The RED Menace: Sony Getting Paranoid

[planet e]

http://www.broadcastbuyer.tv/publish/Sony_152/Sony_Delivers_Real_Systems_Right_Now_At_NAB_2007_1 0706.shtml

is it just my interpretation, or is sony's entire NAB theme built around RED paranoia? who else would they be targeting their "Real Systems, Right Now" campaign towards? what spectre are they responding to, with this weird title?

let's see, it's not panasonic, jvc, or canon, which already have HD-capable "real systems, right now" in the marketplace....

could it be the ghost of cameras yet to come??

mwahahahahaha!

[CVB]

yup... seems like paranoia to me.

[Michael Schrengohst]

Real systems, right now - for a butt load of cash.
Even if money were no object I would still
get a RED. Look at the used market in
the first generation HDCAM. Nobody wants
them. I know of several shooters dumping
older HDCAM's and going to HVX for now.
They are all waiting and know what it is like
holding notes on gear that cost more
than your house.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

"Real systems, right now"

Heh... As if Sony doesn't have their own vaporware? :umm:

Hopefully RED will be shipping at NAB or so close it doesn't matter and then Sony can eat their own poo. :matrix:

[Mark L. Pederson]

real systems, obsolete now

[Gbabymogul]

'Real systems, Real overpriced'



:trees:

[Ace]

Hey somones gotta pay for balls bouncing down the street and paint exploding over buildings and..

[Joe Carney]

It will be interesting what qualifies as real systems right now. I think they are making a big push into workflow software directly competeing with Avid and others.

[PaulClements]

Real Systems, Right now... Just like their Playstation 3... Oh wait, I live in Europe... we have to wait an extra year or something, maybe I'll import one... Oh wait Sony's sueing everyone who does... sod it I'll use an xbox... it's better anyway

[Jeff Kilgroe]

You can't even buy a PS3 in the USA or Japan anyway... Unless you happen to be at the right store, on the right day, after the proper delivery truck and know the kid who works there. And catch him before he buys it himself to sell on ebay or to sell to a friend.

And you're right the xbox 360 is better anyway. PS3 sucks... But at least it serves dual purposes right out of the box -- the world's crappiest BluRay player and the world's most overpriced, overrated game console. There ya go.

...Actually one of my local Wal-Marts had a couple PS3 systems in the case last week. So I guess they're starting to gain on the market. But at their current price, many kids who want them still can't have them.

[Jeremy Torrie]

I too have heard from the Sony folks and they basically say nothing has been proven yet with Red and there's no way to edit, nobody knows what all the add-ons will cost and so on...and if you need to shoot high end HD now they are the only real solution given the fact they have 20,000+ F900's worldwide, and 9,000 XDCam users...I sometimes feeling like vomiting as a gag reflex.

[MikeCurtis]

"right now" - hmm...what if the F23 isn't shipping by NAB?

:D

[MikeCurtis]

As for Torrie's comment - hopefully we'll have some new answers at NAB to further clarify some of those questions.

20,000 F900s? Is that right? Where did you get that number? I'm not saying it is wrong, but it is higher than the estimates I've heard - I'd just like to know where it came from.

-mike

[PaulClements]

Can't comment on F900's but others there are about 100 Vipers, 70 Genesis, and maybe a couple of dozen Dalsa Origin and Arri D20s around the world. 20,000 F900's does seem high.

[Häakon]

is it just my interpretation, or is sony's entire NAB theme built around RED paranoia? who else would they be targeting their "Real Systems, Right Now" campaign towards? what spectre are they responding to, with this weird title?
The great irony in this is of course that RED will be real at NAB (and cost a heck of a lot less than Sony's high-end products to boot). Their half-hearted "announcement" of a 4K camera indicated that such a device was a good 2-3 years away, and even then you know it's not going to sell for $17K. Even if the RED ONE retail price does go up for non-reservation holders, I can't imagine it jumping anywhere near the level of an F900 (and we won't even bring up the fact that it's a superior camera in every way possible). No, I think that there are quite a few camera companies that are really going to have to take a long, hard look at their priorities and start making some changes if they want to be taken seriously in the future.

[Jeremy Torrie]

Haven't worked in 4K and I suspect not many (if any) will unless there's a major theatrical deal requiring either a 35 print or 4K projection.

My guess on the 21,000 F900 units probably includes VTR's as they always seem to include them when they describe how much product is on the market.

[Mike]

Transferring a 4k film to 35mm is very expensive.

Most of the film transfer houses in Asia does 2k and advices their clients against going for 4k for film transfer.

[Ruairi Robinson]

Transferring a 4k film to 35mm is very expensive.

Most of the film transfer houses in Asia does 2k and advices their clients against going for 4k for film transfer.

When going out to film, is it possible to easily mix and match 2k and 4k outputs? (on a shot by shot basis)

R.

[Rob Lohman]

Under what OS is this all running? If you run this on a graphical OS in say an OpenGL viewport (instead of Vesa VBE, sounds like your running under DOS or something) you can get to higher resolutions (if you have a graphics card + display device that support that), have color calibration & support reading from much faster (portable) RAID arrays.

From what I've seen most laser printing is done from TIFF/DPX/Cineon image sequences. With a decent RAID the wait time is recording the frame, not fetching it off the RAID.

For example: http://www.arri.com/prod/digital/arrilaser/index.php

If you take their maximum time of 3.8 seconds and multiply that by your 126,720 you get 481,536 seconds or 8025.6 minutes or 133.76 hours or 5.573 days.


Anyone have an idea how long it takes to process and render all frames through all the steps (ingestion, color timming, editing, filters, rendering the edited frames for output) used in making a 88 minute film using uncompressed 2k frames on one 3GHz computer using some program you have experence with?

I don't really understand this question. Rendering something like this with a fast enough disk setup should be fairly quick. It all depends on what kind of color corrections, filters & effects you have added. Simply converting a 2K (compressed) clip to an uncompressed one your single core (?) 3 GHz machine with a proper RAID setup attached should takes you hours to convert an 88 minute feature, not days or something. Unless you added heavy visual effects or filters etc.

[Graeme Nattress]

Dan, that's an over-simplistic way to look at how a Bayer CFA works though. The interpolation algorithms these days are quite sophisticated, and remember that each of the pixels picks up all colours, not just it's colour, although it's biassed towards that colour. Really, you're looking at the equivalent of > 70% of the linear resolution, which is more like 3k+ than the 2k you mention.

Also, anti-alias filters are not just necessary for Bayer CFA cameras, but all cameras unless you have really crappy lenses. Aliassing is a digusting artifact (that shows up as false colours on Bayer chips, but as nasty luma aliasses on other systems) that is especially bad on moving images. You can just about get away with it on stills cameras as you can always go into photoshop and paint out the worst moire, but really, all cameras should be designed to avoid aliassing. Of course, not all cameras do, and if you look at the image from them, you'll see the artifacts. We don't want artifacts, but instead, lovely images.

Graeme

[Graeme Nattress]

I give the 70% figure as an estimate, as there are so many variables that can effect this, from the nature of the image being shot, to the lens being used etc. etc.

REDCODE itself, doesn't really have any effect on resolution. What you may notice, under some conditions, if you look super carefully, with a strong levels manipulation is what looks like mild noise reduction. That's about it.

REDCODE is frame based, with no temporal dimension, so is not effected negatively by moving images.

Good Bayer CFA demosacing interpolation algorithms don't "improve" the resolution. They just make best use of the data at hand. It's as much an art as a science as there are various trade-offs you can make.

Sharpening the images is fine, if you don't mind how sharpening looks in general. It doesn't undo the effect of the AA filter, doesn't introduce jaggies or colour artifacts. However, if you're projecting 4k as 4k, you don't need as much sharpening as you may think you need as there is more than enough resolution there to sell the overall effect. I'm not personally that keen on traditional sharpening unless it's used ever-so-mildly so that you can hardly see it. One of the issues with traditonal HD video is that is really has such a low resolution, that it needs excessive sharpening, which leads to artifacts. That's why it's so hard to do makeup for HD - it's not it's resolution, but lack of it, and the need for sharpening (which makes faces horrible) that does it, IMHO.

Subjective - sure is. And it's aesthetic as well as engineering based choices. That's part of the fun of it though.

Graeme

[Graeme Nattress]

If there's some kind of information in the "luma", then the demosaicing will extract that no matter what the colour. I can see how you can imagine in a thought experiment that if you shot something and only the blue pixels reacted to the light, then you'd get a much lower resolution. That makes total sense, but doesn't actually occur as the colour filters are not narrow enough for that to easily occur. It might be possible to provoke something like this on a specially produced test image, but I've not seen it happen on real world image. Red writing on a black background, for instance, doesn't look that much more lower resolution than white writing on a black background. Your comment about subjectivity is right - you've got to look and decide for yourself. Good news is that subjectively the image quality is very high.

