No build is safe anymore!

[Brent@RED]

Ronx, just sent you an email...

BC

[Alex Carr]

\\A lot of those things can be eliminated or worked around. Honestly send it back, I've sent multiple bodies back to the rental house's on other jobs.

[sander kamp]

RED ships battery chargers with new firmware these days. The old firmware refused to charge a battery if it was too hot, you would have to cool the battery down and try again, the new firmware keeps trying until it thinks it is okay to charge.

With the audio board upgrade you can have your charger upgraded as well, you would have to ask RED if that can be done separately. I have two chargers, one with old firmware and one with new firmware and the old one was always a pain to use. In this climate (Thailand) batteries run hot all the time and I would have to cool them down with a fan before charging them.

[gdv]

The bottom line is that this camera is way way too much premature.
This is also reflected in the manufacturing process when not all cameras are created equal.
I think many of the Red owner were blinded by the low price (which is not so low considering all the accessories, some of them are useless, and the fact that a new model, Scarlet or Epic, will make the old accessories useless) of the camera and the non-existing glamorous halo of the movie business.
I am sure in the future many will be more careful.
This will affect also the Red company and unless they will be more precise with their R&D I can't see a repeatable enormous quantity sales like they had with the R1.

[Ian Laurie]

wow. and yet I was just on a feature, two reds, for four weeks. in all that time we had one battery pop off (battery got bumped against a wall) and a bnc-din cable get yanked. both of which had nothing to do with red. No offence meant towards you or anyone else, but who is handling your camera?

[gdv]

wow. and yet I was just on a feature, two reds, for four weeks. in all that time we had one battery pop off (battery got bumped against a wall) and a bnc-din cable get yanked. both of which had nothing to do with red. No offence meant towards you or anyone else, but who is handling your camera?

Yes, you are lucky. In a way I am too. No major issues with the one that i work with (sometimes batteries are not charging, sometimes the camera loose its "zero" color, sometimes the monitor shows squeezed image and sometimes some other things).
I learned to work around it.
The fact is that the customer doesn't care. He pays for the day rental, the crew cost him a lot and he wants a working camera, and he is right.
By working around the problems, we are covering Red for not delivering an end user camera.
On the other hand, their customer service is really trying to cover and solve the problems, I must admit and be honest.
I guess these are some of the problems that comes with a new camera from a very new company.
Hope all this will be corrected in the future.
Red, don't rush delivering the Scarlet and the Epic. Make it well. Rush is from the devil.

[Appleguy]

I have to agree with the battery plate issue. I have a red cradle and a Red battery plate all brand new got only a month ago and a tap on the bottom of the battery makes the battery fly off everytime.
My sony BP's from my DSR 500 NEVER did this and slamming the battery home on the plate twenty or thirty times has done nothing to rectify this.
This is clearly a manfacturing flaw and really needs to be looked into it isn't somethign that should be put up with those batterys should stay locked on until you release it.

[David Wyatt]

To everyone with battery plate problems get your camera in for the audio board upgrade as soon as your number's up because Red also replace all your battery pins at the same time - never had a power problem since.

Codec errors however are still are a huge problem, Build 17 doesn't seem very stable at all (I haven't used Build 18 much since we tend to avoid it on professional shoots - but hopefully this will be more stable when it eventually makes it out of Beta). As others have speculated there appears to be a variance in the reliability of different model numbers (which could be down to different components used in different production runs...who knows?).

On a recent shoot I saw just about every codec error known to man - audio codec error, post error, playback error...green screen of death, black screen of death, booting hang, posting hang, even Rocketio error which I haven't seen for a long time. I'm beginning to get a sneaking suspicion that these will never disappear completely, even on Epic - they're the data equivalent of getting a hair in the gate - we'll just learn to adapt with these errors, and be prepared to deal with them as they arise. I'd be very interested to hear how common these kind of errors are on other data cameras which I don't have much experience with like the Arri D-21 & the SI-2K. Anyone have any feedback?

Unfortunately the plain fact of the matter is that in these error situations on a busy set you simply don't have time to write a log file without looking like a complete w***er - your priority is to get the camera working again which sometimes requires a re-boot and even more waiting around. Unfortunately and unfairly these situations can reflect badly on the camera crew in question but it reflects even worse on the camera itself and its reputation within the industry. It's probably the number one worry people have when they ask us about the pros and cons about shooting with the camera for the first time - they've already heard the rumours through the industry of unreliability. If, for example, the camera loses production a minute every other day that could equal thousands of pounds/dollars in lost time over the course of an entire feature.

It would probably be invaluable for Red to receive log files of these errors but their big problem is that most people will encounter codec faults when the camera is being pushed to its limit and time is at a premium - these tend to be the situations when the camera faults but you simply don't have time to write a log file so Red are unlikely to get to the route of the problems [I'd love them to prove me wrong].

[JanneJansson]

Yepp, funny things on build 17, and 18. Im still on 16 on my own cam. Best build I have used.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

On B18 here. Seems a lot more stable than B17. I don't want to go back to B16, not that it was any better than 18, which is pretty damn good here. I can't roll back to 16 anyway -- I need to use 16GB cards. The only problem I seem to have with B18 is the occasional audio fault playback problem. Supposedly that gets fixed with the new audio board. I need to send my camera in, it's past due for upgrade - probably will in the next week or two.