Let's talk REDFLASH

[Rob Lohman]

Thanks Andrew, hopefully everyone had a good holiday!

[Emanuel A.]

Thanks Rob but you can't break my jealousy :)

[SF Geek]

I would really like to know what RED has in store for the RED Flash. With the Viper Filmstream being able to record to the Venom Flashpacks in film stream mode makes me think that there are great opportunities for higher bitrate Redcode Raw that might be able to do higher frame rates. Does anyone know enough about flash drives and the Venom Flashpack specs? Is RED actively developing the Red Flash or is it second in line to the RED Drive and Red Raid?

[Rob Lohman]

We are actively developing the flash system as well. The flash market changes
fast so I would not expect (personal guess!!) more details until more closely to delivery.

[MikeCurtis]

The company line given at NAB & IBC: RedFlash will start at 32GB and start "around $1000" - so no, will not be substantially less than Red Drives. Solid state products are much more costly than hard drives, look at all the IT based products and you'll see that pricing disparity. Just noticed I got my Mom a 30GB hard drive based iPod that plays video for the same price of an 8 GB nano that doesn't play video (but is smaller). You pay the price for solid state's security.

Beyond that, my own unofficial/uncorroborated/WAG thoughts:
-the stats on the 32GB solid state hard drive are very interesting - at 50 MB/sec transfer rate, that is PLENTY fast enough for all the onboard formats. My own calculations, which Red has verified as overkill, put a maximum datarate of over 43 MB/sec, well under the always sustained nearly 50 MB/sec the solid state will do - with NO data rate falloff as regular hard drives have.

Advangates of solid state:
-consistent transfer speeds - no datarate falloff
-effective seek time of ZERO - so no penalty to write multiple simultaneous files, such as metadata, proxies, audio, and video in different files on the media. This is NOT the case for regular hard drives - seeks are "expensive" in terms of time
-no head crash risk
-more consistent transfer rates means less safety overhead required as well
-smaller form factor
-much lower power consumption as well

From a functionality standpoint, solid state is the way to go if the capacities can get reasonable. If my estimates are correct (and I don't think entirely so), 2K@60p from which 1080i can be derived should give about a half hour of video fitting in 32GB (not including audio, metadata, proxies, etc.). That's a pretty reasonable load.

The only drawback on solid state is the price - and that will improve over time.

-mike

[Brook Willard]

We are actively developing the flash system as well. The flash market changes
fast so I would not expect (personal guess!!) more details until more closely to delivery.

Makes sense to me. Happy remaining holidays, folks! :D

[SF Geek]

Does anyone know the specs on the Venom Flashpack? I just want to have an idea of what's possible. There isn't any hard data at the Grass Valley website.

[Chris Kenny]

-the stats on the 32GB solid state hard drive are very interesting - at 50 MB/sec transfer rate, that is PLENTY fast enough for all the onboard formats. My own calculations, which Red has verified as overkill, put a maximum datarate of over 43 MB/sec, well under the always sustained nearly 50 MB/sec the solid state will do - with NO data rate falloff as regular hard drives have.

Benchmarks on that Samsung solid-state SATA drive show it only writes at 25-30 MB/s. Seems like in a device with that many chips, though, you should be able to get higher by using more of them in parallel, so this limitation probably won't apply to RED's flash system.

[Blair S. Paulsen]

I support the RedDrive before RedFlash approach since the evolution of flash media is so steep right now. Yes, hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper also, just not as fast.

By getting the RedDrive out when the body ships it gives us a workable solution that is:
- affordable, particularly in terms of $ per GB
- has enough capacity not to feel like P2 redux
- because of the price/capacity ratio it will allow you to avoid on set downloading hassles in most shooting situations, especially if you get 2 or 3.

By pushing the release of RedFlash into the future we have a better chance of getting a better cost per GB, it maybe gives the RedTeam enough engineering time to create a unit that uses the topology of the P2 where multiple flash chips are RAIDed to increase maximum write rates that would maybe even allow higher fps in RedCode RAW!!!

[Jared VanLeuven]

Mike, love your avatar, that's how I feel in the mornings! :)