New camera from Sony

[Mark L. Pederson]

The Future has no moving parts.

An no whale oil ... or synthetic lubricants ...

 

[Ariana]

Well with respect... the off the shelf reference has nothing to do with the scenario I highlighted earlier. If you are recording about 500 hours of footage per day... then it becomes way more costly to use HDD or solid State based media.

That would be $25k of tape stock per day.
Over $8.5Million dollars in tape stock if they sustained
that over the 340 days.

Reusable media would have been more cost effective, I think.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

That would be $25k of tape stock per day.
Over $8.5Million dollars in tape stock if they sustained
that over the 340 days.

Reusable media would have been more cost effective, I think.

Tape stock is reusable too. A RED Drive costs $900 and gives you 640GB of data capacity. A 40 min HDCAM SR gives you 128GB of storage for $75... for $375 you get the same storage capacity as a RED Drive. That's the math a significant cost saving.

Later they can chose to archive the best clips to HDCAM SR Large tapes which gives 255 mins (1642GB at 880mb/sec at a cost of $230) of storage at full 444 HQ (880 Mb/sec). They can even archive it to cheaper LTO4 for vault storage.

 

[Ariana]

I don't know anyone that reuses tape for serious work and even so there's a point where the tape wear does start to cause problems. I've reused my red drives hundreds of times.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

I don't know anyone that reuses tape for serious work and even so there's a point where the tape wear does start to cause problems. I've reused my red drives hundreds of times.

Well since you mention that. Many of these people would not trust the RED drive with their footage due to it being a RAID 0 device. It is not suitable for many environments. A RED-RAM at $4500 for 128GB would be cost prohibitive and also not practical. My guess is that for a solid state media to meed the requirements of these workflows... we are looking at an affordable 2.5TB SSD (about 25 HDCAM SR tapes). Until then tape will be a necessity.

Another thing to think about is do you guys think these people bring a data center with them just to offload footage? How much would the SAN cost... and the generators and the solar power facilities? :lol: Not to mention the IT personnel.

 

[Stuart English]

Tape

Tape

You take the documentary that was highlighted in the Sony reel... Oceans... if that was done on Solid State, Compact Flash or HD Drives... how much money would that cost? Tape is a great solution for those type of workflows and nothing else beats it. Lets look at the issues posed in those workflows... 500 hours of dailies per day recorded at a high data rate of say 440 or 880 Mb/sec. I can't see any other way those projects can get done other than tape.

The "Oceans" clips were very compelling, but that's not exactly what was said by the way.

" ... 340 weeks of shooting, and 98 locations, 17 teams, and 500 hours of dailies at the end"

Not per day...

And in that underwater application, a 128GB RED-RAM sounds like an excellent fit for the 45 minute loads that they were shooting.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

And in that underwater application, a 128GB RED-RAM sounds like an excellent fit for the 45 minute loads that they were shooting.

At $4500 why would it be an excellent fit when the $75 tape can record the same amount? Even more is the RED Drive fast enough for 880Mb/sec?

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=30633

Another point that I mentioned is what would all this data be offloaded to? How much does that cost? Are they going to offload to LTO4 in the field? Are they going to bring along SANs in the field?

 

[Pawel Achtel]

Andrae,

I film underwater and I film large amounts of wildlife footage. I am greatly relieved by the upgrade from HDCAM tape to RED. There is simply no comparison the the savings that tapeless workflow and storage gives. Now I can afford to have a backup copy of every piece of footage shot. Hard discs are cheap and far easier to store and access footage than tape.

 

[Jeff Coatney]

Tape workflow is inherently inefficient. File-based workflow data can be transferred at greater than realtime. Tape must be ingested. Tape cannot be compressed beyond the data initially written to the tape. Tape rusts. Tape is not hermetically sealed media and can fall victim to mold. Tape can snag, wrinkle, tear, or otherwise get destroyed by the very mechanism required to Record / Play it.

I find it amazing that anyone is building a NEW camera in the year 2009 that relies on tape as a recording medium. I understand there are legions of studios that are tape centric, but that does not mean you have to keep it as an acquisition medium. Broadcast deliverable? Archive? Sure, why not. But NEW Acquisition platform? No way.

 

[Martin Ludwig]

this is going to a silly discussion. of course you can shoot 45 min underwater on a red ram, but if you want to do that more than one time a day and maybe more than one day in follow you have to unload all to a hard drive system. means one person more to do that. there are enough job in the industry where tape is great alternative, especcialy for those walking thru the jungle for several days without any possibilities to charge battery or to have power.
And yes, tape can get mold, it´s not sealed, it rusts - but have you ever seen a hard drive fallen down from a table and tried to unload the data?
lets stay serious guys - this is not a format war - the question is more the performance of a camera !

 

[Jeff Coatney]

If it were a format war, we wouldn't have a clear winner, IMO.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

this is going to a silly discussion. of course you can shoot 45 min underwater on a red ram, but if you want to do that more than one time a day and maybe more than one day in follow you have to unload all to a hard drive system. means one person more to do that. there are enough job in the industry where tape is great alternative, especcialy for those walking thru the jungle for several days without any possibilities to charge battery or to have power.
And yes, tape can get mold, it´s not sealed, it rusts - but have you ever seen a hard drive fallen down from a table and tried to unload the data?
lets stay serious guys - this is not a format war - the question is more the performance of a camera !

Exactly.... Obviously I own 2 RED cameras and the workflow is perfect for us. Would I want to bring a RED into the field for say a 5 day shoot... no... it's not the camera for that. Even a 2 day shoot would be more expensive than using tape.

Folks where are you going to offload the data to in the middle of no where? You guys make it seem like the cost of SSD is all that has to be considered. No, the expense goes way beyond that. Heck I don't even do long form shooting in the field and I need multiple RAID arrays. I'm suppose to strap this storage on my back and bring it in the field? This type of work cannot be done properly on the RED. In a BBC documentary called LIFE, that took 3 years to complete and is now showing online... the team spent weeks in the field (very remote locations... off the power grid). How many SSD's are you going to buy for that? Yes it would have to be Solid State... the RED drive is not suitable for that work.

The RED RAM can capture 78 minutes of footage at REDCODE 28. How many of these would you need for just a 2 day shoot that's off the grid? The cost is $4500 per drive. You can shoot on a $75 tape that gives you the same storage capacity and general safety. Which one would you chose? I'll even be more generous and reduce the time in the field to 16 hours.

 

[David Rasberry]

Well with respect... the off the shelf reference has nothing to do with the scenario I highlighted earlier. If you are recording about 500 hours of footage per day... then it becomes way more costly to use HDD or solid State based media.

Is anybody really doing this? That is 20 cameras rolling for 24 hours straight!

Or more likely 100 cameras pulling about 5 hours each of footage per day.

Building that kind of footage for a project is typically done over a much longer time frame.

 

[C.H.Haskell]

The under water video samples in the sony press release were phenomenal...regardless of the format the did an outstanding job, so if they are reading, bravo.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

Is anybody really doing this? That is 20 cameras rolling for 24 hours straight!

Or more likely 100 cameras pulling about 5 hours each of footage per day.

Building that kind of footage for a project is typically done over a much longer time frame.

I misinterpreted that part about the dailies... but with 19 teams... who knows how much footage they were capturing per day. 19 teams does not mean 19 cameras. It could be more. The RED RAM only captures 78 minutes of footage at REDCODE 28. My argument is still valid. How many RED RAM drives would they have to supply to 19 teams? How would the offloading be done in the field? Especially when the teams are spaced out around the world in the ocean?

The under water video samples in the sony press release were phenomenal...regardless of the format the did an outstanding job, so if they are reading, bravo.

Hear, hear... those guys are at the top of their game. Incredible work... can't wait to see it when it comes out. I'm a big fan of wildlife docu's... especially underwater.

