4K at 10Mbit/sec - Red Ray

Red Ray will scale 4K down to 1080p, so what you get is future proof when 2K or even 4K projectors start showing up in upscale Home Theaters. More importantly is the fact that Red Ray makes cost of distributing theatrical releases negligable. Imagine distributing your 100 minute feature to 1000 theaters for $500.00 plus postage. (50cent dual layer dvd data disk). Or even single layer Blu Ray data disks for slightly more.
 
You know, everyone keeps arguing about whether or not red ray is a viable distribution and if it will market well. While yes this is obviously important, I think the focus should be on how cool this "Jedi trick/Harry Potter magic" is. :Drogar-Happy(DBG):
 
Actually, using the Red Ray's wavelet codec can help speed up video downloads to your house. For a 1080 movie on Blu Ray, the maximum AV rate is 48Mbps. For Red Ray, a 4k movie, which is about 4 times the size of a 1080 movie, uses only 10 Mbps. So Red's wavelet codec is about 20 times more efficient than the MPEG4 codec used in Blu Ray. So a movie that may take 20 minutes to download now, may take only 1 minute with Red's codec. Or, a cable or satellite provider can give you 20 times more channels using the same bandwidth. Who wouldn't want that?

The problem is industry acceptance. Red developed this technology on their own, so they may have problems getting partners to sign on. If Netflix doesn't sign on, then you won't be able to download movies any faster. If cable and satellite companies don't sign on, then you won't get more channels. If movie studios don't sing on, then theaters will not be buying any Red Ray players. And there will be no movie releases on Red Ray disks. No content means no player sales.

Would Red camera owners buy a Red Ray player just so they can see their movies on their way too expensive 4k projectors? Maybe a handful. But why buy Red Ray, when all of your clients have blu ray players that are cheaper and can play commercial disks? And they can only view your movie on 1080 TV's anyway.

Another issue that hasn't been discussed is the encoding. We don't know if the encoding can be done at a reasonable speed in software, or if we have to buy an accelerator card or box to do it. We don't know the price of the hardware, or software, or if there are any royalty fees. But knowing Red, I think their prices will be affordable.

In my opinion, the people with the most to gain from using Red Ray right now are the movie theaters. If Red can convince the theater chains and the movie studios that Red Ray can save them a ton of money in distribution, then they can get some sales. After that, I would approach the movie download companies, then the cable and satellite companies.

I don't think Red Ray can displace blu ray, at least in the next several years. Even if the price of a Red Ray player were only $100, why would movie studios and consumer electronics companies alienate a large installed base of blu ray users? Especially since there is no added feature for this marketplace. Would a 4k movie look any better than a blu ray movie on a 1080 TV screen? No. Now if display technology improves, and we start seeing TV's with higher resolution, then maybe Red has a shot.

Just my $.02.
 
4k Displays started to be previewed at NAB last year. More showed up this year.

If you've ever viewed 4k material in 4k then you already know how absolutely jaw dropping it truly is. If you haven't then it would be hard to be inspired by something you don't have first hand experience with.

Red Ray is going to change things for a lot of very insightful entrepeneurs. People who can't look past conventional media will just have to sit by on the sidelines until their brains catch up.

This reminds me so much of FEDEX when it was trying to get started. Nobody in the delivery business could understand the concept that it wasn't about distance, but time. Conventional wisdom is always just that, conventional.

I sometimes feel like I'm back in the days of the square rigged sailing vessels and someone wheels out a 767. Comments like, "it doesn't even float very well" and "there isn't even a place to put a mast, let alone install any rigging for sails!" spray forth from those of convention. That's what always happens when there is a paradigm shift. The establishment never gets it and even when they hire people to advise them, they don't want to believe the facts.

When integrated circuits first came out, the concept was miles over the head of the established electronics industry and they sat around on the shelf for the first few years. The brilliance of ICs became apparent during the minute man missile program. The rest as they say is history!

