"RED is Dead baby... RED is DEAD" or Chronicle of immature technology

[addie_reiss]

I shot (DP) an Inidie Feature Film, here in the film-peripheria a.k.a Israel.
Being The first production to ever use this VooDoo camera here in Israel.
All Went relatively well, as long as we were shooting inside a studio. this took place during February.

Two weeks ago we shot the ending scene, outdoors.
Climbed ontop a mountain for the view, with trucks, generator, crane, 11 actors ,30 extras and crew. images were magnifisant. we played back what we shot to enjoy the results and to make sure we have it.

little did we know...

the next day i get a phone call from the director. I assumed he was calling to tell me how good the shots came out. wrong. "There is nothing on the hard drive", he said, trying to hold himself.

nothing.

well, it showed that there are 189GB of data. but you just cant access it.
next thing - the rental house suggested we plug the Hard Drive back to the RED, to see if the camera can access the clips. it probably made things wrorse...

Now the disk is at a special lab and they try to recover the data (not to mention the thousands of dollars they charge for this restoration). i hope they make it. The first restoration lab already gave up on the lost data.

"Oh, did you know that theRed disk contain actually two hard drives?" said the data recovery girl.

"wow", i said. "great design. it must be some kind of raid-mirror that keeps data integrity in case of malfunction" i thought there is still hope and that someone out there in RED thought about data recovery during design stages...

"well, no..." she said. "the data is stripped on the two disks." making it harder to recover and less robust... i guess they were thinking of speed rather than stability...

by the way - in case you were wondering. the hard drive was never physically damaged. It's some kind of "logical failure".

On top of that , during the shoots, there was another problem. a very serious one. compared to the data loss it seems minor, but in any other context its unheard of... The camera just stops recording "randomly" and gives the big RED "X" and the message "CODEC FAULT". shit. really shit.
thing is - you never really know when this message will hit you!
My AC said that he thinks this happens when you overexpose the image. anothe AC said that it was because there were too many details in the frame (in my case - spectacular city & bay view of Haifa).

and i say - WHAT VOODOO CAMERA IS THIS???
can i not overexpose ???
can i not shoot spectacular view in 4K???
must i be haunted by fear of losing the footage???

i dont care what "build" it was.

I dont eat half baked cakes.
I dont want to use immature, not QAed, unrealiable technology, claiming to be a camera for cinema.

for me RED is DEAD, baby. RED is DEAD.

you guys neglected, by design, the most important aspect of a film camera: a relaiable workhorse that doesnt get in your way.



Addie Reiss, Cinematographer
Tel Aviv
addie.reiss@gmail.com
+972-54-7778433
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=addiereiss


p.s

when the production reported these accute malfunctions to RED, all they got - so far is some kind of serial number regarding the complaint...
No technitian was sent over to investigate.
No official response or any attempt to understand what went wrong or how to fix this.
do you RED guys have some kind of customer support at all?

 

[cinemano]

RED has the best customer support in the country. this site proves it..
take it easy and try to approach someone at RED with calm and civility and someone will surely help you.

 

[Fredrik Callinggard]

I understand your frustration but I'm wondering... did you not off load material on set to back up drives?

I continuously do so. When I'm shooting things of importance I shoot it as if it was film and change drives and make back ups regularly.

The codec error happened to me this week, without warning. I'm not sure what it is and just like it was for you, impossible to predict and understand. It's really annoying that you can't get your head around it.

I believe I've read a few posts from you guys wondering what that was all about, I'm sorry for lack of response from RED or that it's not working out for you, but don't let it discourage you from RED. This camera is premature and it has flaws, but it's a risk you take if you use it. It will become better with time as long as we report the problems and RED acknowledge them, so let's hope you guys can figure this mess out together.


Fredrik Callinggard

 

[Fredrik Callinggard]

RED has the best customer support in the country. this site proves it..

This site is not a proper or true customer support. It's wrong to keep claiming that, since REDUser is not affiliated with RED at all. It's owned and run by Jarred, who is the connection to RED. It's a great forum that accompanies the camera with support from the RED society, but there's very often issues that shouldn't be solved by second guesses from people without the proper knowledge of the actual structure of RED engineering.

Edit: and I believe I've seen posts from these guys asking for help in the past.


Fredrik Callinggard

 

[Gunleik Groven]

You're right.... And wrong.

The RED RAID is a RAID 0, and we are all warned when we buy it.
The only safe (and practical - for a movie shoot) way to record is to CF cards.

The disk is primarily an intermediate alternative for those willing to take that risk, and really need to record more than 4,5 mins of footy pr shot.

The advantages of the CF route over disk are so numerous, that if the rental house didn't inform you, you've been given very poor advice...

But I agree with you: YOU should not need to be aware of these concerns. Your AC/DIT/Rental house should definitely have spelled this out in very large letters.

As to codec errors, I've seen this 3 times in about 120 hours of shooting. And they are bad and shouldn't happen.

But again: I have to refer you back to the rental house/DIT.

Cam is still officially in beta stage and these are known issues that I prefer to deal with, rather than not having the cam. If you were not informed of this, you were ill-informed.


as the current state of the cam is what it is, it is crucial that you rent from someone in the know. I see people insisting on renting the cam without an assistant who knows what to do, repeatedly getting into big problems of all kinds.

So far all my customers are extremely happy.

It's a matter of (the rental house/ACs) knowledge, and I totally agree: This is not the DPs responsibility.

A good DIT/Renter would have told you to shoot to CF and get the shoot logged and backed up as you go and given you confirmation of the integrity of the shoot ON SET. Playing back from camera is NOT such a confirmation... He or she would also know the cam well enough to give proper advices on all subjects from setup to exposure. This has obviously NOT happened in your case, and I feel for you.

The cam works pretty well, even under pretty extreme conditions.
I would not insist on RED being "mature", but it is crucial that data integrity is handled right. Preview from a RAID 0 is not sufficient... And if you were on any of the last two builds, the preview itself is scaringly buggy from disks.

 

[cinemano]

i didnt mean this site IS the customer support. Just the fact that we have RED team members reading our posts and replying is proof their interest in their customer's satisfaction goes beyond email responses and phone call support, which by the way, are also excellent. Try finding a Sony website with SONY people replying.

 

[cinemano]

the best way to recover the footage would be to send the drive to red

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Cinemano, this is not what addie or Fredrik is refering to. If you rent from Panavision, you could probably have a support man on set pretty quick, and you wouldn't have to wait for Stuart to show up here.

As good as THAT is (and I really think it is fantastic) it's a different thing alltogether.

NOW: Pull that mastercard gold...

 

[Gunleik Groven]

the best way to recover the footage would be to send the drive to red

I'd rather suggest experts like IBAS...

http://ibas.com/

 

[cinemano]

NOOOOOO not my mastercard gooold

 

[cinemano]

i dont think red drives record like regular ones.. i'd send it to red. your decision addie

 

[laguun]

Addie,

sad to hear you might have lost footage.

however, its clear that production and logistics were faulty.

-Never- allow a production running hours of footage without backup.
Never.

Backing up interrupt the production for more than 10 seconds and is done in minutes in the background.

harddisk fails. they did, do and will do this for a long time.
No matter if in a $100.000.000.000 spacestation, a $100.000.000 supercomputer a $100.000 camera or a $100 mp3-player, no matter if in a completly perfect old system or a nasa-prototype.

Therefore: back up. Stored once is a not stored.

i dont care what "build" it was.

If intentionally a non-production beta build was used that would bring another reason for the storage failure.

I dont want to use immature, not QAed, unrealiable technology, claiming to be a camera for cinema.

The movies shot by directors camera "claiming" being for cinema are running in cannes, as steven soderberghs che/argentine, went straight to position #1 in the box office with doug limans jumper and are used as we speak for features here.

for me RED is DEAD, baby.

I wouldnt replace a camera when necessary production and operation procedures were faulty.

RED is DEAD.

Sorry addie, i think you couldnt be more wrong.

do you RED guys have some kind of customer support at all?

They have. They however dont offer negative & production insurance which would be necessary now.

I would strongly recommend to wait, before the data recovery lab proceeds, for exact instructions from red.

Make no mistake about it: Tom Cruise recently lost 4 full days of shooting on the $$.$$$.$$$ production Valkyrie, right here in Berlin. Cameras were 35mm film, lab was Arri. I personally lost 6 reels of 35mm footage in the last 19 years in labs. No cinematographic process is perfect. S**t happens. If it does, stay cool, logical and focussed - thats the only way to clear a mess. ANd with digital recording, chances are high that you can recover.

That the data is still *visible* is good. Smells like a file system error. All images could be recoverable then. But dont let an non-qualified technical service *try* - call red directly, they have good troubleshooters. The forum is not qualified enough to solve this problem.

p.s.
mods, move this one to complaint dept?

 

[Brian D. Goff]

I dont eat half baked cakes.
I dont want to use immature, not QAed, unrealiable technology, claiming to be a camera for cinema.

for me RED is DEAD, baby. RED is DEAD.

Calm down - you ever shoot film and get the call from the lab: "something went wrong while processing your footage - sorry" - Well, I have been on several productions the last years that have gotten those calls - that's why a professional film production has a film insurance, that will cover cost of re-shooting when things like that happen. Recently shooting with Arri 535, the camera was down for 2 hours because of a pinhead size piece of film caught some where in the transport mechanism - is the 353 a piece of sh...t because of that? People, with the RED you are dealing with a computer, so get mature and start treating it appropriate: Check you footage, back up everything asap and immediately re-boot when problems come up.

Hope they can recover your footage, wish you luck.

Cheers

 

[Christian Edwards]

Operator error !

Operator error !

Two weeks ago we shot the ending scene, outdoors.
Climbed ontop a mountain for the view, with trucks, generator, crane, 11 actors ,30 extras and crew. images were magnifisant. we played back what we shot to enjoy the results and to make sure we have it.

little did we know...

