Recently at Bling we had the opportunity to push the boundaries of how far you can go with the RED One.

The RED One is a 12 megapixel digital camera with a sensor that gives up to 4520 (h) x 2540 (v) pixels. To put the amount of information you are working with in perspective, imagine taking your favorite digital camera, pushing on the shutter button and holding it down, and having it snap away 30 pictures every second. So, a ten second shot would end up with a directory of 300 pictures, each at 12 Megapixels.

For a 90 minute feature film, that would be 162,000 pictures you had snapped.

And, that’s assuming a 1 to 1 shooting ratio, no multiple takes, inserts, coverage, establishing shots, reverse angles, etc.

SO, how do they do it, and how do you deal with it?

How do they do it?

The answer, they cheat! RED has intelligently realized that they are dealing with a lot of pictures, and to use what digital slr cameras call “camera raw” would create enormous files and be very costly to develop. So, they shoot all the footage in a compressed format, similar in a way to Jpeg. So, instead of having 162,00 raw files in your folder, it’s more like you have 162,000 jpeg files.

In fact, instead of Jpeg they have their own codec call REDCode, or RC for short. This is a very advanced codec that has many feature we will discuss in a future posting, but, the important thing to note for this discussion is that it is a type of compressed file that squeezes the file sizes down and throws away some image information. The RED One supports this compressed files to capture up to 36 Megabytes per a second.

This means that it stores 30 images that have 12 megapixels into 36 Megabytes. If we do the math, that means that they have effectively dropped the files to 1.2 Megabytes per a frame. So, they’ve essentially drop a 36 megabyte raw image down to only a fraction of the size through a complex type of compression.

Most people who have worked with Photoshop, or are professional photographers know that you want to work with the raw uncompressed images, like canon raw, tif images, etc. when processing the images. So, how do we get this into a format that many of the professional programs out there like?

How do you deal with it?

Much like unzipping a file, the REDCode compressed R3D file would need to be decompressed into a RAW file format. This process of moving from the RedCode to another format is called TRANSCODING. The industry standard for feature film is Cineon or DPX file format. However, this is pushing the image back out to 36 megabytes per frame again.

So, if we once again do the math, our finished film is 162,000 frames that are each around 36 megabytes, that is 5,832,000 megabytes, or around 6 terabytes.

Also, to play the sequence back on your computer at 30 frames per a second, you would need 30 x 36 megabytes or over 1 gigabyte of speed per second off your hard drives. To put that in perspective, the SATA II hard drives that are common place out there have a 0.375 gigabytes of speed per channel, and you would need about 4 fast drives to keep that pipe filled.  So, you would need at least 16 hard drives to get the speed to play back the uncompressed RED 4k footage. In fact, it took us 24 drives to achieve because you have to add the overhead of the raid and computer’s operating system like OS X, or windows. With 24 drives over Fiber Optic Cables we netted a minimum of 1250 MB/s on OS X.

To get the throughput you need to playback RED 4k footage uncompressed, it is similar to running over 300 frames per second of HDTV 1080p footage.