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The Longest Take Possible

J

JohnF

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Sorry to ask what might seem like a dumb-arsed question.

When shooting to a RED-drive what is the longest take one can reliably shoot for.
Is it recommended to break the take up? Is there anything one should avoid when trying to do long takes. Is there a risk, or rather, what is the risk of corruption and losing hours of footage?

I need to run the cameras for as long as possible. All night if possible (~9hours), I know this'll mean switching the drives after around 3hours.

Any thoughts much appreciated?
 
Thanks chaps,

Power is not an issue though coverage may well be as I was more thinking along the lines of are there any practical operational issues (things to avoid) that one should be aware of when shooting very long takes with RED.

I was thinking of breaking up the takes with a quick stop/start every 30mins-1hour just to make sure the files are written correctly - avoiding all the eggs being in one basket so-to-speak.

Any other tips?

JohnF
 
In my amble opinion, I would surely avoid shooting for long takes when all possible.

For Sirens of TI, we used six RED ONE's all with the RED DRIVE's and taped the shows from beginning to end, no choice here, as the show was not going to stop for us.

Unfortunately we had few issues that could have been a disaster if we had filmed all four shows on the same drive non stop, or even stopping and the recording again.

My point here is that if there is anything wrong at all with the media or the camera, when you have it all recorded at once, it would ruin your day to only find that out at the end.

Shoot take by take as needed by the assignment, but when all possible shoot short takes, and then have your DI unload the data, and assure that everything is okay, so that even as you are filming the rest of the takes, you can be stopped in time and make any reshoots and or corrections to resolve any issues with camera or data acquisition system, been CF DRIVE or anything else you might use to capture your takes in.

ciao
 
ive shot hundreds of takes that go from full battery until the camera died WHILE RECORDING because the battery was completely drained, it's always fine. if i have ever had a problem it was easily fixed by rendering the shot out or something.. if you really wanna do a long take just take what everyone here is saying with a grain of salt you will be just fine dude.
 
I shoot concerts and quite often do 90 minute takes (using A/C) and don't have problems.

Even if you have a failure, all R3D segments up to that point are viable, so if the camera has an error at 80 minutes, you will still get 75 minutes of viable footage. Only the segment it is currently on doesn't work.
 
The question is do you need the scene to take place in one long uncut take? Or don't you? I'm not sure what your point is if now you say you can cut the camera every half-hour. If so, then obviously you plan on cutting away to something else, or else you are making a jump cut on the same set-up. What is your editing plan? Why do you need an hour-long or half-hour-long take? If a 30-minute take is now OK, then why not a 20-minute take? Then why not a 10-minute take?

The original question implied you wanted a shot in your final movie to run uncut for a long time, like nearly an hour. Now it sounds like it's OK to make edits, so why do you need such long-running takes? Are you shooting a live music performance where the singer won't stop and is only doing it once?
 
Ideally I would rather leave the camera to run until the RED-drive is full. Then change mag. The reason I put forward the idea of breaking up the takes is data security! Making sure that if something goes wrong we won't have lost ~three hours of footage.

The nature of the subject demands a continuous take (maximum coverage) which will be edited down. The transient nature of the subject, the field conditions and production limits, rather frustratingly, make using the pre-record function impractical for this shoot. And these events don't often repeat themselves and are to some extent unpredictable so the analogy of the singer who won't stop and is doing it only once is appropriate!

So my question is more along the lines of investigating what peoples experiences are and of how reliable shooting long takes onto RED-drives actually is.

JohnF
 
You're never going to get a straight answer as to how much risk there is in filling up the Red drive. I mean, it's never a good idea to fill-up a hard drive to absolutely full, but besides that, the issue is filling it up to, let's say, 90%, whatever that running time works out to be (an hour?) and how much of a risk that is... well, that's unanswerable. If nothing goes wrong, then the risk was worth taking, but if something goes wrong once, then was it worth taking?

It doesn't really matter if you start and stop the camera now and then because the Red records data in "chunks" anyway, I think in the range of 60 seconds long per data segment (?). So if something goes wrong in one spot, it would tend to only matter for within that 60 second data segment.

Of course, if you severely damage the physical drive before you get the data off of it, you may lose everything on it, or be unable to get the data off of it, though that is extremely rare.

If you can afford the Red RAM drive, that's more hardy than a hard drive.

But it sounds like you are already prepared to live with small gaps if there is a glitch or drop-out or lost frame or codec error, so you might as well go ahead and fill-up the drive by 90%... but what are you going to do when it's time to switch to a new drive? That's going to take a minute or so, and battery changes and powering down and back up take over a minute, so is your subject just going to keep on acting while the camera is down for that long? And if they are going to pause anyway, then why do you need to be able to record uninterrupted for an hour?

Again, it comes back to why, which you really haven't told us. Because if you can live with switching drives every half-hour so you can get the data copied and verified more often during the day of shooting, then I suggest you do that. And if you can't, you can't and you live with the risk because you have no choice. So the question is, do you have a choice or don't you?
 
Depending on whether you're on RC28 or RC36 will determine how long you can shoot. RC28 @ 29.97 I think let's you shoot for 3 hours. RC36@ 24 should be about 2 hours 48 minutes roughly. Remember that the camera records variable bit rate. Also, if you do have some kind of problem, remember that only the last r3d will be affected as has been mentioned, which means, about 1 minute of footage. One thing to avoid though if you're recording for 3 hours is to let the camera just be sitting in the hot sun, it will get very hot if you roll for 3 hours :)

As David and others have pointed out though, it's never a good practice to record that long to one drive. It's rare for us to go beyond 20%, and usually we change before 10% media has been used.
 
Well reading other fellows REDUSERs, I'm very pleased to hear that those which have run the camera recording their media to the fullest have had never problems with, but in reality there is only the need for it to fail you once and you will for ever change opinion on how to record and for how long of takes.

I for one I will never record long takes, or wait to dump the data till the drive is full or even wait to do so on my return to the Studios, I do that on set on the spot before taking the set apart, or leaving the location, this way I can reshoot and save the day if a need to do so.

Now if you do record a long take, and I mean long, or fill up the Drive, when there is not an absolute need for it, and something goes wrong, trust me you will truly regret it, as the work around to retrieve data is not an easy one and never guarantee the results will be good.


God luck with your project John.

ciao
 
When we only had one Red Drive per camera I would regularly see lots and lots of dropped frames once the drive reached 80-85% capacity.

I would say if you have the opportunity to have 2 or more cameras running simultaneously It would be a good idea. At least then you can alternate sop starting on each one and be assured youve captured at least one angle of every second. Thats what we do for concerts and stage shows.
 
I have shot several concerts, one of them was shot with four RED ONE cameras, recording 4K to harddisk for 2 and a half hour without stopping, all went fine.
 
One night we shot until the drive only had 4% hard drive space left and it gave me an error. It wouldn't record anymore until I offloaded the footage and reformatted the drive. Now I start to get nervous when the drive gets below 10% free. I think it's a good idea to give it plenty of headroom.

Also, I've only done single takes as long as maybe 10 minutes. It takes quite awhile for the camera to post such a long take. Those here that have shot 1 1/2 hours can answer this, but does it take longer for the camera to post the shot the longer the take is? So this needs to be estimated into your "time down" calculation when changing drives.
 
Tyler Black said:
Also, I've only done single takes as long as maybe 10 minutes. It takes quite awhile for the camera to post such a long take. Those here that have shot 1 1/2 hours can answer this, but does it take longer for the camera to post the shot the longer the take is? So this needs to be estimated into your "time down" calculation when changing drives.
Click to expand...

turn off proxies and the camera takes no time at all to post. if your doing long takes or doc stuff you should turn proxies off.
 
We shoot up to 2 hours, continuously, without problems. We use the Switronix dual battery mount so we can hot swap batteries for power, but 2 batteries gets you about 2 hours, which is about what the maximum for the (320GB) drives. The new drives are twice that ie 4 hours, so if you need really long continuous takes....but that's a lot of eggs in one basket!
 
IMO, the only danger to the data in recording very long takes is how hard drives react to being more than 90% full, and I don't like to have too much footage on one drive because if something happens to the drive, more is lost.

Red records video/audio as .R3D's in 2 GB chunks; each chunk is a little over a minute at 4K, and a very long take can include a large number of 2 GB .R3D's. If something was to happen, say a power loss in the middle of the take, the worst that could happen is losing no more than 70 seconds or so of footage, in addition to the time it takes to fix the problem, reboot, etc. There really is no need to break the take up to protect the data, because the Red One is doing that for you automatically.

Having said that, I prefer to shoot as with film, as I hate editing footage where the camera just rolls endlessly while each take is reset and so forth. For a concert, obviously just let it run. I know there are cases where a better performance can be obtained from less-experienced actors by just letting the camera roll. And I know that sometimes it's more efficient to not stop picture and sound for quick resets. The nice thing is that Red can be used with various styles, including just leaving the camera running for extended periods.

The longest take I have recorded is 77 minutes at a concert. I left the proxies on, knowing that it would take awhile once the camera was stopped. If I was doing long takes but needed to start again quickly after stopping, I would turn off proxies in camera.

Matthew Verkler

P.S. The 77 minute concert take had no dropped frames; we blimped the drive to cut the higher frequencies at concerts that can upset the drive platters and heads, and the drive was also mounted on an ET shock mount to protect against the lower frequencies, bumps, etc.
 
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