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copy and viewing rig on set

R

Rainer Fritz

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Hi every Body !

I am very new to the Forum and will say hello... first the RED is a wonderfull project, thanks for it. Cinematography will get a revolution.

So and now my question:

Is it planned to build a copy and viewing station for set/field use? We shoot at the moment a feature with HVX200/FS-100/P+S/Zeiss Planar but the handling with the backup from the FS-100 to the harddisks with computer on set and external drives and so on is not really fine.
Would be fine to have a small Package which runs on battery/AC, i would say about 1TB storage, display/keyboard/mouse.... to backup from the storage of the camera. Made for field use and connecting then after the shoot to the editing station. So that you don't have to go every day to the editing station.
Plug and Play Harddisks or slots to put the RED flash in it and so on. For example with an Final Cut or Avid SW on it and organizing file SW and so on....
one single small package that you can put every where to backup and view the footage....

regards

Rainer
 
I think you're asking a lot to have 1TB battery powered storage. You could use LaCie 320GB Little Big Disks, which run off Firewire bus power on say a MacBook Pro. Still not sure if it possible to bus power one of them and a RED-DRIVE simultaneously though.

For viewing on an HD-SDI monitor maybe a Matrox MXO, but again that needs an external PSU. Otherwise just preview on the MacBook Pro's display. Rumours are that the resolution of that will get a bump to full 1080 HD resolution soon.
 
One solution would be to take a raid of however big you want along with an AC car cigarette adapter. These things effectively turn you car or van into a generator (Turn the engine on plug in and away you go). Furthermore backing up in a vehicle would be more secure both in terms of criminal and an environmental threat. An added bonus is that the raid will be completely compatible from the getgo with your computer for post or backing up in a controlled indoor environment.

Don't forget that backing up such a large ammount of data will take a couple of hours. You'd be best off taking enough Drives to record too and then backup at the end of the day when the shoot has closed up. Two Red Drives at $1800 ought to cover a days' shooting fairly comfortably (About 6 hours record time), unless you leave the camera running throughout. Of course this isn't always possible I understand, especially if for example you are out in the wild shooting leopards in africa for days on end. If this or similar was the case then the first suggestion would probably represent the most cost effective method because it doesn't involve any bespoke manufacture. All the parts can be bought for reasonable costs.
 
This is an issue I've been rolling around in my head for some time as well. Part of the difficulty, of course, is that there is still much speculation about some of the RED components and the potential workflow(s) are mostly untested (except by the RED Team). The Reservation Lists has some advantages. For instance guys like Paul are going to get their Red sooner than my company will. And knowing that most users will start shooting SOMETHING immediately, they can do a lot field testing for the rest of us. :biggrin:

That's the great thing about a community like this; most people are very willing to share tips they've learned and pitfalls to avoid. For example, I picked up a great little power converter at WAL-MART of all places! It has a cigarette lighter plug extending from a box with two outlet plugs - one for your laptop and the other for your external storage device. It even has an onboard fan so the unit doesn't overheat and it was less than $30. Hopefully, we'll have some good information about workflow after NAB. Check out Mike Curtis at HDforindies.com - he's got a close eye on this subject
 
Some of the less exspensive DC to AC converters put out a modified sine wave and some are square waves or saw tooth waves. Why I mention this is that some electronics (espically computers) do not like these modified (not pure AC) wave forms. So it's best to check with the maker of what ever you are going to plug in to one of them.
 
just a few items that may be relevant for portable backup plans. A laptop computer may use about 25-35 W when running. A single 3.5" 500 GB USB2 drive in an external enclosure takes about 12 W when running (30 W briefly during startup) andI have found the data transfer rate is around 18 to 20 MB/sec over USB2 in practice. So it would take over 6 hours to completely fill that drive (actual capacity 465 GB or 500,105,216,000 bytes) via the USB2 interface. I've had trouble getting my external SATA drive to work reliably, but when it did, the transfer was quite a bit better at 54.36 MB/s. That would be about 2.6 hours to transfer the whole drive.

So with a laptop and two external 500 GB drives you need around 50 W steady state, 100 W peak power, which you can get in a 12V inverter smaller than a brick but to run that for any length of time you will want a sizable battery. A car battery would probably be ok, or marine deep-cycle battery. With the laptop + 2 drives running it will draw about 5 amps at 12 V steady-state so a 12V 30 amp-hour battery might last 6 hours. That size battery weighs about 25 pounds if you use a lead-acid type battery.
 
One solution would be to take a raid of however big you want along with an AC car cigarette adapter. These things effectively turn you car or van into a generator (Turn the engine on plug in and away you go).
Click to expand...

We use a car adapter to power our HD monitor when shooting outside with the HVX200 + M2 35mm lens adapter and it works fantastic!
 
A word of caution going this route. It makes sense to carry a spare car battery and enough fuel to get to the nearest petrol station just in case you over do it :)
 
all right... thx guys... does red staying in contact with apple to implement the red codec into quicktime and fcp ?
 
If it's a QT codec, it's automatically in FCP...
 
Back a ways...
Hi Rainer, welcome aboard...

Probably the best bet is the separate charger system and deep cycle battery meant for use in RVs. You do not want to deeply discharge your regular car battery as you will pretty severly shorten it's life. Therefore deep cycle is clearly the way to go. RV shops can set you up with a complete seperate battery in the trunk with enough capacity and its own charger system more cheaply than marine shops. Nice side light is that you will never be stuck with a dead battery again, when you leave your lights on etc, becuase usual to such installations is a switch to power your cars starter etc.
 
Good points from everybody. There's a lot to consider here. I've used the "edit in the car" method on a short HDV project, but 4K is a different ballgame. Depending on the shoot, a Marine battery is an excellent idea. Don't want to get stranded on location because your car died :ohmy:

I read an article about a recent TV pilot that shot on P2 and set up an ingest/backup station in a rented RV. Granted they were on location for 4 or 5 days by a lake so the RV made sense for that shoot. You can read about their escapades at www.kenstone.net
 
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