Red Drive Dropped Frames

[Andrew Wilsak]

Long time lurker first time poster. Hello gang.

The last three days of our shoot we have had a couple takes have dropped frames when recording to the red drive. Every time it has happened the camera has been locked down and not moved, there haven't been any loud noises, and there's no vibration that I can tell. This has happened with three different drives and two different drive cables. Are there any other factors that might cause this? We have some CF too but we'd like to stick to drives.

All but one time it has happened it has been right after the camera has rolled, so the dropped frames are before action and really no harm, but super annoying obviously and worrisome that it will happen in the middle of a take. Is there something I can do to keep this from happening? They already sit in cradles on the camera. Have not had this problem before. Any help is appreciated!

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Its been a long time since I dealt with such issues. My advice may be dated, or just plain wrong.

It could be that the drives are failing, or that they need reformatting/defragmentation.

I'd check on the latter first. Just mount it and use your native operating system disk utilities to reformat the drive. Then put it back in the RED and reformat it again. That fixed a similar issue for me once on some drives that have been in heavy rotation.

If the actual drives are failing in the Red Drive you may be out of luck. What you can do is disassemble the Red drive and connect them directly to a computer. Then check their smart status and other low level checks. (Don't "low level format" them!) You should have an idea of the drives "health" by checking them this way ... but you can't fix them. They have to go back to Red.

 

[Geoff McLeod]

I format my drive before every days shoot. This week I had some dropped frames because I was running the drive at 80% full. I never like to go over 50% if I can help it. The dropped frames occurred on the longer takes, not the shorter ones.

 

[Kaku Ito]

I just had shot 100 minute long dome concert with 30,000 audiences yessterday with RED DRIVE but had no dropped frame even with the large volume from the PA and the vibrations from the audiences jumping around. Now I'm convinced with the Element Technica Drive mount.

 

[Andrew Wilsak]

Thanks for the response. We haven't shot more than 15% on any drive and always dump at the first sign of dropped frames. I'm gonna try reformatting in disk utility and see if that helps.

 

[jimhare]

I shoot up to 7 Reds at a time, always doing long takes (60-120 minutes) and have run them to full capacity, where the camera stops because the drive is full.

Never had a dropped frame issue so would suggest your issue is specific, and not typical of the camera or drives.

I for one will feel much better when everything is SSD! Mine arrive in the next few days.

 

[Kaku Ito]

There was someone mentioned that the SATA cable inside of RED ONE goes bad sometimes. Anyhow, yes you should reformat or ran the surface scan to see if there's any bad block. For me, today was the second day shot the whole mega concert with a RED DRIVE on the Element Technica Drive mount. The encore didn't fil so quickly swapped to my 64GB SSD.

 

[JanneJansson]

I have had droped frame from reddrive on two times. First time it was a hardware issu with the drive and red support exchanged it. The second time it was when shooting close to a ac unit and a strong low-freqvency rumble.

 

[Andrew Wilsak]

Yes I suppose at this point I will probably run a surface scan on the drives this has happened to. Curious that there's mention that internal sata cables can go bad, because this problem has been specific to one camera. If all the drives pass the scan it must be the camera then no?

 

[Stuart English]

Hi Andrew. The best thing to do is to capture the LOG file off of your camera and send to RED technical support for analysis. You may have a hardware problem somewhere in the SATA chain - which comprises camera, cable and RED-DRIVE and the LOG file will tell us that if that is indeed the case.

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Hi Andrew. The best thing to do is to capture the LOG file off of your camera and send to RED technical support for analysis. You may have a hardware problem somewhere in the SATA chain - which comprises camera, cable and RED-DRIVE and the LOG file will tell us that if that is indeed the case.

Stuart, a quick clarification: the above statement implies that the camera will (sometimes? always?) *know* when it has dropped frames. Is that the case? If so, doesn't it emit some kind of error message - or better, sound a klaxon - warning you immediately that you dropped frames? I don't recall seeing anything like that mentioned in the manual.

Mike