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There's a revolution going on, and it's happening before our eyes and ears - yet most haven't spotted it. I'm talking about high-definition video and audio, where a logjam is finally clearing and we're about to see a step-change in quality. And no, I'm not talking about domestic "hi-def" and Blu-ray. I'm talking much higher than that.

My interest in this change was first piqued when I heard about a company called Red. Actually, its head of software development is a PC Pro reader, who emailed me with questions about the eight-core Apple Mac Pro I talked about last year.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, Red was founded in 2005 and, seemingly within a few months, was promising a 4K digital video camera for the staggeringly low price of less than $20,000. For those who don't know, 4K video is shot at a resolution of 4,000 horizontal lines - a tad higher than the 1,080 lines we're currently offered as "full HD".

The order book quickly swelled to more than 4,000 interested customers, and production started. And it wasn't simply marketing hype - it soon became clear that real quantities had shipped. Not just a few handmade prototypes. No, the serial numbers of shipping units had run into four figures, and were climbing fast. Then I read that Peter Jackson, director of Lord of the Rings, and Steven Soderberg had both said that Red was now their tool of choice, and they had no intention of ever going back to film. Clearly something was afoot, and I managed to sweet-talk a visit to the company's

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facility in Orange County, Los Angeles when I was last over there.

The guy behind Red is Jim Jannard, the man who founded Oakley sunglasses. He recently sold his shareholding for a billion or two, and it was made clear to me that Red has, effectively, unlimited funds.

The day I visited was a "Red Day", where customers were invited to a full walkthrough - not only of the camera system, but of the software too. All of them were bubbling with excitement, and most had waited for months to get here. The Red guys fired up a 4K video projector the size of a small car and projected onto a screen some 40 feet across. It was new, untouched footage just in from Soderberg. The quality was, frankly, staggering. Far better than 70mm film, with a solidity and crispness that was eye-popping.

So where does a hugely disruptive company like Red go now? Simple - it announces two more models. A 5K camera for the really serious and a 3K camera "for the soccer moms" called Scarlet. The price tag is going to be explosive - $3,000 for a 3K digital camera that can do 150fps. 3K video is perfectly usable in the cinema, so this is true professional quality for the consumer, not some sort of faux "prosumer" nonsense. It's revolutionary stuff - capture everything at 3K, edit it on your PC or Mac, and then downsample to Blu-ray quality. Red will sell tens of thousands of this thing if it can bring the cameras to market early next year as planned.

And that's just the video side. On the audio front, another revolution is happening. For years, pro audio has been working not at the 16-bit 44kHz standard of CD, but at a higher standard of 24-bit, recorded at either 88kHz, 96kHz or (lately) 192kHz.

As 88/24 has been a standard for nearly a decade, there's a lot of source material in this format. The problem has been delivering it to the public - and of giving them a way to play it back at full quality. CD has been a great solution for nearly 30 years, but attempts to replace it with another disc-based system have failed - DVD-Audio and HDCD have both fallen by the wayside, for instance.