Red Camera Post Production Hardware Specifications

David G. Smith

David G. Smith

Steak Knife Member
Ok, let's get a couple of things straight at the start. First, I am a camera dude and only got into this digital thing because I thought it would give me a better way to rough cut 16mm film than my HFC bench with Zeiss Moviescope and the local film co-op's 6 plate Steenbeck and it was cheaper then setting up a used U-matic SP "cuts only" system. (Ok that was eleven years ago... but....)

Second, I lost the ability to do math at a Pink Floyd concert back in '84.

With the "web-time" this Red Camera is getting could one of you "Number Heads", please take the time and explain the post workflow and minimum hardware requirments the levels of image acquisition this kind camera is capable of would require.

Of course I understand that nothing about this camera is carved in stone, however, could some of you very smart f*ckers take the time to explain the possiblities and requirments to an old camera dude like me?
 
ok well to edit 1080 footage you need a minimum of a 2ghz machine with a recomended 2gigs of ram. this footage is about 2 times the size, so you will probablly need a minimum of an athalon dual 3.8 to edit, or a quad g5 both with 5-6 gigs of ram to be safe.
 
Yeah, the RED is supposedly able to do 4K resolution, but nobody in their right mind would shoot at that resolution and pretend to edit on today's consumer desktop computers. If you shoot in 1080HD, then a good, beefy $2500 desktop with a 1900x1200 LCD and a $2000 RAID hard disk setup of some sort should do it.
 
It isn't known what you would need exactly to edit at such a resolution. Based on speculations, you would need today's top of the line computers to edit it. My recommendations would be:

Athlon-based

-AMD Athlon FX 60 or Athlon X2 4800+ Processor
-2gb of PC3200 DDRSDRAM (4gb or more recommended)
-nVidia Geforce 7800 GT/7800 GTX or nVidia Quadro 4500 or ATI Radeon X1900XT
(All video cards should be SLI capable for nVidia and Crossfire capable for ATI)
-RAID 0 hard drive array, preferably 2x 500gb 16mb cache hard drives for system
-RAID 0 external hard drive array for footage using Serial ATA or Serial ATA II format in a 4 to 8 hard drive array (8 drive configuration recommended) using 500gb 16mb cache hard drives if possible

Pentium-based

-Intel Pentium D 955 Extreme Edition (3.4ghz with 1066mhz FSB)
-2gb of DDR-2 SDRAM (4gb or more recommended)
-Same video options
-Same hard drive options

Opteron-based

-AMD Opteron 280 in a single or dual processor configuration (higher up quad processor setups are not supported by NLE-friendly OS's yet, since these are dual cores, that would equal eight processors, a dual processor setup works using four processors because of dual core, should be good enough)
-Same RAM options as Athlon solution
-Same video solutions
-Same hard drive solutions

Xeon-based

-Dual 3.8ghz Xeon processors, no need to bother with single processor solutions
-Same RAM options as Pentium solution
-Same video solutions
-Same hard drive solutions

Macintosh-based

-Quad Power PC setup or Intel Quad setup when it comes out
-2gb of DDRSDRAM (4gb or more recommended)
-Same video solutions
-Same hard drive solutions

These are not including sound card, Serial ATA controller card, or DVD/CD/Blu-ray/HD-DVD drive choices or NLE choice.

The next question is what monitor to use, well, that could be a rumored 4K-compatible Apple Cinema Display or it could be the 30" Apple Cinema Display as the best bet. More than likely, you'd be tuning it down to 1080p for the majority of work done today and save the full 4K for the future.
 
actually it's pretty uncommon to edit uncompressed 1080p (let alone 4K). what usually is done is to go into a offline/online workflow

so basically it would be:
- shoot whatever quality you can afford to capture/store (4K, 2K, 1080p, 720p) with as little compression as possible.
- create offline proxies in whatever format your editing system can handle (DVCPRO HD 1080p/720p would be an excellent choice)
- take the final edit to a powerful online system and relink the original footage.. do your color correction and fx there.

it's not even that uncompressed 1080p would be that hard to do.. it's just not convenient, since you need massive disk arrays (and those are expensive and noisy). OTOH, DVCPRO HD can be handled by any reasonably recent powerbook with a firewire drive and FCP.

++ chris
 
Also it says there will be a varity of media solutions, dual fiber channel out, blu ray, hard drive etc. So if you want live capture of 4:4:4 video you'll have to have a dual channel fiber card.but then will need a capture program. Maybe Serious Magic is part of the team and we could see the red rack.
 
Puzzled

Puzzled

I don't think it's true nobody will want 4k. I can see lots of film makers going for the camera precisely because it does 4k. Admittedly the high end film makers. But, I'm still struggling to understand how big 4k raw is and what kind of data rate do you need to move it out of the camera. Anyone know exactly?

Would a dual raid be enough, or do you need more?

Nobody's talked about Maxell's new holographic storage, but it strikes me they have the most promising technology for sheer volume of stoarge.

(The data rates are probably too low right now, but could there be a workflow that somehow uses a smaller (cheaper) drive array, or even P2 type media which is peridocally uploaded to holographic storage? They're launching their 300gb disks this year and promising 1.2 terrabyte disks by the end of the decade, so they kind of leave blu ray behind.)

Is this 4k thing a complete pie in the sky right now?

Anyone know?
 
Sam Fisher said:
But, I'm still struggling to understand how big 4k raw is and what kind of data rate do you need to move it out of the camera. Anyone know exactly?
Click to expand...

Let's do the math.
4520 x 2540 -> 11480800 pixels
RGB, 10 bit (just a guess), 4:4:4 raw -> 344424000 bit
60 fps -> 20665440000 bit/s -> 2,4 Gigabytes / second

Today it's just way to complicated, expensive und unreliable to capture such a stream, even for the pros. But storage becomes less expensive and bigger quickly, so I would call 4k raw "future-proof", but not practical in 2006.

As for the holographic storage, I've read way too many articles about this technology the past 10(?) years. I really hope they're going to release this thing, but I won't get excited until I hold a disc in my hands.
 
The data rates will most likely be very similar to the data rates of the Dalsa Origins.

When outputting using Origins Bayer-patter "digital negative" you can expect each frame to be 16MB, minimum. At 24 fps that's more than 400MB/sec (1.44TBytes/hr.) At 60 fps you are looking at 960MB/sec. This is a bare minimum estimate so if you throw in a little overhead you are looking at 1100-1200MB/sec. Course if that is the data rate of your signal, your disk array will need some head room as well, lets push it up another 100MB/sec. Realistically you would need to a RAID capable of 1300MB/sec.

Keep in mind this footage still needs to be reconstructed into RGB before it can be viewed on a monitor. The reconstructed RGB is a GREAT deal larger.

The Dalsa Origins outputs a reconstructed RGB and its data rate is insane, far surpassing the capability of all but the most expensive RAIDS available (>100k.)

RED is ofcouse developing their own codecs which Id imagine are a great deal smaller in terms of data rates. But Im sure they will offer raw output like the Origins.

This camera is slated for the end of 2006 and I think we will see some realistic workflows cropping up mid 2007.

HUGE systems has some RAIDS capable of realtime 4k that are relatively affordable.
 
Ouch!

Ouch!

Thanks for the mind numbing numbers. I kind of knew they were big, but that exponent thing always takes you by surprise. Now I know why the transfer house always talks me out of 4k storage.

So is P2 too slow to store this? I know P2 is out of the question now, but it strikes me this raid array is cumbersome and expensive to the point that film really is far superior. I also kind of feel like spinning disks are starting to feel like old technology.

MarcusX said:
As for the holographic storage, I've read way too many articles about this technology the past 10(?) years. I really hope they're going to release this thing, but I won't get excited until I hold a disc in my hands.
Click to expand...

I have actually held one of these disks, so they're here for real this time. I thought the cat was out of the bag, but maybe I got a sneak peek. I'm sure you'll hear about it at NAB this year. The reason I brought it up is that it seemed like the only cost effective technology that might make 4k possible. I mean, it's one thing to get excited about a 4k cameara, but if the storage technology to use it exceeds the cost of developing and transfering 35mm then we'll still be in the same boat we are now.

I guess it's only a couple of weeks now.
 
Sam Fisher said:
So is P2 too slow to store this? I know P2 is out of the question now, but it strikes me this raid array is cumbersome and expensive to the point that film really is far superior. I also kind of feel like spinning disks are starting to feel like old technology.
Click to expand...

Yes "P2" is of course too slow. But the technology is capable of the required data rates. Again, pulling from the technologies used in existing high end digital cinema cameras, "CineRAM" is basically a high-end P2 Card although the CineRAM block also converts the HDSDI signal into image sequences on the fly and records to it's solid state disks inside. It's very small and compact. A similar device could be engineered to accommodate the monstrous data rates of a 4k camera, though don't expect it to be cheap. No doubt the RED folks are manufacturing just a device and I'd imagine it would have a price that fits the camera.
 
shoot 2k, 4k really is for scanned film and is mostly used by the colorist and shout systems to manipulate the radiosity, chrominance and luminance of scanned film, this information is prserved for the log and linear spectres, da vincis, quantels and infernos for integration with 3D and vfx. with LUT's 2k is capable of this, with a powerful system and the new 2k decklinK cards, this can be done on your desk top with shake, combustion etc.
 
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