Video exclusive: RED demos realtime 8K60 streaming

Jeff Goodman, VP of Product Management at RED provides us with an exclusive interview on the IBC show floor including a look at the new V-Raptor-XL and realtime 8K60 streaming using RED Connect.

Okay, we have a bit of a special one here. Jeff Goodman, VP of Product Management at RED only gave one interview on camera at IBC and it was to our Bas Goossens. That’s all cool enough, but what really makes this video worth 8 minutes of your time is what they talked about on the stand.

We start with the V-Raptor-XL, which takes all the I/O stuff that you would normally need expansion packs for and packs it into the camera body. This is excellent, it’s the first RED camera to have built-in ND amongst a raft of other goodies, but it’s when Goodman points to a box with a blinking green light on the back of the camera that things get really interesting.

“What you’re seeing here is a USB-C to Ethernet adaptor with an Ethernet cable plug in,” he says. “What is happening over that IP connection is that we’re streaming R3D from the camera. In the demo we’re showing right now we’re streaming 8K60 from the camera in full R3D quality, so that’s uncompressed raw 16-bit imagery in 8K, from the camera to a CCU. At the CCU we’re processing that using Nvidia GPUs in realtime, and that allows you to broadcast 8K60 16-bit in realtime. In the demo we have here we’re converting using Nvidia’s Rivermax to SMPTE 2110. Shall we go over and have a look?”

Oh you bet…

“All the grading ability you have in realtime,” he says. “You can have LUTS, you can have CDLs, you can take some of the R3D you’re capturing and do a realtime grade on that and put it back in the system. You have full flexibility with the raw file just like you would in post.”

And then it gets even better. Goodman points to another monitor that’s extracting a 1080 signal from the feed. Here AI software called Keycast is doing some realtime masking and just floating imagery behind the people on the stand. Green screen? What green screen?

Next he walks over to the edge of the stand and two Raptors that are mounted back to back. Each has a 180-degree fish eye lens on the front and are streaming 8K60 to two CCUs leveraged by RED partner Media.Monks to stitch the images together in realtime. These are then streamed to an Oculus headset to provide probably as immersive a VR experience as you can currently get.

“It’s a first of this quality being able to be streamed in realtime,” says Goodman.

Have a look below.