[Tig] Random comments

[Lawrence Towers]

"The DLP rainbow issue happens when the viewer moves his head."
Actually any reasonably quick eye movement will reveal this. The closer the viewer/larger the screen the more likely to hapen. Particularly terrible with monochrome material. I've often wondered why there wasn't a monochrome mode available to turn off the color wheel.

" If the content is 24 frames per second, then the display should update cleanly at 24 frames per second."
As projected it is usually a 48hz shutter, some places with 72. I've often wondered why 72hz wasn't adopted as a display refresh standard.

"It seems that the customer may be locked into using RED-provided
software in order to make sense of its proprietary RAW camera format
(R3D).  It would be interesting if there was an open-source solution
to convert from RED-raw to standard DI formats.  I wonder how
different RED RAW files are from common DSLR RAW formats? "

Lock-in is not an appropriate term here. RED uses a codec, it offers free software to decode it free as well to DI as a free quicktime plugin. Raw refers to the format of the data which saves raw sensor data with color balance etc as metadata. It is then compressed. That is the proprietary part.
They had an exclusive agreement withAssimilate/Scratch, which is supposedly going to expire soon, to incorporate their codec engine.

"It creates a single path where other capture media have many."

This really only applies to film. Sort of. Realistically there is lock in that you are locked in to a process of development, scanning and projection which are far less ubiquitous than any reasonably priced/powered computer. Red captures to commodity flash media, easily adapts to commodity sata drives.
Other capture media has been much more proprietary.

"Consider that it likely takes about 3 seconds (an estimate based on
dcraw performance using a single CPU core) to convert a RED RAW frame
to a standard DI format on a reasonably fast computer."
Where did these numbers come from? On our Dual core Mac, hardly a speed demon, it was faster than that.
Also comparing the time it takes to convert a 4k frame to a 2k txfer is not exactly fair.
You are not bound to any particular OS for storage. Furthermore, even assuming the codec would only be available for windows and mac in the future, either of these platforms can offload processing to generic linux boxes.
I think this emphasis on converting to DI is really missing the point. Traditional DI is going to disappear. Anyone responsible will be reading Raw files and only metadata will be edited. Nothing will be baked in until delivered. 

---Larry