4K Delivery…

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We are very happy to hear Panasonic and Sony announce their 4K displays at CES today. That allows us to finally announce that RED has been developing for release a 4K delivery system.We have been committed to 4K from day one. It has always been our vision to see 4K in the home as well as on the big screen. We always believed that 1080P was a stop-gap along the way to 4K.We will be announcing details of the RED 4K Delivery system at NAB in April.Jim

It’s interesting that “4K Delivery system” is the phrase used, as previously (according to my recollection) the discussion was of a 4K projector. So does this mean a 4K display?

In any case, assuming it was at least 5 feet in diamter (60 inches), you could now have coffee houses showing indie movies shot on Red in 4K (i.e. as good as a 35mm film shown on a projector). All the middlemen cut out. Acquisition and distribution back in our own hands. Just like back in the days of the Lumiere Brothers…

So imagine a simple web-based service where indie film-makers upload their 4K (Quicktime?) movies, which independent coffee house-type movie theaters can download, paying back to the creators of the movie a per-ticket royalty. (Say “Mei’s Coffee House” in Hong Kong shows my movie to 20 people on Wednesday night. She charges US$5/ticket and gives me 40% (via simple “honor system” PayPal donation on the web site)). Nobody’s going to get rich here, but now we’re filming movies with high production values and back to the collective experience of eating popcorn and viewing movies on a big screen with like-minded people–and have a process to pay for the production of low-budget indie movies.

Who needs to see movies at 4k, you ask? We all do. Anamorphic 4k is what the director (and cinematographer) intended the audience to view it at. I watched “3:10 to Yuma” on the 15-hour United Airlines San Fran-to-Hong Kong flight yesterday: down-ressed to standard def, cropped to 4:3, wobbly horizontal lines scrolling up through the image, crappy projector, crappy player that fritzed out every 30 seconds for 2 seconds (dropping audio), etc. Totally destroyed the movie. So you say, I could have watched the movie on an iPhone. Naw, that’s a bad way to watch a movie too. Don’t take my word, here’s David Lynch on the subject: