RED Drive and 12V Power for Offloading

[Brian Broz]

I had a thought...more like a question about the Red Drive and offloading in the field where no AC power is available.
I'm sure a lot of Red owners will be shooting to 320GB Red drive and wanting to dump footage to a laptop (most likely MacBook Pro) in the field. In this scenario recording to XPresscard would make the most sense, but i have a feeling many production companies will want to record dual (Xpresscard/CF + Red Drive).
The Red Drive will obviously power from 12V as it is connected to Red (via Lemo connector I believe).
However, bus powered drives are currently much lower capacity than the 320GB Red Drive....making offloading the Red drives a little tricky when powering from the Macbook Pro.
Has anyone thought about powering larger drives or RAIDs in the field to offload...or more importantly does anyone have experience powering 3.5" RAIDs (non-bus powered) drives with a 14.4V AntonBauer or similar battery system.
Thanks for any input or suggestions.

 

[tj williams]

Since the power supply in a computer is regulated at * 3.3 volts 5 volts 12 volts, it makes sense to me that you would have to power up from 14.4 etc. and regulate to 12V I can't find a ready made product that does this. The components are there for someone who makes cables this would be a nice low volume product. Maybe not that low a volume as probably a lot of people who travel would like to extend the play time on their laptop, and use the external drive wo drying up the laptop internal batt. This might be nicely combined with the Esata connector so that downloads could be as fast as possible?

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

One small correction (and someone can re-correct me if I'm wrong but..) you can't dual record to two places at once aka Expresscard/Sata. I'm pretty sure someone asked on another topic and it was shot down. I can't find the link. Maybe an official word on this?

 

[Cam McGrath]

One small correction (and someone can re-correct me if I'm wrong but..) you can't dual record to two places at once aka Expresscard/Sata. I'm pretty sure someone asked on another topic and it was shot down. I can't find the link. Maybe an official word on this?

Also read this, I'm pretty sure Stuart English made this clear.

cam 'dREDlock' mcgrath
:red_bandana:

 

[Stuart English]

Dual record

Dual record

Yes, we have noted the request, but at this time you can't record to internal and external SATA digital media devices at the same time. A SATA device plus HD-SDI yes, but REDFLASH and RED-DRIVE (or RED-RAM) no. If you have RED-DRIVE (or RED-RAM) connected that is the default SATA media the camera will record to.

 

[Brian Broz]

Wow...i did not realize that. I realize the camera can't do everything...just trying to think this through. Fortunately time is on our side But, thank you Stuart for clarifying. (Sorry I missed that for earlier posts).
Perhaps the AJA IO HD is worth serious considerationas it will record direct to ProRes over HDSDI while recording to Xpresscard/CF etc...but, again the AJA requires AC power!!
Hopefully someone will come up with a way to provide power to external 3.5" drives/RAID in the field powered by a 14.4V Red Battery or similar (AntonBauer or equivalent).

 

[Paul Leeming]

Actually what I plan to do is connect the RedDrive to a laptop for downloading the data, BUT instead of downloading it to the laptop's drive, feed it directly out to a standard 3.5" SATA external HDD instead, effectively using the laptop only as a throughput device. The trick will be finding a laptop that has a FireWire 800 port as well as eSATA to make the process as speedy as possible. No, I'm not interested in a Mac, before you suggest that option. Strictly PC oriented in the field, sorry.

 

[Joe Carney]

One good thing about recording out the sdi port is hooking it up to a field monitor so the DP and/or Director can observe from inside a video tent, and you still have the evf and lcd for the operator and focus puller.
It's nice to have the option to NOT have lots of cables running everywhere if you don't mind recording to the Hard Drives.

 

[vanguy]

Has anyone thought about powering larger drives or RAIDs in the field to offload...or more importantly does anyone have experience powering 3.5" RAIDs (non-bus powered) drives with a 14.4V AntonBauer or similar battery system.
Thanks for any input or suggestions.

The solution here is the power supply. A laptop can run on batteries, and there are bus-powered drives out there capable of 320 GB storage: http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-RAID-mini.cfm

But you need to power the Red Raid, and if you want larger storage, you need to power that. 3.5 drives require more power, but if you consider how much they store, and how much faster they are, they use slightly less battery power per GB than 2.5" laptop drives.

I've been looking at my external firewire drive boxes, and they need 5V and 12V. You could easily regulate these down from a 14.4V Anton Bauer. The chips to do this are under $10. The problem is the amount of power wasted, especially going to 5V. That waste significantly shortens battery life, and makes things quite hot. But totally doable with a very simple circuit.

So you'd have: your laptop, a battery box with built in regulator and heat sink, and an outboard firewire drive (which can hold up to 750 GB). Probably it'd take two Anton Bauer bricks to run it for a busy day's shooting.

Problems are:

1) not totally dead simple to operate. You need to shut it down after download to save batteries. The computer will go to sleep, but you need to eject the drive and power it down each time.

2) no RAID redundancy or security.

3) heat.

4) it's a bit clumsy (3 pieces plus the Red RAID when attached).

But if you like, Brian, we can try and build one. It'd work for any non-tape system, like HVX200.

Steve Plitt

 

[vanguy]

Hmm. A slight rethink. This may be simpler than I think. Theoretically;

It's possible that you could set your drives to spin down, saving power and enabling the whole thing to go to sleep automatically.

It's also possible, by using bigger regulators, to power a RAID. And it's also possible to use almost any external Firewire box (Lacie, G-RAID), as long as it uses an external power supply. So you could build a 2 TB vault.

S

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Aversion

Aversion

If you know the available voltage (14.4 nominal off the bricks) you should be able to spec out the correct drive enclosure / array to match it closely enough that very little power is wasted or heat generated in the step down. One question I would have is how the micro-processors in the bricks will deal with the load presented by the rig?

I had been planning to use a car battery mounted on a Magliner (or similar) as a field power source but that is obviously problematic for flypacks. One thing I have not figured out is how to avoid going DC to AC any more often than necessary. I figure an AC inverter will be a necessary evil but the more pieces I can drive directly with DC the better.

Of course I am still a big proponent of simply renting extra RED Drives and dumping after the strike assuming your nighttime accommodations offer AC power. I am just too darn lazy to drag around a field back-up solution unless absolutely necessary :shiftyph34r: .

 

[vanguy]

I think the thing I'm thinking of (laptop included) should fit into a medium Pelican case (1510 or 1550). Open it up, open the laptop, plug in the Red RAID, and start to copy the files.

2 TB should hold a week's worth of even the most insane shooting. And then you just swap out the firewire drive. It would have AC for when power is available, but have enough batteries to function for a day on the fly.

Thoughts?

 

[Cail Young]

The trick will be finding a laptop that has a FireWire 800 port as well as eSATA to make the process as speedy as possible. No, I'm not interested in a Mac, before you suggest that option. Strictly PC oriented in the field, sorry.

Macbook Pro of your choice + Boot Camp + Windows + FirmTek ExpressCard eSATA card = your solution.

I've never seen a "PC" laptop with FW800.