Red Data Rates

[Joe Taylor]

Does anyobdy know where I can find info. about the data rates for the RED? I'm not sure if that's very clear, what I mean is the mega-bites per sec. for 1080P or 2k and so on.

The drives that RED offer don't seem large enough for extensive shooting, especially out in the field.

Any help would be appeciated

[Jeff Kilgroe]

RED hasn't announced official rates for all the formats yet.

They have said that 24fps REDCODE RAW @ 4K has about ~28MB/s (when including audio). Each frame is encoded on its own, so one could assume that 30fps 4K RAW would be about 35MB/s.

Anyway, if you think about that for a second, you'll realize that a 320GB RED DRIVE will hold just a bit over 3 hours of 24fps 4K REDCODE RAW or 2.5 hours of 30fps 4K REDCODE RAW.

Rates for RGB modes are completely unknown at this time. But I'm guessing 1080p RGB 4:4:4 takes up more room than REDCODE RAW @ 2K, which we don't know the data rate for anyway. We have been told that 2K REDCODE RAW won't be 1/4 the size of 4K as the wavelet compression doesn't scale in size in a linear fashion.

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Until Graeme & the RED Team get out the cameras for the LART so we can see actual numbers I am using the exact same assumptions as Jeff in my storage planning.

To resurrect an old adage:
"there are two kinds of people, those that need more storage space and those that don't use computers" :tongue: .

[Joe Taylor]

RED hasn't announced official rates for all the formats yet.


Anyway, if you think about that for a second, you'll realize that a 320GB RED DRIVE will hold just a bit over 3 hours of 24fps 4K REDCODE RAW or 2.5 hours of 30fps 4K REDCODE RAW.

That's very impressive. I sure hope those numbers are right. I was thinking that at 4k, a 320 GB drive would be mere minutes.

3 Hours. That's totally acceptable.

[Alexander Nikishin]

4k Redcode RAW = 1.5GB/m

4k uncompressed RAW = 19GB/m

[Rob Lohman]

I sure hope those numbers are right. I was thinking that at 4k, a 320 GB drive would be mere minutes.

They are right (with a nudge factor of say 5 MB/s). You were thinking in uncompressed probably. We have an efficient compression system in place to deal with the massive data.

[Jim Arthurs]

How many hours of 4K RAW can you get if you leave the lens cap on and record black?

Only half joking here... just curious about how "variable" the variable compression is.

Conversely, if you point the camera at an uber-busy multi-burst chart, what is the other extreme like?

And is there any visual situation that could "break" the codec and simply fail? Something like 1 frame strobe lights, etc.?

I know that the compression scheme doesn't bridge frames, but I'm not familar enough with wavelet to know what to avoid in terms of shooting conditions.

[M. Bergeron]

Will it be possible to shoot uncompressed when doing frame by frame? Will everything going to disk have to be Redcode?

I'm planning to shoot a short animated film with RED (for many good reasons) and that would be great.

[Stokestack]

I asked about this in the time-lapse thread:

This kind of functionality would benefit from variable compression rates. When you're only processing a frame per second or less, why limit the quality to what the camera can do at 24, 30, or 60 FPS? I think user-selectable compression levels would provide an important way for us to maximize the quality of our Red images in all shooting modes. At any given frame rate and size, users should be able to max out the throughput of the Red's processor and storage medium to achieve the best quality.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

It would be nice to be able to shoot directly to a mathematically lossless REDCode as well. You would get a 2:1 compression ratio without any loss and the performance hit would be erased by the extremely low framerate.

Would be handy if RED were to be used to generate a super high resolution HDRI probe in conjunction with a moco head like curt was talking about as well.