Same kind of plodders who watched Doug Englebart's, (http://www.velocityguide.com/computer-history/douglas-englebart.html), ground breaking demonstration to the US Navy in 1968 and then went immediately right back to what they were doing without breaking stride. Its not their fault, they're just wired that way.
 
craigbowman said:
4k Displays started to be previewed at NAB last year. More showed up this year.

If you've ever viewed 4k material in 4k then you already know how absolutely jaw dropping it truly is. If you haven't then it would be hard to be inspired by something you don't have first hand experience with.

Red Ray is going to change things for a lot of very insightful entrepeneurs. People who can't look past conventional media will just have to sit by on the sidelines until their brains catch up.
Click to expand...

I remember seeing my first HDTV in 1992, well before most Americans had even heard of HDTV. Now this was a Sony Japanese-version analog HDTV in a university research lab, displaying video from an HD tape deck. My jaw dropped because it was just like looking out the window. I thought everybody would want one immediately. But here we are in 2009, and we haven't even made the jump to HDTV broadcast yet. So although I have not seen a 4k display, I don't doubt that the picture is beautiful. But I'm afraid that its adoption is going to be more a matter of economics rather than aesthetics.

The FCC adopted the ATSC broadcast system in 1996, and 13 years later, we haven't quite switched to it yet. In fact, this is the first major change since the introduction of compatible color broadcast in 1953!

In December 2008, Nielsen Media Research reported that 23.3% of American households own an HDTV. Leichtman Research said the number was 34%, and forcasted it to double in 4 years. Most people in America haven't even switched to HDTV yet! Do you think they're just going to just drop everything and move to 4k? With no broadcast standards, no content available, and super-expensive displays ($50k+)?! Heck no! Those display prices need to drop below $5k, and some might say much lower, before consumers are going to buy on any large scale. On top of that, they need some content to watch. There may be movies available, but I don't think the FCC is going to change the broadcast standard again for at least another 10 years.

Now on the other hand, the movie theaters would be perfect customers for Red Ray. They want to differentiate from the home theaters, they can earn money from their 4k projector purchase, 4k movies would look just as good as film or better, and the studios can save a bundle on distribution. That's a win-win situation, and I'm sure Red is already well down the road in pursuing this market.

And as I mentioned in the above post, they can also go after the movie download, cable and satellite markets with the Red Ray's wavelet codec - used on 10800p content. But I doubt that Red Ray will cause mainstream consumers to switch to 4k any time soon.
 
Considering the billions spent across the entire industry to upgrade from analog/SD equipment to digital SD/HD, via government mandate no less, I don't see that level of spending happening again in anything that could be remotely considered the near future. B'cast standards don't really mean a thing for the net though so if IPTV takes off the technological limitations of traditional TV signals are bypassed, but bandwidth issues will need to be solved both in terms of speed and in ISPs not capping monthly usage.


-A
 
If you stop and think about it, 4kp24 at 10mbps is something akin to 1080p24 at 2.5mbps (compression wise). If you take 1080p24 footage, and compress it with x264 at 2.5mbps, you can get quite viewable results.
 
Robert M Wright said:
If you stop and think about it, 4kp24 at 10mbps is something akin to 1080p24 at 2.5mbps (compression wise). If you take 1080p24 footage, and compress it with x264 at 2.5mbps, you can get quite viewable results.
Click to expand...


I think Its not as simple as divide 4K bitrate by 4, to get real useful bitrate for HD.
 
Sumfun said:
I remember seeing my first HDTV in 1992, well before most Americans had even heard of HDTV. Now this was a Sony Japanese-version analog HDTV in a university research lab, displaying video from an HD tape deck. My jaw dropped because it was just like looking out the window. I thought everybody would want one immediately. But here we are in 2009, and we haven't even made the jump to HDTV broadcast yet. So although I have not seen a 4k display, I don't doubt that the picture is beautiful. But I'm afraid that its adoption is going to be more a matter of economics rather than aesthetics.

