NVIDIA, RED Digital Cinema announce easier ways to work with 8K

Source: NVIDIA. Footage courtesy Phil Holland. 8K vs 4K.

Working with 8K video will be easier and more accessible than ever after RED Digital Cinema and NVIDIA announced an NVIDIA CUDA-accelerated REDCODE RAW decode software development kit (SDK) that gives a new way to work with 8K video.

“Our mission is to bring cinema-grade images and performance to content creators everywhere,” said Jarred Land, president of RED Digital Cinema. “RED, NVIDIA and our industry partners are levelling the playing field, making the technology for high-resolution processing and image quality accessible to everyone.”

8K is becoming the new frontier in video, notes NVIDIA's Andrew Page in a blog post. “Overshooting” resolution lets creators do more with their footage such as stabilise, pan, crop and zoom in on the best parts of a shot. Compositors can also benefit from more precise masks for keying and image tracking.

"Just downsampling from 8K to 4K reduces artifacts, such as noise, and produces higher quality visuals. The fact 8K is exactly four times the size of 4K makes the operation much simpler," he wrote.

The need for massive CPU processing power or single-purpose hardware like the RED ROCKET-X to handle 8K had put it beyond the reach for most content creators, until now. Earlier this year, NVIDIA and RED announced an initiative to accelerate 8K video processing by offloading the compute-intensive decoding and debayering of REDCODE RAW footage onto a single NVIDIA GPU.

The new capabilities are now available. At the launch, an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 GPU played back, edited and colour-graded RAW 8K footage on a system with a single-CPU HP Z4 Workstation — eliminating the need for either a US$6,750 RED ROCKET-X or a US$20,000 dual-processor workstation. Similar 8K performance is also available with NVIDIA TITAN RTX or GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPUs.

NVIDIA GPUs are the only solutions capable of playing RED MONSTRO’s 8,192×4,320 frames at 24 frames per second (FPS) with no pre-caching or proxy generation. The GPU processes every frame as needed, so jumping around the timeline is quick and responsive, and scrubbing is smooth.

The new SDK runs across a variety of legacy GeForce, TITAN and Quadro desktop and notebook GPUs, benefiting 4K, 5K and 6K workflows as well.

“Colorfront has been shipping 8K-capable systems for several years now and we are delighted to join with RED and NVIDIA and other industry leaders to celebrate a faster, more streamlined future for 8K,” said Colorfront MD Aron Jaszberenyi.

“With the new RED SDK allowing wavelet decompression on NVIDIA GPUs, Colorfront can do all the RAW processing in GPU and output 8K video (up to 60p) using AJA Kona5 video cards. With this latest advance – faster-than-realtime Debayer and decompression of 8K RAW footage, with simultaneous display of the 8K image on an 8K HDR monitor – Colorfront and our partners have achieved a significant milestone.”

“A few years ago, things like real-time playback or real-time encoding when exporting footage was not even possible,” said Director and Cinematographer Phil Holland.

“As GPUs advanced further, this has empowered content creators to receive these performance gains in much more modest systems. Working in native raw formats, real-time effects, significantly faster exports, as well as much faster in application playback have all been huge time savers as digital cinema cameras advanced from 4K to 5K, to 6K, to 8K and likely beyond.”

Details:

The RED R3D SDK and REDCINE-X PRO software are planned to be available at the end Q119. Beta versions of the SDK have been made available to major third parties to support integration.