What does that mean? Is it lossless like lossless webp or png, or is it lossy and well performing under some metric like PSNR? "no perceivable loss in quality" can mean anything, including a lossy codec.
There are a lot of reasons to prefer lossless over lossy, but there is always the "good enough" point with storage media. Film is not lossless, so it doesn't matter if the digital storage is. What matters is if the lossiness in encoding is good enough to work with at the same level as film.
For example, there was a study a few years ago at McGill with trained listeners on the effects of bitrate with mp3 and m4a audio encoding that found that only a slim number of mastering engineers preferred lossless over lossy encoded audio (interestingly enough, some professional mixers and musicians found lossy encodings preferable to lossless even for jazz and classical music). But trying to convince audiophiles that those codecs are comparable to lossless is a losing battle.
I can transcode FLAC to Mp3 fast enough to stream it on my phone without issue, if I decide to use OGG or Opus or anything else, I don't have eventual reencoding issues.
Film/TV more generally I think tolerates slightly lossy codecs like RED or Pro Res, as there's often only 1-2 intermediate steps that could cause extra loss. (E.g. the part of editing that is just 'cutting' is pass-through, but color-grading would require a second encoding step.)
Thats a lot of data. Now, RED at the time didn't have a way of recording to large disk arrays, (unlike the alexa) so they used their own SSD pack things.
This limited the amount of space, and shooting time.
So they needed a way of doing more than RLE compression.
This meant that they had to start chucking away some data. With standard JPEG, you throw away 3/4 of the blue and green channels (kinda, its a different colour space) and then compress the rest.
The problem? in VFX the blue and green channels are crucial for "pulling a key" (green/blue screen work, the less clear, the more manuakl cleanup needed, which costs $$$). So all that 4k resolution will be useless because in practice, the bit that the VFX team need will be < HD res.
So RED used JPEG2000 that uses wavelets to compress things. Roughly speaking, instead of storing a per pixel value, you group chunks of the image together and store the _change in frequency_, that is the difference in colour between pixels.
This doesn't reduce the resolution so much and doesn't produce square artefacts like oldschool JPEG. The problem is that its quite CPU intensive. To the point that it would take >30 seconds to decode a frame.
GPUs make it trivial to do it in real time now, but back then, its was a massive faff.
Also, RED are masters of bullshit and marketing. There is quality loss, its just they never tell you that.
Minor nitpick: they’re miniPCIe SATA (not NVMe) SSDs in a fancy housing with some fancy pin remapping for the outer connector
This is new to me, I didn't think it was that simple. They harped on in the old days about how revolutionary the minimags were.
Edit: I had a look at https://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/cannes-2018-camera-cinemat... and annoyingly I have to admit that ARRIRAW looks to be much more popular I expected among smaller features. Like 10/32 specifically mention it, and some of the others are ambiguous.
> i.e. no /percievable/ loss in quality.
would be pretty redundant otherwise.
The only reason to describe a system as visually or perceptually lossless is because the encoding is lossy, even if very good, like an MP3 or JPEG at their highest quality settings.
For VFX, no.
That extra resolution, and crucially colour dynamic range means that less time and money had to be spent cleaning up green screen masks.
It also means that there is more scope to do things like Day-for-night, change the colour temperature, and have full artistic freedom to change the look and feel of a movie without reshooting.
As for frame rate I'm pretty sure we know from experiments that the average human eye can see the difference in frame rate all the way up to 150-160 fps, and that the trained eye can detect images shown for less than 1/200 second.
So however marginal the gain is, it makes sense for professionals that take pride in having the absolutely best quality. It's the same people that will finetune encoder settings for the individual scenes in a movie just to get that tiny improvement.