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interesting RED Drive dropped frames moment

Michael Morlan

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I was shooting an actress doing a freak-out scene in a small bathroom - her, me, and the sound recordist. She elicited a scream that caused the RED Drive to drop 77 frames! I presume the combination of frequency and some resonant reflections in the live room were just right to cause the drive heads to stutter. If the camera had been two feet away, it might not have happened.

Any other odd drive skipping like that?

Michael
 
My AC had a "gasous moment of considerable volume & power" and we dropped a buttload of frames. I cannot be sure how many since I did not remain in the room long after that.

Jay
 
It has also been reported close up to a band. High enough sound levels from either the bass and/or percussion apparently trip up the hard drive. Maybe a good rule of thumb is, if you need ear protection, so does the Red?
 
I was shooting an actress doing a freak-out scene in a small bathroom - her, me, and the sound recordist. She elicited a scream that caused the RED Drive to drop 77 frames! I presume the combination of frequency and some resonant reflections in the live room were just right to cause the drive heads to stutter. If the camera had been two feet away, it might not have happened.

Any other odd drive skipping like that?

Michael

Last week i was shooting a genarator wich was turning from 0 tilll high speed and and at one moment the frame dropped when the generator was going faster after that moment the dropped frames were over.

I could not see at what speed of the generator this occurd, but there was a light shaking in that room.

wkr Robert
 
The one thing not covered in these threads and the thread Shawn Booth (above) directed us to, is whether or not this is only a Red issue or one common to digital cameras in general. Anyone out there know if this fault occurs in other systems as well?
 
Does the RED drive have a write memory buffer?
 
So is the answer shooting to CF Cards when there are loud sounds/vibrations?

If this is something which happens due to power in camera, then it would theoretically still effect the CF Cards.
 
I had blue frames in the video when shooting machine gun fire. When the gun stopped firing, the video was fine. I also shot a howitzer at 100 fps and no dropped data. When I played the video from the hard drive, it looked fine. When I copied the data to an external hard drive and played it back through RedCine, the blue frames appeared. The camera said there were no dropped frames. However in RedCine, I got blue frames with no picture when the machine gun was firing. The shock wave from the howitzer firing was much more than a small machine gun.
 
I've had this problem shooting music videos, particularly with the drums. The closer I got, the worse the frame drops were...
 
For these kind of reasons it would sure be nice to record to both the CF and Hard drive at the same time.
If we just kept filling and recording over the CF cards while recording to hard drives then anytime we had a problem with the disks which we discovered (as the camera should register this) we'd still have the images on CF. Backups are always good. Sometimes the loud stuff I shoot in live events where hard drives are needed cannot be repeated!
 
The one thing not covered in these threads and the thread Shawn Booth (above) directed us to, is whether or not this is only a Red issue or one common to digital cameras in general. Anyone out there know if this fault occurs in other systems as well?

Not in the SI-2K so far. Shot some pick-ups with it of a live band to the internal drive, but then, I think the SI-2K doesn't drop frames because it uses a RAM buffer. In theory, if skipping was bad enough, the RAM buffer would fill up and recording would end while it wrote to disk.

Haven't put the Red through this type of situation yet. I don't think it is a construction issue or camera design issue. The writing to RAM means that if skips happen, the camera software has time to "catch up".
 
Interestingly, I was shooting a motorcyle spec from the back of a U-Haul flatbed trailer and suffering skipping all over the place. After I wrapped the RED Drive in a terrycloth towel and taped it to the iris rods, we didn't lose a single frame.

There is some room in the drive cradle, if you remove the mounting hardware, to include a bit of padding around the drive. This could go a long way to eliminating the high-frequency skipping effects.

Michael
 
Today I had a hard time. The camera with RED-drive was hanging on a belt like a cablecar. The whole thing was moved quite smoothly by an electrical motor. As soon as it gained speed. The dropped frames came instantly and counted to a couple of hundreds after 30 sec. I had to spend time getting CF's. Why was it so sensitive I wonder or were there any electrical interactions?
 
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