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How fast is REDCINE? - DVXuser.com -- The online community for filmmaking

For those not keeping track, Redcine is the software that will read the Red One's proprietary codec and convert it to...anything you have installed on your system, as well as DPX/Cineon/JP2K/TIFF/etc. sequences. The question of speed has been raised - another RAW processing camera was said to take 8 seconds per frame at one point in its development, and folks were concerned about.

Graeme Nattress, Voodoo High Priest of Red's software/codec effort answers. Graeme's statements in italics, my comments interspersed in plaintext:

1) you can play your REDCODE files in real time - at what resolution depends on your processor specs.

(sounds to me like you can play the files and it'll do a realtime extraction of lower resolutions - so your slower machine may play high res files only at 1K, for instance)

2) colour transforms are GPU based, and hence very fast indeed. I'd expect realtime performance for a lot of configurations, but again, more details as we get nearer release.

(...so think of it like Aperture for video processing- it is GPU based, it demosaics RAW imagery, then it kicks out in a variety of file formats and sizes. Except instead of just stills (or still seqences), it can write to QT/AVI formats as well)

3) full quality demosaic of the full 4k will be a touch slower. It's got to be as we're using a complex / nice demosaic. However, hardware is getting rapidly faster and we'll be looking into how to best optimize the demosaic algorithm.

Presuming you've got a hoss system...which is why I'm waiting for 8 processor Intel Macs before buying a new desktop)

More details, such as questions about Avid & FCP specific workflows (I chime in on the latter) are in the thread, and it's growing quickly.

Graeme wrote in to add:

I should add, that 1) and 2) and 3) above go together, so that you shouldn't expect to see 4k being demosaiced and colour corrected and played back in real time.

RE: 2) GPU is not used for demosaicing. CPU is. It's hard to get the complexity of demosaic we need running on a GPU.

RE: 3) As posted earlier, current time for just the demosaic of 4.9k raw frame is 1.7 seconds (single core of quad G5, totally un-optimized development code). That's todays "touch slower" we hope to get that time down, but until we've got into the optimisation, I don't know how far down it will go. (People were worried when they'd heard that Dalsa was taking 8 or 4 seconds per frame.)

I don't want people to think either of two things:

a) it will be dog slow
b) it will be realtime everything

As we all know, in the real world, 4 processors doesn't make code 4 times as fast, as there overheads and other things at work.

The above is of today. Things can and will change.
-Graeme


-mike