 

[Carsten Fenstermacher]

I misinterpreted that part about the dailies... but with 19 teams... who knows how much footage they were capturing per day. 19 teams does not mean 19 cameras. It could be more. The RED RAM only captures 78 minutes of footage at REDCODE 28. My argument is still valid. How many RED RAM drives would they have to supply to 19 teams? How would the offloading be done in the field? Especially when the teams are spaced out around the world in the ocean?

You'd use firewire drives to off load like everyone else. You claims of high cost for SANs, etc isn't really applicable to the way most people are working. Big storage arrays are used for editing and accumulating huge amounts of footage. It's not something that needs to be done in the field. If you were hdcam-sr you'd still have an avid or fcp system with a big raid with all your dailies.

IMHO, reddrive is great for underwater at 3 hours of footage and it's cheap
and can be used hundreds of times. It takes only 10 or so reuses to beat the cost of SR tape. a couple more to pay for the offloading cost of the hard drive.

Tape has it's place for now but it'll be dead soon enough.
If sony didn't think so they wouldn't be scrambling towards an SSD solution.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

You'd use firewire drives to off load like everyone else. You claims of high cost for SANs, etc isn't really applicable to the way most people are working. Big storage arrays are used for editing and accumulating huge amounts of footage. It's not something that needs to be done in the field. If you were hdcam-sr you'd still have an avid or fcp system with a big raid with all your dailies.

IMHO, reddrive is great for underwater at 3 hours of footage and it's cheap
and can be used hundreds of times. It takes only 10 or so reuses to beat the cost of SR tape. a couple more to pay for the offloading cost of the hard drive.

Tape has it's place for now but it'll be dead soon enough.
If sony didn't think so they wouldn't be scrambling towards an SSD solution.

Please explain the workflow for offloading in the wilderness? What type of equipment is necessary to support just a 2 day shoot? Are you going to convince the bond company on a multimillion dollar production that you are going to shoot on a RAID 0 hard disk based RED Drive? Is your data wrangler going to be tagging along with his MacBook Pro and a bunch of external firewire drives and a big ass UPS with extra batteries? What are you going to do with one RED RAM drive offloading on a dingy and the whales just breach the surface? :smile5: You are going to tell your data wrangler to hurry up with the transfer. Pray the laptop or the hard drives don't drop overboard into the ocean with all your previous valuable footage. Of course you could use multiple RED RAM Drives... Say about 25 of them... that would come up to a cost of $122,500.

 

[Carsten Fenstermacher]

Then please explain what the workflow is for duping a tape out in the wilderness is so you can reuse tapes (since you mentioned tapes are easily reusable). I use multiple red drives for nature work and dupe when I get back to the car or hotel. I can't do that with tape and I absolutely need 2 safety copies before I fly.

You keep trying to skew your arugument into areas that tape does well but there are just as many problems with it that you have to work around. Each has different workflows and advantages.

I can drop a tape into and an ocean, I have lost tapes due to dew, sticky tapes, corroding tapes (on the ocean), tapes snapping or comping loose. Bonding companies have bonded red drives no problem. I've had more problems with tape than any other media, film or drive.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

Then please explain what the workflow is for duping a tape out in the wilderness is so you can reuse tapes (since you mentioned tapes are easily reusable). I use multiple red drives for nature work and dupe when I get back to the car or hotel. I can't do that with tape and I absolutely need 2 safety copies before I fly.

You keep trying to skew your arugument into areas that tape does well but there are just as many problems with it that you have to work around. Each has different workflows and advantages.

I wouldn't have to dupe with tapes thats the entire point. Bring along 25 HDCAM-SR tapes at a cost of $1875. Compared to RED RAM Drives at $122,500.

Each has different workflows and advantages.

I agree... shooting remotely or away from power sources... tape sure has its advantages. I stated earlier in this thread by stating this is a workflow issue. Tape is necessary for certain scenarios.

 

[Cüneyt Kaya]

I wouldn't have to dupe with tapes thats the entire point. Bring along 25 HDCAM-SR tapes at a cost of $1875. Compared to a RED RAM Drives at $122,500.

i am not sure, but there are rumours that you can rent redrams...dont know if you can rent tapes
edit: i personally dont like tape...it drives me crazy to handle tapes...so i am a biased.