I took apart a Redmag SSD...

[Liana]

What's the big deal in the SSD having a high profit? If they didn't, then the cameras themselves would be that more expensive.

It doesn't matter either way.

Yes, it's a bit like inkjet printers: they either make money by selling you an expensive printer (higher costs upfront), or very expensive cartridges (you pay over the lifetime).

 

[Dave Blackham]

Im perfectly happy with the efforts of hardware, firmware and software from the boys and girls at Red. You hackers can keep well away from our kit, its doing just fine as it is....And any one caught prising our SSD cards apart gets a kick up the front, just so as you know.

 

[Nick Timmons]

Harrison and Antony, I'm in complete agreement. The feature set for RED firmware gets better every revision. I see only heartbreak in trying to hack it, for any particular reason.

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

It might be the Magic Lantern guys hacked the Canon firmware to make up for some serious functional short comings (and perhaps to show Canon the amazing video tools that can coded on an ARM).

As RED readily listen and absorb - they are a creative superset. I don't therefore think there is any need to hack their firmware.

AJ (xML)

RED are, in my experience, about the most *incredibly* responsive company I've ever dealt with (well company larger than a mom & pop shop anyway!).

That doesn't mean they always give us what we want or need; the ability to delete individual clips in camera, as mentioned by a previous poster, being an excellent example. It would be relatively trivial to code. Cinema guys, by and large, are very unenthusiastic about the idea. Docu/wildlife guys are the opposite. It appears as if RDC had to make a decision, and they listened to the cinema guys - which is fair enough. But I'm a grown-up, I'd like to make that choice, not have it made for me.

And I'm not speaking about 'hacking' the core RED firmware, I'm talking about some kind of open API layer on top of it, that little enhancements (like the functionality to delete clips) could be coded up for without disturbing the core image processing engine.

Well, either that or the alternative of a ground-up open-source rewrite of the entire firmware... but then the camera wouldn't be a RED any more!

Did I ever tell the story of the laser printer?

In one of my previous lives, I worked for a company that specialized in label-printing software and systems.

We partnered up with a Japanese company which made a very expensive reel-to-reel laser printer, ideal for labels. This thing had some serious hardware in the engine, but the firmware was... sub-optimal. It could only print small labels, up to make 2"x2", and was very limited in other ways.

We nodded sagely as the Japanese explained the huge software development effort it had taken to get to this larger label size, and sent them on their way, to come back to see us in four weeks.

We took our best hacker (1), supplied him with unlimited coffee, pizza, and cigarettes, and put him in a rented office away from the main building, with a phone that only made outgoing calls.

A month later, when the Japanese returned, their original firmware was in the garbage; our ace hacker had, single handed, written a pre-emptive multi-tasking operating system in firmware, and an entire new imaging engine. The printer could now print up to A4 size, faster, with graphics of any size and orientation, any barcode ever invented, and nice tricks like sequential numbers and barcodes on each label. The Japanese literally could not believe what they saw.

Now if it was Canon or Nikon or just about any other company apart from RDC, I would love to see the same approach tried. Knowing what Graeme et. al. can do, I don't think there's a lot of mileage in this approach with a RED camera... but *never* underestimate the abilities of true hackers; most hardware can do more than you think it ever could, sometimes much more.

(1) Shoutout for my old mate Jon Green: http://www.green-lines.com/index.php/jon/jon/jons-cv - RDC, hire him if you can. Just do it.

Mike

 

[Peter Moretti]

Bricking is one thing... hacked firmware on a $40,000, or even $10,000 professional camera is another thing entirely. If you're shooting with that $1500 SLR, or $1000 GH2 with hacked firmware and it chokes trying to record at a higher bit rate or with some random feature turned on. If you're running a hacked Epic or Scarlet with, say, a cobbled-together SSD or some new feature turned on and it ruins a shoot, you're giving the camera a bad name in the industry. That's something that hurts Red as a company, and every Red owner, operator, and rental house who have invested in Red products and expertise in a line of work that demands reliability on high budget productions.

+1^6.

 

[Brian F Kobylarz]

That doesn't mean they always give us what we want or need; the ability to delete individual clips in camera, as mentioned by a previous poster, being an excellent example. It would be relatively trivial to code. Cinema guys, by and large, are very unenthusiastic about the idea. Docu/wildlife guys are the opposite. It appears as if RDC had to make a decision, and they listened to the cinema guys - which is fair enough.
Mike

Mike,

For consideration only as I am not an expert in storage (aka, my base presumption may be flawed):

As I understand the tech, if you introduce the functionality of deleting clips, the firmware needs to do more work when recording future clips because you have now fragmented the mapping of data on the SSD.
For example, if you delete Take 2 of 3 which was a 20 second shot, then resume shooting - let's say that Take 4 is 23 seconds, the new R3D is split into two different locations.
On the other hand, if Take 4 was only 15 seconds, then there is a 5 second "space" on the SSD - how will the firmware know when to and when not to use empty space?

It may not be that complicated if the function of "Delete Last Clip" is introduced - perhaps no data "hole" would result - [asking that someone more knowledgeable add insight]...

One idea that has come up frequently for the wildlife shooters is introducing a cache. Ups the ante in power consumption, but that feature has many applications. Had it on my Sony HDW750 - very useful - saved the day a couple of times.

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Mike,

For consideration only as I am not an expert in storage (aka, my base presumption may be flawed):

As I understand the tech, if you introduce the functionality of deleting clips, the firmware needs to do more work when recording future clips because you have now fragmented the mapping of data on the SSD.
For example, if you delete Take 2 of 3 which was a 20 second shot, then resume shooting - let's say that Take 4 is 23 seconds, the new R3D is split into two different locations.
On the other hand, if Take 4 was only 15 seconds, then there is a 5 second "space" on the SSD - how will the firmware know when to and when not to use empty space?