To have backed that shit up!

You should have backed up as you went man.... you know that !!! hot swap and dump that shit off as you go ... trades man never blames his tools, what was used to try and extract the data ?

 

[sander kamp]

Cam is still officially in beta stage and these are known issues that I prefer to deal with, rather than not having the cam.

Where does it say that the camera is still in beta?

 

[Gunleik Groven]

As far as I have understood, Jim declared in february that the program was officially out of beta when build 15 (now 16) and the SDK was released. That was @ the same time as all early orderers got the option to wait "close to indefinitely" on the decission to take the cam when it was ready to ship, as long as the software is still beta.

RedCine and RelAlert is an integrated part of the cameraprogram, and says "BETA" with big words when I open them.

The codec will be changes (it sounds like) with build 16

Lots of functions are known as buggy, but in there (because we want them there, buggy or not. Thank you very much)

etc etc etc.

In other words:
Cam is still officially in beta

(From what I've seen/heard, I must say I do prefer REDs beta stage to some other unmentioned companys release stage, though...)

Cheers

 

[Patrick Tresch]

Any news about RED Flash Drives?

We know that's "Coming soon…"

http://www.red.com/store/product_detail/74

But when?

Pat

 

[Andrae Palmer]

Its amazing to see "Professionals" shooting all day long on a striped RAID and not backing up at ALL during the entire shoot... gives amateurs like me a fighting chance. Heck i guess if you have a big crane, generators, RED and a team of people... its a pro shoot. Too bad none of those people could inform you of the basics of backing up your data. Also who knows when the data loss occured? Everything could have been recorded properly on the drives and the data loss stands a good chance of happening post shoot. A multitude of variables could cause the data loss post shoot... such as magnets, shock, operator incompetence on the computer. This issue reflects more of a lack of professionalism with your crew than with RED as a tool.

Now the other issue with the camera is something RED should get on and fix as soon as possible.

 

[Andrew Walker]

Man that sucks about your footage. But most of the people here on this forum know better than to put all their eggs in one hard drive. I shot a music video last weekend using my Red drive and didn't have any problems. But of course I would dump the footage every 30 minutes onto two backup drives.

If it was something as important as you made it seem I would have backed up every 5 or so minutes. But that's just me.

 

[Pawel Achtel]

next thing - the rental house suggested we plug the Hard Drive back to the RED, to see if the camera can access the clips. it probably made things wrorse...

Yep, you are spot on. So why did you do it?

"Oh, did you know that theRed disk contain actually two hard drives?" said the data recovery girl.

"wow", i said. "great design. it must be some kind of raid-mirror that keeps data integrity in case of malfunction" i thought there is still hope and that someone out there in RED thought about data recovery during design stages...

"well, no..." she said. "the data is stripped on the two disks." making it harder to recover and less robust... i guess they were thinking of speed rather than stability...

by the way - in case you were wondering. the hard drive was never physically damaged. It's some kind of "logical failure".

The discs are striped in Raid 0 for speed. Mirroring or striping with parity would require minimum of 4 or 6 discs and the cost would also be significantly higher. The design is sound and perfectly adequate for the intended purpose.

and i say - WHAT VOODOO CAMERA IS THIS???

Obviously it is not a camera for everyone. It is a great camera in the right hands. No doubt about that.

i dont care what "build" it was.

So what is the problem? Why are you complaining?

you guys neglected, by design, the most important aspect of a film camera: a relaiable workhorse that doesnt get in your way.

Nothing is 100% reliable. It is how you prevent and deal with failures that matters. If you used Sony cameras you would know the meaning of unreliable. The difference is that Red team is very responsive in fixing any problems encountered.

when the production reported these accute malfunctions to RED, all they got - so far is some kind of serial number regarding the complaint...

That's professional. If you didn't get a number, I would be worried.

No technitian was sent over to investigate.

Investigate what? Your grumbling? :angry03: It would seem obvious that you need to send the camera to Red to be investigated. Your post only gives an angry account of an ignorant operator.

No official response or any attempt to understand what went wrong or how to fix this.

The only official response (without looking at the camera) is that you did not follow any reasonable steps to ensure safety of your footage. If you supply more information, we may attempt to understand what else went wrong.

do you RED guys have some kind of customer support at all?

Yes, they do. In my experience it is second to none.

You are so wrong that it is funny, even though it is not. What was your DIT doing with the media? Did he back it up on the set if it was of any importance to the production? Did you send a backup copy to the director and kept the originals? Is the backup also no damaged?

Anyway, I have 20 years of experience in data recovery. If it is recoverable, I should be able to recover it, even from Raid 0 stripes. Sometimes I can even recover the data if you format or/and re-partition a Raid 0 hard disc. If it is of interest, send me an email (listed on contact page on my website).

Besides, we have a Complaint thread. Did you miss it too?
http://www.reduser.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=36