REDCODE wavelet codec advantages

[Dennis S.]

Hi,

first i have to say, i am not a camera guy but i am in charge for our IT and as you all know, postproduction and IT, usually have a few things in common ;)
That being said, i just try to help our camera guys as good as i can with the little knowledge i have about the RED Epic, we purchased a while ago.

Our camera guys are currently filming abroad, mostly at 4K sometimes even 5K and are ordered to "trim" everything down as good as possible, so that we all make our life a little bit
easier when it comes to saving all the material on our main raid storage, at our production office.

Reviewing 4K/5K material on a macbook or a windows notebook isn`t a funny thing to do. We use a RED rocket for that purpose even on our main postproduction workstation but thats not an option for all of our notebooks/macbooks because we focus on nature documentary and its required that our camera people can review the files, while filming in the outbacks of this world ;)

As i was looking around the internet i found an interesting description of the REDCODE codec and the advantages wavelet based codecs can offer at wikipedia.
Here is the entire quote:

However, since REDCODE is a wavelet codec, the files contain several lower resolution versions of the video; the codec uses each in sequence to build the next higher resolution version.
That means a 4K file can supply 2K, 1K, or even 0.5K footage directly without decoding the full 4K resolution data followed by scaling.

Thats sounds like the ideal solution for the problem i described above.
I am not sure if i understood it correctly but is it really possible to easily switch from a 4K recorded R3D file to lets say 2K so that proper playback on notebooks isn`t an issue, trim everything down to the scenes you really wanna have and translate the changes back to the 4K file immediately?
Seperate proxy files wouldn`t help that much i guess because you commit your changes to the proxy file and not to the 4K R3D you recorded which would make additional working steps necessary.
I am looking forward to your answers and would like to say thank you in advance for helping out an IT guy who is a little bit lost in the world of camera stuff. ^^

Dennis

[Bob Gundu]

Hi Dennis. The various resolution clips are generated at the moment only with the Red One. Not so with the Epic/scarlet. You can however create them in post through Redcine. But in all honesty, most laptops can playback the red footage at 1/4 or even half res pretty efficiently.

[Todd T]

+1 Bob

Take a look at Jarred' s post about the RCX Export Tutorial

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Hi Dennis. The various resolution clips are generated at the moment only with the Red One. Not so with the Epic/scarlet. You can however create them in post through Redcine. But in all honesty, most laptops can playback the red footage at 1/4 or even half res pretty efficiently.

I think you're referring to the QT pointer files of the RED One. And that is related to the wavelet and multiple resolutions, but is just a round-about way of interfacing them through QuickTime.

Wavelet compression of images, or video frames in this case, are a multi-tiered algorithm where you don't have to decompress them all the way to get at a useable image. In REDCINE-X, or other apps that properly support R3D, you pick your playback resolutions of full, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8... And those are based on how far you dig into the wavelet data. Choosing 1/8th resolution playback essentially only digs 1/8th of the way into the wavelet, only consumes 1/8th of the CPU horsepower needed to decode the full frame, delivers 1/8th of the resolution and runs 8 times faster. ...Or even perceptibly faster than that as 1/2 or full resolution on a given system may just be too much for that system to handle at all.

Current generation laptop computers using mobile i7 CPUs with adequate amounts of memory and respectable internal storage can play back 5K R3D files at 1/4 res in real-time without breaking a sweat. Which is all that's needed most of the time for any real-world playback and checking. Here and there, it can be stopped and increased to full resolution and viewed at 1:1 pixels if needed to verify a specific detail or critical focus, if necessary.

Proper use of wavelets essentially eliminates the need for offline workflows and rendered proxy formats. But it's still taking some time for most of the software out there to really capitalize on these advantages.

[Dennis S.]

Thanks for all your fast replies, i appreciate it :)
So bascially it would be best to pick 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 or whatever the horsepower of the notebook is capable off, to
practically achieve the same, as you would when you generate QT wrappers from within REDCINE-X Pro or is there anything special,
less cpu dependant about the QT wrapped files?

In other words a 4K R3D file played back at 1/2 results in 2K with only half the CPU power necessary for the decoding and with twice the speed
so for example if i can`t play the 4K file in realtime (full) but maybe at 13fps, i can play it at 26fps with 1/2.
Is that correct?

Thank you :)

[Danai Chutinaton]

Thanks Jeff...been wondering about this for a while.

[Michael Lindsay]

Current generation laptop computers using mobile i7 CPUs with adequate amounts of memory and respectable internal storage can play back 5K R3D files at 1/4 res in real-time without breaking a sweat.

what aplication are you using for this??

thanks

Michael

[Olivier Madar]

I feel better in 4K wavelett than in 1080p AVCDHD. I LOVE Redcode.


Olivier

[Timur Civan]

Wish the epic still had QT proxies.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Thanks for all your fast replies, i appreciate it :)
So bascially it would be best to pick 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 or whatever the horsepower of the notebook is capable off, to
practically achieve the same, as you would when you generate QT wrappers from within REDCINE-X Pro or is there anything special,
less cpu dependant about the QT wrapped files?

The QT pointers, or QT wrapped files if you log them into FCP7, are nothing special. They're just flagged to run at a certain wavelet decode level. The wrappers and QT pointer files are just for the benefit of making R3D files play within QuickTime. You of course have to install the QuickTime R3D plugin, which is Mac only. It's also a dated and clunky way to work.

In other words a 4K R3D file played back at 1/2 results in 2K with only half the CPU power necessary for the decoding and with twice the speed
so for example if i can`t play the 4K file in realtime (full) but maybe at 13fps, i can play it at 26fps with 1/2.
Is that correct?

That's correct in a generalized, nut-shell way.

what aplication are you using for this??

Premiere does a fantabulous job. :) So does Sony Vegas Pro and now Edius 6.5. RedCine-X does alright, but it's optimized for use with the Rocket more so than being multi-threaded, so it's performance isn't all that great compared to other solutions out there.

I feel better in 4K wavelett than in 1080p AVCDHD. I LOVE Redcode.

Yep. Agreed. It's amazing how well the latest NLE software is handling R3D files. It's fun to see the looks on peoples' faces when I show them how well Premiere CS6 thrashes through 5K EPIC files and does it better, smoother and faster than FCP7 can deal with 1080p AVC from most consumer cameras. :)

Wish the epic still had QT proxies.

eh... why? The QT proxies always were, and still are, a very clunky and kludge way of working with R3D files. But if for some reason you still want them, you can generate them from within RC-X. Yes, even for EPIC 5K files. IMO, if you're still in a FCP7 editing environment, you're better off to generate QT LT proxies from within RC-X (or Premiere / AME, lol) and edit with those. The latest releases of the R3D plugin for Final Cut Studio has Rocket support if you do L&T ingest and transcode to ProRes. So that's one other way to ingest usable footage. FCP7 works best if you edit in one of the various flavors of ProRes, but Color has proper internal support for native QT-wrapped R3D, or you can re-link to the R3D's themselves on XML export for ingest into Resolve.

SpeedGrade also does a great job of handling R3D files natively and does many things snappier than Resolve does. Biggest complaint from most about SpeedGrade is monitoring as it requires an nVidia SDI card. That's changing soon though. ;) like IBC soon... ooops, and he walks away.. muttering something about cats and bags and whatnot.