It may not be that complicated if the function of "Delete Last Clip" is introduced - perhaps no data "hole" would result - [asking that someone more knowledgeable add insight]...

One idea that has come up frequently for the wildlife shooters is introducing a cache. Ups the ante in power consumption, but that feature has many applications. Had it on my Sony HDW750 - very useful - saved the day a couple of times.

Insightful, and semi-plausible; except that this has been an issue subject to debate since way back on the Red One, on all media, including Drives and CF cards. So it's nothing to do with SSDs per. se. - which, in any case, handle computer applications where data is constantly being written, deleted, and rewritten.

Mike

 

[Dave Blackham]

Mike,


One idea that has come up frequently for the wildlife shooters is introducing a cache. Ups the ante in power consumption, but that feature has many applications. Had it on my Sony HDW750 - very useful - saved the day a couple of times.

I own 1/3 of the UK patent for that feature, its was called Hindsight patented by Leo Dickeson, Ian Philips and myself. Essentialy it was a ram FiFo buffer before the days of this new fangled Disk/CF/SSD stuff.

Im all up for any creative really good software and much of our work is doc and Wildlife, we get in there when its either to difficult to film or thought to be in hostile locations. We do innovate but we have always sucsesded to date with our projects. The job is hard enough as it is and we rely always on our cameras and audio kit to perform when we need it most, so you can understand the concern about hacking our prime recording and imaging device.

 

[Björn Benckert]

The cards are not expansive, they last long and it's one of those things you do not want to save money on.

Also realize the following....


Soon the SSD slot / back module will be out. When it is out I doubt that you will be able to shot a commercial or anything "important" without running data onto two cards at the same time just for redundancy. I doubt that the production insurance will be valid if you shoot to one card and do not verify the material on set on a "per frame basis".

As the dual recording will secure a the data with a dub all ready on board of the camera...

 

[Mestizo Devon]

Bjorn,

I'll take a couple 128's and another 64 for good measure!:sifone:

 

[Brian F Kobylarz]

Insightful, and semi-plausible; except that this has been an issue subject to debate since way back on the Red One, on all media, including Drives and CF cards. So it's nothing to do with SSDs per. se. - which, in any case, handle computer applications where data is constantly being written, deleted, and rewritten.

Mike

Precisely - affects all media, not just SSD. Only referenced SSD because that was where the discussion in this thread was concentrated.
The truth is as soon as you begin to write to and read from different physical areas of any media, things slow down - just like a layover at an airport, one pauses when they need to figure out where to go next... RED probably took a look at their benchmarks and decided it affected performance too much when capturing large amounts of data in single bites (and sometimes with high frame rates or HDRX engaged - that requires even more headroom).

Thought this made sense one day when I was watching the on screen graphics during a hard disc defrag operation.

Applications on a computer don't need to process the same amount of data continuously. That's the beauty of it all - you hardly notice milliseconds difference when saving one PDF over another - but try that with a media file - a dropped frame is quite obvious.

 

[Trent Lillehaugen]

+1^6.

1^6 = 1

 

[Patrick OMara]

SSDs are different tech, they are not affected as badly from fragmentation in the same way an HDD would be. On an SSD you are accessing memory space with an address, it just needs a fast controller to whip around that electricity. You can increase IOPS with a faster controller which is being done with each release of consumer SSDs.

Now take an HDD, for random access you have to find the new location on the hard drive AND wait for the disk to rotate before you read or write. There's a physical limitation that just can't be fixed as easily as just upgrading the speed of a controller chip. Fragmentation absolutely destroys HDD Performance.


If you format your ssd before use, and delete a few clips..then record again ... it should be absolutely fine.



I still wouldn't want the "delete a clip feature though", too scary.

Side note: It'd be nice to have thumbnails in playback with the scene metadata listed beside each.

 

[Yousuf Abbasi]

I still wouldn't want the "delete a clip feature though", too scary.

Indeed. Very creepy to think about........

 

[Pawel Achtel]

...I still wouldn't want the "delete a clip feature though", too scary...

So, would you rather run out of space and keep the bad shots rather than the action? Sounds silly and this is exactly what happens when you shoot wildlife and/or underwater. There are different uses of this camera and there are legitimate and valid reasons where having a "delete clip" feature is the only way to get a shot, especially when we do not have pre-record function.

When you in the field, you can not just shoot everything or sort out the good and the bad takes on location: in Antarctica, on top of a mountain, on a cliff, on a helicopter, underwater, on a piece of rock in the middle of the ocean, etc...

What is scary to me is not to have delete clip function

 

[Patrick OMara]

holy crap i am not that serious, I am not actually scared. hah. You guys are crazy. I get the points of needing delete and pre-record, I actually need them too

 

[Nick Timmons]

I'm a little scared myself, as I haven't heard back from Nick at RED yet... Someday, I'm going to learn to keep my yap shut!

 

[Ivan G]

I'm a little scared myself, as I haven't heard back from Nick at RED yet... Someday, I'm going to learn to keep my yap shut!

Stay away from tap water for the next few days...

 

[Mike P.]

They're thinking of ways to remotely brick your camera/gear for your transgression.

What I wanna know is if you can offload a REDmag's data by directly connecting the SSD to your comp's SATA 6Gbps port... ...Or is that just as bad to ask?

 

[Matt Ryan]

Stay away from tap water for the next few days...

ROFL!

:rofl: