You can now COPY Apache Parquet and Apache ORC file formats from Amazon S3 to your Amazon Redshift cluster. Apache Parquet and ORC are columnar data formats that allow users to store their data more efficiently and cost-effectively. With this update, Redshift now supports COPY from six file formats: AVRO, CSV, JSON, Parquet, ORC and TXT. 

Source: Amazon Web Services News Amazon Redshift Can Now COPY from Parquet and ORC File Formats