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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

32 & 64GB 90MB/s CF cards, now were talkin'...

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Forgive me if this has already been brought up in this thread, but what is RED going to do when the EPICs come out?

Right now the cards can't handle RC42, what about RC225? Do they expect to tell Soderbergh he has to shoot on a drive? How much can even the drive handle?

Seems like a big deal for people to buy all this media that won't work for full performance on upgraded cameras...

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They announced a module called Red Mag, which is an SSD module. They announced 128GB media for it too. All things are subject to change, but speeds and capacity of SSDs are already much higher. So I am guessing that what they are planning to use for larger Red Codes. The module design is very thin so you'd wouldn't notice much of a difference with or without it. Even with a Red Mag, an I/O, and a power module you should have a smaller camera than the Red One.
 
Hi Jeff,

Have you seen Rob Galbraith's evaluation of these SanDisk Extreme Pro vs. Transcend 600X vs. PhotoFast GMonster 533X and 533X Plus?
He doesn't have full benches, but his database is quite extensive and he is pretty thorough.
Might find it interesting.

Best,
Cliff

It was interesting that the photofast 8 and 16 do 45.8MB/s write but the 32gb drops to 30 indicating that there is a controller difference and is somewhat like the lexar 8gb supposedly being a lot faster than the 16gb.

Next interesting thing is that the extreme pros seem to have a truly improved controller and all versions have the 40 MBs speed - hoping this is roughly the same throughout the capacity and makes it possible for R1 shooting.

Has RED published specs on the 16gb cards?
 
If I were to buy one of the 32gb Extreme pros what software/hardware would I use to test sustained write speed thorough most of the card's capacity since the camera won't let me? I have a 2x2.8 Quad Core Xeon MacPro with 10gig ram and a lexar pro FW800 CF reader. Can I just drop 30 gigs of RED raw files on it and observe the data rate on some type of software?

While I am at it I will test the red and lexar 8gb.

Running blackmagic disk speed test I got 35.7 write for Lexar 8gb and 36.2 for RED 8gb
 
You can try the AJA system test - which thoroughly tests disk (and hopefully also CF cards; haven't tried) for their sustained speeds.

http://www.aja.com/ajashare/AJA_System_Test_v601.zip

Got pretty much the same speeds with the AJA. AJA gives more control. Used 2 gig file size. About 37MB/s

second time I loaded up the 8gig card with 6.34 GB of RED files and ran it and it dropped to just under 35MB/s. Had to drop to 1 gig file size.

I used 720x486 10bit and 1280x720 8bit frame sizes - didn't seem to make much difference.

Anybody can run same test on 32 gig Extreme Pro?
 
Next interesting thing is that the extreme pros seem to have a truly improved controller and all versions have the 40 MBs speed - hoping this is roughly the same throughout the capacity and makes it possible for R1 shooting.

I also find it interesting how varied the write speeds are for these cards (and others in general). It really shows how in camera optimization can pay off. I can only imagine that RED takes this optimization seriously, much more so than Canon/Nikon etc.
My guess is that with appropriate tuning, this card will be a monster. Looking forward to anyone's write benches on these things!

Cliff!
 
40MB/s isn't really fast enough for R1 use. It also has to be able to sustain enough speed at appropriate data block sizes and as the cards heat up. The 8GB Lexar and RED cards handle 45MB/s under R1 conditions.

I don't have numbers off the top of my head for the RED 16GB cards, but they are quite a bit faster -- on par with the RED Drives. You can pretty much shoot all the R1 recording formats to the 16GB cards.

The AJA benchmark and others only show a part of the picture here as we don't know how the R1 writes data to these cards.

This could also be another reason why RED certifies cards for use in the cameras. Perhaps not only does the card need to be up to spec for the camera, but the camera also must have a an embedded profile for how to deal with specific cards, in order to maximize performance.
 
40MB/s isn't really fast enough for R1 use. It also has to be able to sustain enough speed at appropriate data block sizes and as the cards heat up. The 8GB Lexar and RED cards handle 45MB/s under R1 conditions.

I don't have numbers off the top of my head for the RED 16GB cards, but they are quite a bit faster -- on par with the RED Drives. You can pretty much shoot all the R1 recording formats to the 16GB cards.

The AJA benchmark and others only show a part of the picture here as we don't know how the R1 writes data to these cards.

This could also be another reason why RED certifies cards for use in the cameras. Perhaps not only does the card need to be up to spec for the camera, but the camera also must have a an embedded profile for how to deal with specific cards, in order to maximize performance.

Jeff: (or anyone else) can you run the same aja benchmark that I did on the 16gig RED cards - it only takes a little while.

The 40MB speed is from the article's test with the SLRsso I think was limited by the speed of the camera.

My test was just a generic comparison between RED card and Lexar of same size using that particular benchmark - so that is the only true apples to apples.

However, this stuff does suggest to me that those new cards are at least as fast as the RED 8GB (quite possibly much faster) and would be useful for any purpose that the RED 8gigs are useful - which is all I have been really after. We want reasonably long underwater record times at RC28 on the R1. None of this will be an issue with Epic where we have the option of multiple cards with very little size penalty.
 
That ExpressCard reader is also attractive...at 133MB/s (supposedly) you could offload a 16GB in about two minutes. That'd be nice.
 
That ExpressCard reader is also attractive...at 133MB/s (supposedly) you could offload a 16GB in about two minutes. That'd be nice.

And it is going to be very affordable!
"The Lexar ExpressCard CompactFlash Reader is slated to reach store shelves mid-November 2009. The MSRP is US$44.99 in the U.S. It will be compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 (possibly OS X 10.4 also), and Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7."
 
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