You're right about if you want the best 2k to shoot 4k and downsample. This gives higher resolution 2k and still lower noise.

Even if you shoot 2k centre crop, you're not quite getting into the issues that I mention with HD because those cameras are designed with a very different aesthetic in mind, and that's part of their problem with over-sharpened images. We're working from a very different POV.

Graeme

[Obin Olson]

Hey somones gotta pay for balls bouncing down the street and paint exploding over buildings and..


So I guess you made that bouncing ball ad for Sony??

what was the budget?

[tj williams]

So finally after many nabs, we have the Japanese mfg's running a little scared. I think I will wear a RED/White/nBlue t Shirt at nab!!!

I saw a quote a while back: "If you want a good stereo get your technology from Japan, If you want the space shuttle buy American" They forgot to mention in 14 months!!!!

After the endless arrogance we have experienced from Sony. After their total failure to find out what users want. Finally they are gonna get their butt kicked.

[Bruce Allen]

> After the endless arrogance we have experienced from Sony. After their
> total failure to find out what users want. Finally they are gonna get
> their butt kicked.

Except for the fact that you'll be watching the footage on a Sony 4k projector.

You guys don't seem to be too thankful to the Japanese for all of the effort they put into HD for the past few decades. I like Americans very much (and live in LA), but in case you were wondering why you are not popular around the world, try being a bit more humble.

The Red camera is great and builds on decades of hard work by scientists, businessmen and hard-working people worldwide. If you look in the "gear we use" section of the Red page, you'll see companies from outside the US. Heck Graeme has Canada as his location...

As for Sony's complaint that you can't edit Red footage without transcoding it first... well, it's true so far! Is that a big problem? To us, no.

DANCAD3D wrote:
> In my editing system I assume that the user will be storing the large frame
> files on DVD disks, and so the program asks you to insert the right disk
> when it cannot find the source file.
DANCAD, out of the approximately 20 filmouts I have done, I have always delivered a hard drive. DVD is too small and slow. And that's for 2K.

DANCAD3D also wrote:
> I have been thinking of how to edit a uncompressed 4k or 2k feature on a
> home PC with about 3GHz CPU 32GB HD and 256MB RAM.
Don't. You'll wait for hours. Instead of spending those hours waiting for your computer, spend those hours working at a job and then spend the money you get on a faster computer.

Ruari wrote:
> When going out to film, is it possible to easily mix and match 2k and 4k
> outputs? (on a shot by shot basis)

Well, I think it'll be like this: people will probably charge you more for a 4K print. So either you:
- print 2K shots on a cheaper laser system and, you know, actually cut film and all... to splice in the stuff that you got printed at at 4K
or
- negotiate a deal and do the whole thing on the fancy 4K laser system
or
- just do 2K, which has been fine for 95% of all theatrical trailers, etc anyway

Bruce

[Bruce Allen]

DANCAD3D, let me correct myself: a lot of the time, the people who do the film out will take HDCAM or D-5 tape. We did that a lot of the time, too - online to tape, then give the tape to the film-out place. Many external hard drives are often used in the process that leads up to this :) ...but never DVD.

[Bruce Allen]

DANCAD3D, I have done 4K before (most recently for the teaser for Ocean's 13).

As a filmmaker and Computer Science grad, I humbly propose that we are not there yet.

Stay 2k. You can get better results if you spend your time and money on improving another part of your process - eg, buy a bigger, better monitor with wider color gamut, upgrade your speakers, buy more plugins, hire more experts... do ANYTHING, except waste money on 4k. The only place you'll want to go 4k is if you're blowing up a shot heavily. But keep your main edit at 2k, or even better, HD. Much more bang for the buck.

When computers are faster (in a year or two), it will be less painful and then you might want to go there.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

[Bruce Allen]

> HDCAM and D5 seem to be sub-2k video formats that use compression?
> The data rate for un-compressed 4k RGB 16bpp files would be about,
> 4096x2730x6x24=1.6GB/sec or about 16Gbps,
> D5 seems to be about 250-300Mbps, thats
> about 50:1 data loss ratio.

Uh, yes. But you can't really see it when printed to film. I am serious.

Uncompressed is not a smart way to go.

Next time you go to a movie theater, please try to distinguish which of the trailers that you just watched were from a D5 master, which were from HDCAM, and which were from 2k dpx files. You can't.

Bruce

[Ace]

Next time you go to a movie theater, please try to distinguish which of the trailers that you just watched were from a D5 master, which were from HDCAM, and which were from 2k dpx files. You can't.

Bruce

To be honest, as a cinema affecionado, I care very little for the quality of the picture projected in the cinema, (other than out of focus screens.. boy that shits me. Makes me wanna stab the projectionist in the heart with an anamorphic lens.. That and airconditioners not working properly. Stab the usher for that shit) I actually enjoy seeing the magical flicker of the random gateweaves, the dancing grain degaussing my retina's, the hair which you know had to come from someones...uh..nevermind. I digress.. What I DO care about as a cinema goer, is the sound. Sound will make or break an excellent picture. A thrashed print, not so much. This is why its the least of my worries editing with high compression, hell I'll live with artifacting. If ultimately, it presents a case for higher art and fluidity of technique, give me compressed. On the double.

[Ace]

Oh and by the way, although Im slightly indifferent about cinema projection standards, I do care about other distribution formats. Namely DVD/Bluray. Theres no flicker, or magic, or any of that to fall back on when watching a movie on DVD. And as more and more of the general public adopt large screen TV's and projectors, the scrutiny will be harsher than ever. This is when our favourite digital cinema company comes into play.

[Michael Schrengohst]

Yes, what we need next is RED HD AUTHOR......

[planet e]

bruce, i don't think anyone is ungrateful to the Japanese techies and technological innovators. it's the marketing departments and the trickleware model which leverage the technology to the disadvantage of the vast majority of moving image makers. sony has every advantage and could be leading this charge and selling zillions of new products to an emerging market. if RED makes them wake up and smell the marketplace, more power to RED. that's not symptomatic of American arrogance, it's sheer frustration and impatience. look at the American car industry, it's in a huge decline while the Japanese cars are taking over the world, and it's a lack of innovation in a space screaming for it which is killing the US automakers. killing off stagnancy wherever it persists is a good thing for evolving industries. there's nothing arrogant about that....

[Bruce Allen]

planet e, good point. Maybe I was overreacting to tj. I agree that Sony could be doing a ton more. But still, the question remains, if Sony didn't exist, would we be better off? I really think that the good that they did (pushing HD cameras in the early days, when nobody believed in CCDs, working on good HD tv sets, etc) outweighs the bad. But it seems like people on the forum want them to go bankrupt.

To me it's like SGI - they were pioneers who created the industry. When cheap PCs took them down, it was great for animators around the world, but we didn't exactly chortle with glee. We wouldn't have OpenGL, etc if it weren't for SGI. I feel the same way bout Sony. I don't like kicking a person when they're down, even (especially!) in the name of patriotism.

I also see Red being good for Sony as a whole. Yes they compete in cameras, but the camera systems are very different - Sony is selling an ENG-ready tape / optical media - based line of products that are very well suited for people who like tape (and linear editing ;), are too impatient for the RedCine process and don't like getting too technical with computers. Not anything we're interested in, of course, but a big market nonetheless.

The anti-PS3 comments are the weirdest of all. Sony's losing ~$200 per console trying to push HD... and people are against that? This is putting HD playback in the hands of consumers! This is broadening the market of people who'll be able to more fully appreciate the beauty of your footage because thay have upgraded from DVD. Why hate it?

Bruce

[Nik Manning]

>
Uh, yes. But you can't really see it when printed to film. I am serious.

Uncompressed is not a smart way to go.

Next time you go to a movie theater, please try to distinguish which of the trailers that you just watched were from a D5 master, which were from HDCAM, and which were from 2k dpx files. You can't.

Bruce

Wow. I never thought about that. That was really a eye opener.

[Nik Manning]

planet e, good point. Maybe I was overreacting to tj. I agree that Sony could be doing a ton more. But still, the question remains, if Sony didn't exist, would we be better off? I really think that the good that they did (pushing HD cameras in the early days, when nobody believed in CCDs, working on good HD tv sets, etc) outweighs the bad. But it seems like people on the forum want them to go bankrupt.

To me it's like SGI - they were pioneers who created the industry. When cheap PCs took them down, it was great for animators around the world, but we didn't exactly chortle with glee. We wouldn't have OpenGL, etc if it weren't for SGI. I feel the same way bout Sony. I don't like kicking a person when they're down, even (especially!) in the name of patriotism.

I also see Red being good for Sony as a whole. Yes they compete in cameras, but the camera systems are very different - Sony is selling an ENG-ready tape / optical media - based line of products that are very well suited for people who like tape (and linear editing ;), are too impatient for the RedCine process and don't like getting too technical with computers. Not anything we're interested in, of course, but a big market nonetheless.

The anti-PS3 comments are the weirdest of all. Sony's losing ~$200 per console trying to push HD... and people are against that? This is putting HD playback in the hands of consumers! This is broadening the market of people who'll be able to more fully appreciate the beauty of your footage because thay have upgraded from DVD. Why hate it?

Bruce

Never thought about this stuff either. Do you have writers on staff. :)

[JohnF]

... Sony is selling an ENG-ready tape / optical media - based line of products that are very well suited for people who like tape (and linear editing ;), are too impatient for the RedCine process and don't like getting too technical with computers. Not anything we're interested in, of course, but a big market nonetheless.
Bruce

I'm used to shooting with ENG type cameras and I like tape for its reliability but I don't agree with your point. I don't think the big companies have been "delivering the goods" of recent hence I won't buy their gear. I think that over the past few years Sony have been more interested in fracturing the market up (originally with SD) with "specialist" formats (news, corporate, drama etc) when just releasing DigiBeta at a reasonable price would have supplied crews with decent SD gear - It should be remembered that DigiBeta price was kept artifically high whilst the BetaSX range of cameras that were more expensive than DigiB to make but had a lower pic quality. (and at first poor editing performance due to non-I frame MPEG compression)

Over the best part of 25years (until HDCAM SR and XDCAM) Sony have kept with the same tape format and mechansm, meaning that they only had to develop a codec to write data and leave the mechanism alone. This made their products very cheap for themselves but not for us crews. Not to mention that they were not paying attention to shrinking TV budgets making it harder to pay off the price of the camera before the next model/format came out...

I say this with sadness as I was a big Sony fan. And frankly they only have themselves (Sony mangement) to blame.

I must say that the excitment that RED is generating amoungst those who know will be making "big brand" manufacturers very nervous ~1500 orders represents a surprisingly large segment of the potential annual sales market and, if the pricing is kept right, that is likely to expand into many other market segements - all because the RED team looks like they're going to produce a bit of kit that many people actually want at a price that's right...

Rant over

JohnF

[planet e]

that's a great rant, JohnF, actually. you put specifics to exactly what i was trying to say. since the release of the VX series of DV cameras, sony has been a giant leap forward followed by two big steps back. look at what they followed up their Z1U with....the V1. phaw. and an accompanying tapeless solution, which is still VAPORWARE. funny how RED's promised release is characterized as vaporware, and when sony doesn't fulfill on their promised release date, it's merely postponed. double standard, anyone?

i don't think sony is in any big danger with RED. i think that's laughable. they have the technology. it will only push them into marketing it to people like us, fer crying out loud. and about time. if i thought sony was in any sort of jeopardy, i'd dump their stock. sony is a global behemoth, and that's part of the problem, size = inertia. but frankly, i think they will make some coin out of competing in this space, if they can get their act together, so i'm holding, for the moment. it's just about to get interesting.

[Bruce Allen]

Okay, I'm going into a ton of deadlines now and will promptly disappear from the forums... Before I do, I just want to say I heartily agree with most of the points everyone has raised. This is a fun topic and it's nice to have a constructive debate about the state of the industry. All the best, and I look forward to seeing cool stuff being shot by you guys (and me, if I can afford it ;) on Red.

Bruce

[GlennChan]

Regardless of whether or not you like Sony, it seems like their tape formats will keep Sony Broadcast going. BetaSP, Digital Betacam, HDCAM, and (increasingly) HDCAM SR are the mastering formats of many, many productions. And the use of those formats is going to help support its camera sales. As, Sony's ubiquity will help perpetuate its future formats (i.e. HDCAM SR), since its decks tend to read the older formats (multi-format is a very nice feature).

[PaulClements]

Just wanted to add to my comments about the PS3 for you Bruce, In Europe the PS3 is being released a great deal later than everywhere else in the world, it will not be backward compatible with PS2 games to make it cheaper to make and we will infact being paying more than people in the US, Japan or anywhere else. So not only do people in Europe have to wait longer, they also get a machine that is less capable and more expensive. If you lived here you'd have similar feelings towards Sony along those lines.

The comment that the Xbox is actually better stems from an issue with the PS3's memory. I'm not too clued up but I have had it explained to me, basically the PS3's memory does 2 jobs, just in the same way the xbox's does. However unlike the PS3 the xbox can split the memory proportionally so that if it is doing 2 jobs it works out how much of the memory it requires. The PS3 is rigid with it's memory and as such this slows the machine down, so even though it has a faster chipset it isn't actually any better graphically, and in some cases is actually worse. Whilst I can sypathise they are losing money to deliver on their bluray format, they are also delivering a player that is not as good a quality as those expected to ship in the near future (Just in the same way the DVD functionality on the PS2 was second rate). Whilst they might lose the money on it, if it helps them to win the war over HDDVD then it will be money well lost for them. Add to this that HDDVD is a far more economical offering than Blu-Ray and one in many respects I'd prefer to see the industry adopt I don't agree that they are helping to bring HD to the fore, they are simply attempting to kill off the competition and are doing a very bad job of it.

Sony have made some great things in the past and I'm sure they will in the future, but at the moment everything they are currently involved in is a bit stale, the ipod is better than their walkman, the wii and xbox360 make better alternatives to their PS3, RedOne appears to be a better choice than any of their cameras - current and future.

I don't want them to go bust in the slightest, I just want them to pull their finger out and think about the quality and not the revenue so much, this is what Apple, Microsoft, Nintendo and now Red have all done and it pays dividends.

[Rob Lohman]

From what I understand the PS3 should support around a 1000 PS2 games in Europe, not none! Still less than the US though?

[Michael Schrengohst]

Regardless of whether or not you like Sony, it seems like their tape formats will keep Sony Broadcast going. BetaSP, Digital Betacam, HDCAM, and (increasingly) HDCAM SR are the mastering formats of many, many productions. And the use of those formats is going to help support its camera sales. As, Sony's ubiquity will help perpetuate its future formats (i.e. HDCAM SR), since its decks tend to read the older formats (multi-format is a very nice feature).

Its time for Sony to lower prices as tape will all but vanish in the next 10-15 years. Look at commercial TV delivery...going away from tape to file transmission.

[GlennChan]

IMO, I don't think tape will go away.

For archival/backup/storage purposes, tape will still stay one step ahead of data. Companies making playout servers acknowledge this.

2- Bandwidth-wise, the Internet doesn't quite have the bandwidth for all post houses to be delivering over IP. Maybe except for commercials (and the broadcaster is not the client, so they may bend over to their client's demands).

3- Workflow-wise, tape/VTRs works.
A- Standard interface via SDI + deck control. No proprietary data formats, no data incompatibilities, etc.
B- Supports insert editing (video and audio).

4- I still see work being delivered on betaSP. In some cases, non-tape formats don't have a big enough advantage over tape to justify switching over.

5- To clarify:
A- Are you talking about delivery over IP, instead of sending a tape?
B- Or are you talking about sending a hard drive / optical disk / whatever, instead of tape?

[Michael Schrengohst]

I am talking that most spots are now sent as a file over FTP.
I have a few die-hard "it must be on BetaSP" clients.
I am trying to get them to convert to file transmission....
I am talking 2020 when programs will probably
be on an optical disc vs. tape. Even HD tape can have
drop-outs.

[PaulClements]

From what I understand the PS3 should support around a 1000 PS2 games in Europe, not none! Still less than the US though?

Apparently not Rob. Latest I heard is that Sony have just decided to remove the emotion chip or whatever was running the PS2 games from the PS3 for the Europe market. The rest of the world has backward compatibility but we do not it'd seem. hmmph

[Rob Lohman]

so backwards compatibility with PS2 games will be achieved via software emulation. Sony’s decision to point consumers towards a website (http://faq.eu.playstation.com/bc) detailing which PS2 games will be playable on the PS3, but which won’t go live until March 23 also hardly made PlayStation enthusiasts feel any less unloved. But we have good news: we managed to snatch a quick interview with head of worldwide studios Phil Harrison, in between putting the finishing touches to his Game Developers’ Conference keynote, and what he said firmly puts the contentious issue of backwards compatibility into storm-in-a-teacup territory.

Harrison would not be drawn on specific PS2 titles which will be playable on PS3 on March 23, but it seems the only problem we will have is deciding which ones to play: “The situation is changing every day, but on March 23, we expect the list to include over 1,000 PS2 titles.” That enough for you?
Source: http://threespeech.com/blog/?p=301