Pretec CF thread??

[CJ Roy]

I agree that 3rd party options would be nice, but I still have to put RED on the same boat as Panasonic, Sony, Arri, and so on. How many 3rd party P2 cards exist? How many 3rd party SXS cards exist? How many HDCAM SR decks are out there that cost a lot less from a 3rd party manufacturer.

The fact is 3rd party support for RED media is just the same as it is for the other major players.

The major difference is that CF cards, 2.5" Raids (SSD & HDD) are not proprietary and are very common from many different vendors. These are hard drives & flash cards. Most of us use these every day in one form or another. It's not rocket science.

 

[James Brundige]

16:9 and 2:1 are aspect ratios. No quality difference between the two, just the 16:9 is the physically larger frame with more vertical pixels. 16:9 also requires higher bandwidth for processing as well as for storage, so therefore has lower maximum frame rates and will take up a bit more space.

I have read elsewhere that 16:9 creates a sharper transcode to 1080, because of the easy math involved. For that reason, I've changed acquisition from 2:1 to 16:9. If this is not the case, I'd prefer 2:1 to save storage room.

feedback??

 

[Shawn Nelson]

Shawn-

Or just make public the pin-outs for the Lemo drive connector, and wham... done. Is there even an opportunity for this to be done? Can a company approach red with a solution, and get the pin-outs to test it? I know of several small companies who would love to do this.

-CJ

Has Red ever stated they would or wouldn't give us a pin out with a few diagrams so 3rd party solutions could be made?

 

[James Brundige]

As I said in the old thread, 64 gig cards can't come too soon. I've now officially sworn off doing long event or doc work with RED. The drive I used on an important event for an Academy Award nominated director failed due to mechanical error in the drive (according to RED). It costs 500.00 for data retrieval. We lost 40 of 160 gigs of irreplaceable footage. I lost the subsequent month long gig.

extreme bummer. Was the drive dropped? Was the loss discovered immediately , or days later? I'm a little nervous about Red on a long international shoot.

Time for Red Ray. will it be possible to write Red code directly to optical disc?

 

[Ed Watkins]

When I shot a series of long interviews (4hrs each in length). I used two RED Drives, switching them over every 30mins or so, and immediately backing up the data (about 50GB of footage a time). Not ideal, but I had no issues, no dropped frames.

There will always be an element of worry with digital media, even solid state, a few stray bits and everything goes screwy. We love the security of tape/film but hate the limitations it brings.

If you're not a little nervous when you shoot P2 or SXS, you probably should be.
I'd love to see larger, cheaper CF cards but I'm still not sure I'd feel that much safer filling a 64gb card, than putting 64gb of on a drive.

 

[Brent J. Craig]

... I'm still not sure I'd feel that much safer filling a 64gb card, than putting 64gb of on a drive.

Except a card wouldn't be destroyed if it got dropped, suffered a serious bump while powered, or got dunked in water. I just put an SD card through a complete washing machine was and dry cycle (oops) and it still works fine. Try that with a hard drive!

 

[Ed Watkins]

Except a card wouldn't be destroyed if it got dropped, suffered a serious bump while powered, or got dunked in water. I just put an SD card through a complete washing machine was and dry cycle (oops) and it still works fine. Try that with a hard drive!

O.k.. I'll give you that. But I still won't worry any less.

b.t.w that's one tough SD card.
:costumed-smiley-047

 

[CJ Roy]

Give me solid state over spinning platters any day.

 

[James Brundige]

I have had corrupt clips on SxS as well. Is the Red bandwidth too much for optical media? Red Ray?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I have read elsewhere that 16:9 creates a sharper transcode to 1080, because of the easy math involved. For that reason, I've changed acquisition from 2:1 to 16:9. If this is not the case, I'd prefer 2:1 to save storage room.

feedback??

Actually there is no difference between 16:9 and 2:1 in terms of transcoding to HD. The horizontal pixel count remains the same for all modes (2K, 3K, 4K). By switching from 16:9 to 2:1, you only change the aspect ratio and cut the number of lines. If you matte the 2:1 frame onto a 16:9 1080p HD frame, there is no difference or change in math, etc..

The one mode that does offer benefits in terms of slightly quicker transcodes and no arbitrary scaling is the 4KHD mode. It provides "simple math" in that it is a quad-HD or the same as 4 1920x1080 frames; 3840x2160.

Easy math doesn't necessarily mean a sharper transcode, either. It mostly means quicker conversion times due to less-involvement in scaling your image. However, the difference here is so small, it really doesn't matter. The real benefits of 4KHD is that the H proxies become native 1080p and you can play back 1080p from the camera in this format without cropping.

If you shoot 2:1 and matte (letterbox) it onto 1920x1080p it will convert faster than 16:9 since the frames are smaller with fewer pixels to process. And there is no difference in quality. Just different aspect ratio / frame size.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

As for Tim's drive misfortune that sucks... I've never had much faith in the HDD media. I've always made it a habit to offload from the drives every 30 minutes or so and I've never filled one much past half-way.

RED record bandwidth is too great for optical media. And that makes little sense anyway. Optical discs would be far more prone to disruption from motion and vibration than hard drives!

No media is infallible. While tim's situation is unfortunate, it's not too unlike shooting film and losing a can or two along the way. It happens. Rare, but it does. Decks eat video tapes, it happens... I've had CF cards go bad. I know the RED RAM won't last for ever and even though it should be "bullet proof" I still offload and back-up the same as if it were a mechanical HDD.

 

[tj williams]

Fm POst by TIm N... I emphasize lost a bunch of frames on hard drive mag...O raid not recoverable data!!!!!
"id in the old thread, 64 gig cards can't come too soon. I've now officially sworn off doing long event or doc work with RED. The drive I used on an important event for an Academy Award nominated director failed due to mechanical error in the drive (according to RED). It costs 500.00 for data retrieval. We lost 40 of 160 gigs of irreplaceable footage. I lost the subsequent month long gig."
RE TinN..
"I can't imagine ever again recording long events or interviews on RED on the Drive. All drives fail and I got burned. Not that CF cards are fail safe but the probability is much lower, especially under production conditions"

Easy to fix just give us the digital media pin outs, and firmware requirements and we can run E sata cables, to a high speed multiple 7500 rpm raid 5 etc. and have totally reliable redundent media for long interviews!!!!!!!! If you don't wann do that how about at least selling lemo equipped raid 5s???

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

TJ, don't be too sure that a RAID-5 solution would be any better in this situation. Depending on what caused the failure with Tim's drive, a RAID-5 may not have saved him.

I've seen plenty of RAID-5 and RAID-6 units bite the dust and offer nearly zero chance of recovery. RAID controller goes out and writes a bunch of erroneous data. Array takes impact and two drives become physically damaged, meaning the entire array is irreparable. I lost a RAID-5 not too long ago when the OS and RAID had a misunderstanding. I was playing around with various LTO-4 backup configurations and a new RAID card. Completely wiped the file system by setting incorrect block values for an LTO drive, system hung and had to be restarted. On restart the RAID was gone, just as if I had deleted the partition. It probably would've been recoverable to some extent, but didn't matter. I had backed it up a couple times already in my testing... Heh. I personally would not prefer RAID-5 over the current RAID-0 unless it was based on solid-state and every bit as compact or more than the current RED drive. Actually, a RAID-5 style array of 7 x 64GB CF cards (or equivalent FLASH memory) in a package no larger than the current RED Drive would seriously kick ass. It's probably still a couple years away though.

 

[Pascal Scheffers]

b.t.w that's one tough SD card.
:costumed-smiley-047

That is actually fairly typical CF/SD card performance. They're exceedingly tough to break. Hammers and nails kill them. Water, not so much.

The thing which would really, really make sense for RED is to make the backup-your-media after the shoot an integral part of the shooting. Record to two media at the same time. The 'simple' implementation of this is RAID-1, which only requires two identical media and you can just send the same data to the same sectors.

The friendlier implementation is some sort of loop-through ability of two (or more, for the paranoid) red drives/storage solutions and have each drive store data to capacity or stop at first-drive-filled. This might also help recover dropped frames in some form of camera-panic-mode for slow/bad media - just thinking here, probably not practical.

And either can just be an optional Red Module Buy it, plug in two other storage modules. This modular system thing is so cool.

Still, for a large number of users, just a just-plug-it-in way to offload/backup after a shoot is probably good enough. I don't have a Red-Drive, not being an owner yet, but an application to do just that shouldn't take more than a couple of days to perfect. I would not like to do that manually, I'd make mistakes.

 

[JanneJansson]

Yes, in a raid-5 or 6 you are not longer on the mercy of the drives, but on the controller. If that one go bye bye, all your data go bye bye. Unless you have a extra spare controller card laying around. BUT dying controller cards have a funy way of writing garbage on to the drives, and then you also have the secondary effect of data corruption.

Just use complete duplicates. If you use one drive, have a identical copy. If you use a large fast raid-0, then have another complete raid-0 as backup. Always have TWO!!! of all. Data, drives, controller .... There is no magical way of saving data. Just have two. If you have a raid-5, then you should have another raid-5, but this is very non-cost effective. Better to use simple and fast disc configurations, but double.

 

[James Brundige]

The one mode that does offer benefits in terms of slightly quicker transcodes and no arbitrary scaling is the 4KHD mode. It provides "simple math" in that it is a quad-HD or the same as 4 1920x1080 frames; 3840x2160.

Easy math doesn't necessarily mean a sharper transcode, either. It mostly means quicker conversion times due to less-involvement in scaling your image. However, the difference here is so small, it really doesn't matter. The real benefits of 4KHD is that the H proxies become native 1080p and you can play back 1080p from the camera in this format without cropping.

If you shoot 2:1 and matte (letterbox) it onto 1920x1080p it will convert faster than 16:9 since the frames are smaller with fewer pixels to process. And there is no difference in quality. Just different aspect ratio / frame size.

I meant to say 4KHD. I have read elsewhere it is a sharper transcode than 2:1. I'll look for that thread, because I really need to know.

 

[James Brundige]

Here's the thread

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=25267&highlight=4KHD

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

4KHD is no sharper in my experience. Where the logic comes from is that scaling to 1080p is just halving the resolution in each direction, so there's no funny scaling artifacts that can be introduced. Softening isn't usually a problem when you down-rez anyway if you do it with a proper scaling algorithm and pixel filters. When you shoot 4K 16:9 or 2:1 you have 4096 horizontal pixels. Divide that by two gives you 2048, so there's a bit of uneven scaling going on to get to 1920 horizontal pixels. In reality, the scaling algorithm, or at least good ones, will oversample from the entire 4096 pixel width to build the 1920 pixel-wide frame. So in reality it doesn't matter when you shoot 4K, you're not going to see any softening with proper image processing.

If you want, you can always shoot 4K 16:9 or 2:1 and then crop to 3840 wide (cropping the vertical too if shooting 16:9) and then do your scaling. However, that makes little sense because you will be separating the crop an scale passes into separate generations of processing.

The real advantages to 4KHD are the slightly faster processing speed, but more importantly the direct to 1920x1080p via camera playback and the H proxies.

 

[Dale Launer]

There's another issue. RED might just want to control the media because they can make money on it. It seems out of character with the company, but not unrealistic.

I'm sure we'd all prefer an open architecture. And that will likely happen in a few years when it is impossible to control, but for now...

They could adopt Apple's policy - "We don't warranty stuff we don't sell."

And/or they could allow 3rd party CF manufacturers to submit cards for evaluation - and charge them to test it. Then it would be verified with a RED seal of approval.

And/or, if you pop in 3rd part CF, a message would come on the screen "This is unapproved media. RED will not be responsible. WARNING! You are risking possible catastrophic production failure, use this at your own risk, etc. "- a little boilerplate warning that asks you if you're read this and you have to click yes or it won't load.

Also, I suspect insurance companies would negate insurance if one was shooting on a RED and using unapproved cards.

Then the risk is all yours.

I would think a software program like the ones that AJA and Blackmagic offer would allow someone to easily test if a CF is fast enough.

But speed isn't everything. CF cards are not quite as robust as people want to believe. And they don't last as longer. They're getting better and better with each generation, but would you want to risk shooting on unapproved cards?

of these new products are truly fast, faster than hard drives).