple Lossless does) but still maintaining bit level integrity of the original raw image.

Once more images and scenes are out and people have a chance to truely AB Redcode--for the vast majority of the indies I think it will be a non-issue, but I suspect at the studio level--it will always be an issue and is worth considering if it is possible.

Although, maybe RAW is already compressed enough to be digitally lossless and I don't know what I'm talking about!
 
Apple Lossless is only about 2:1. (See here.)

And my understanding is it's somewhat easier to compress audio data than video data.

It would be neat if REDCODE and REDCODE RAW let you dial in any bit rate you wanted (within reasonable limits, of course), the way you can with, say, H.264. Compression in-camera is done with specialized hardware, though, not with general-purpose processors, so I'm not sure if the flexibility would be there to allow this. (I don't really know, though; embedded systems are not exactly my area of expertise.)
 
Having seen the projections I have a feeling even Peter Jackson will be shooting Redcode. With the exception of FX shots maybe.
 
Ha ha. Which shots in a Peter Jackson film are NOT vfx shots??? And 'Braindead' doesn't count. :)
 
What I would be interested is an option for higher data rates(less compression) with redcode by adding another reddrive in a raid 0.
 
The RedDrive might already be RAID 0 - we don't know the details yet. In fact I would quite like to see it being a set of 3 disks, RAID 5 striped, to give speed and data ruggedness through redundancy. Although that might make the unit rather bulky.

I suspect that a limiting factor on data rate may in fact be the compression hardware rather than the drive(s). It has been said that the compression ratio can be varied in-camera. Is 27MB/s an upper limit, or a suggested average setting?

Nick
 
Mathematically lossless compression maxes out at arounf 2.5:1, and is never guaranteed. I don't see this as a "good" in camera option. The variability in the produced data rate would be a nightmare to deal with properly. There are other options though that we're looking into.
 
visual lossless and math lossless are two seperate things and graeme is right.. i would rather have 10:1 visually loseless rather than 3:1 math loseless.

If i was working on a project that required 4k math lossless recording, i most likely would have the resources to go fiber out to lossless raw.
 
Even if mathematically lossless RedCode is not available in camera, it might be a nice idea to be able to turn up the quality setting on RedCode RGB when using it as an editing codec to much higher than 27MB/s, so that it would stand up to more de-compression re-compression cycles in the post production process.

Of course I don't know enough about wavelets to know if this would give a significant advantage. Graeme?

Nick
 
very good point Nick.. as an editing codec the restrictions of 27MB/s go out the window.. so it might be a good idea to have a higher rate for the system codec.. as long as there doesnt need to be ingest to other Red devices that are restricted to that disk speed.
 
For and editing codec, you're right, that we do have flexibility. But let's get the camera codec fully sorted first before we worry about changing a few numbers to make an edit codec.

Graeme
 
For all intents and purposes, Redcode RAW might be good enough (*assuming you could extrapolate from the greenscreen stills that are up). Just look at the images- it's visually lossless, and better quality than 4:2:2 uncompressed.

My assumption/hope is that Redcode (RAW) will do just a good a job on other images (which it may not?).

2- Peter Jackson doesn't shoot in Imax or shoot 3D. There comes a point where money/resources is better spent elsewhere.
 
Graeme_Nattress said:
For and editing codec, you're right, that we do have flexibility. But let's get the camera codec fully sorted first before we worry about changing a few numbers to make an edit codec.

Graeme
Click to expand...


Graeme, is it easy to make it a editing codec? Just changing a few numbers? Sounds nice... Is that a few weeks of development or just a few days?
Thanks!
 
be careful christian with your humor.. he's graeme.. he's our redcode man.. and this one is already known crossing these posters.. mate..
 
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