The FCC adopted the ATSC broadcast system in 1996, and 13 years later, we haven't quite switched to it yet. In fact, this is the first major change since the introduction of compatible color broadcast in 1953!

In December 2008, Nielsen Media Research reported that 23.3% of American households own an HDTV. Leichtman Research said the number was 34%, and forcasted it to double in 4 years. Most people in America haven't even switched to HDTV yet! Do you think they're just going to just drop everything and move to 4k? With no broadcast standards, no content available, and super-expensive displays ($50k+)?! Heck no! Those display prices need to drop below $5k, and some might say much lower, before consumers are going to buy on any large scale. On top of that, they need some content to watch. There may be movies available, but I don't think the FCC is going to change the broadcast standard again for at least another 10 years.

Now on the other hand, the movie theaters would be perfect customers for Red Ray. They want to differentiate from the home theaters, they can earn money from their 4k projector purchase, 4k movies would look just as good as film or better, and the studios can save a bundle on distribution. That's a win-win situation, and I'm sure Red is already well down the road in pursuing this market.

And as I mentioned in the above post, they can also go after the movie download, cable and satellite markets with the Red Ray's wavelet codec - used on 10800p content. But I doubt that Red Ray will cause mainstream consumers to switch to 4k any time soon.
Click to expand...

What is making you think that Digital Cinema technology has anything to do with broadcast television?
 
craigbowman said:
What is making you think that Digital Cinema technology has anything to do with broadcast television?
Click to expand...

Your previous post seem to imply that you think that the general public should rush out and buy 4k displays/projectors. I'm saying that 13 years after a government mandate, most Americans haven't even bought an HDTV yet. So they're not going to get a 4k display just because it looks better.
 
Sumfun said:
Your previous post seem to imply that you think that the general public should rush out and buy 4k displays/projectors. I'm saying that 13 years after a government mandate, most Americans haven't even bought an HDTV yet. So they're not going to get a 4k display just because it looks better.
Click to expand...


I had made a reference to business people and a subset of insightful entrepeneurs. How you conneced that with Joe Public is quite a stretch, but wasn't even remotely on my mind.
 
cheezweezl said:
really? i'm doing it right now. literally as i type this, a movie is streaming in HD over the web from netflix to my xbox360 and playing back flawlessly. looks almost as good as blu ray. way better than dvd. discs are on the way out.
Click to expand...

Funny i just saw this today, interesting: http://www.twice.com/blog/730000673/post/1790044179.html

Ok its with iTunes but i imagine the Xbox compression is about equal? (is it 1080 or 720? Dont have one myself.)

Also what a lot of people forget with the Blu Ray/Digital downloads argument is Audio. BD's have lossless audio which is even more impressive than 1080p (when done right).

I think Blu-ray is here for a long time, but give it 7-10 years and DD's will begin to be the norm.
 
Another thing that people need to understand is that just because there is a jump in technology, companies outputting hardware don't WANT to upgrade until there is a reason to. Same reason that we could have 50 Ghz 16 core computer processors. If those were released, especially at a reasonable price with hardware to support, it would make everything else immediately obsolete, which spells disaster for their current products. There's always going to be some specialty companies making specialty hardware at a specialty price. Jumping the gun on technology can be a very bad thing for business viability and profitability. So they milk it and milk it.

Look at when they had 720p/1080i capable tvs. There was a slight lull in the market and wouldn't you know it, 1080p was there to save the day. But if you notice, most things are still not displayed in 1080p even though there is HD and the technology there to support it. And look how cheap you can pick up a 42" tv for that isn't capable of 1080p. Dirt cheap.

Bottom line is that technology will advance with what the market can support. Eventually everything will begin to take a turn in higher resolutions, but I think it's going to be quite awhile too like others have said. 75% of people are stuck in SD land right now and they really don't know the difference and are fine with it.

Another interesting thing is that the way your brain works, it doesn't really matter what the picture looks like, your brain adjusts to it and gets used to it. Watch a good DVD movie and you'll forget all about the resolution 5 minutes into it.
 
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