A Stripped RED Firmware?

[BrendanLeahy]

I know people have asked for a cheaper, lighter camera (which the Raven seems to answer). I was wondering, however, if there would ever be a possibility for a stripped firmware version for current camera owners?

Though I don't know the ramifications of cutting out bells + whistles that go unused by some shooters, my hope would be that a basic firmware without some functions would decrease boot-up time, make menu navigation even faster, and possibly allow for other developments.

Would anyone with greater knowledge mind speaking to the feasibility of this, as well as what might result if such a thing is possible?

 

[Elsie N]

Bump - just wanted to see if anyone else has thoughts on this. My understanding is that the reason why computers are slow to boot up is because they have more tasks to handle when powering on.

I've advocated for this in the past and recently there was a thread where this was mentioned again (can't remember the thread it was brought up in.) Realizing the hassle it would likely be to create a separate firmware, someone suggested making different ways to delete certain processes upon start-up.

(That jostles my memory to think it was in a start-up time thread or possibly the latest firmware thread where start-up-time is reduced.)

 

[Phil Holland]

With the boot-up time being now around 20 seconds, what are you hoping to achieve here? Maybe 10 seconds? I'm just curious.

You wouldn't have a menu exhibiting faster navigation/more responsiveness.

At the moment, I'm pretty impressed with a more than 50% faster boot time from the late October 2015 firmware update.

 

[Elsie N]

With the boot-up time being now around 20 seconds, what are you hoping to achieve here? Maybe 10 seconds? I'm just curious.

You wouldn't have a menu exhibiting faster navigation/more responsiveness.

At the moment, I'm pretty impressed with a more than 50% faster boot time from the late October 2015 firmware update.

Can't answer for Brendan but my thinking is the fewer "apps" running in the firmware, the less likely you are to have glitches with the monitor, camera shutdown etc.

Not a software engineer so those are just intuitive thoughts on my part.

That and with the RAVEN I would like it to boot up almost instantaneously if it were possible because I aim to use that camera for more than production.

 

[Patrick Grossien]

I was the one who brought it back up in the new firmware thread.
Phil, the startup time is great now, and it was great some years ago before, but the thing that made me get back to that idea was what Jarred said, that it's a seesaw battle: add a feature - lose start up time. So it could over time become longer again. Now if parts of the firmware could be shut off temporarily like plug ins, it could save startup time If it were going back up again. You wouldn't even need to Take it out of the menus. Just grey it out. Would be even better because you would instantly see what's off and what not.

So if that actually were a possible option, I would think it be a smart and cool move. But what do I know. I've only got stupid ideas ...

 

[Isaac Babcock]

I would be a huge advocate of this, but can see where it would be a total nightmare for Red. Person "A" wants fast boot time, nothing else; person "B" wants HDR added in at the expense of 3 seconds of boot time; Person "C" wants all the lens calibrations included for maximum Canon/Nikon etc, and they are willing to have 15 seconds... and so on.

Phil is right, a 50% increase in boot time with the last build - that is incredible, and kudos to the engineers and all the work to pull it off. But I mean no disrespect when I say I'm still staying with Build 5 with my Epic X because it has a 10 second boot time - and for me, that is the most important. Not so for others. Eventually I'll need one of the new features badly enough to upgrade firmware, but to date keeping that 10 second boot time remains my priority.

My camera spent the last year on a wildlife assignment where it was slated to be a backup camera to two Dragons. It became the go-to camera solely because of the quick boot time. For that species and location, that was what was important - but as we all know everyone has different needs. The DP (who owned a Dragon) said to me "Your camera (Epic X) is the best because it boots up is fast and is always stable. Don't go upgrading, just keep it that way". And that is why I am still sitting on an MX sensor with build 5.

So long answer, but if there was a stripped build that prioritized boot up time, I'd love it. But I won't hold my breath, I think it would be a total pain in the ass for Red to have a secondary build and try to sort through peoples needs and priorities of what features it did or didn't have.

 

[Antony Newman]

With my soft-wear hat on - we only want one firmware.

+) Maybe what people would prefer would be a 'standby' mode that did not fully turn off the camera, to be awaken by pressing of any button on the brain (for an INSTANT ON). This low power mode might use a fraction of the power (only RED would know this)

+) Or a 'sleep / hibernate' mode that persisted Camera State before shutdown (maybe written to the SSD), with this being loaded back on 'wake-up' (this might forgo some of the hardware checks. It could configured that if more than 12 hours had passed, the next wake up go through a full boot. It could be that state full information is also stored on each SSD - allowing a Full boot to occur when no SSD is inserted)

AJ

 

[Karl H]

I find this a bit confusing. I'm on an old firmware of Epic MX (maybe just over a year). I used to upgrade to every build and the boot-up times always remained around 8 seconds (which it still is) and the camera runs flawlessly. This was pre-dragon.

Are you saying that I'm now missing tons of essential new features to make this boot time go up so large (I'm reading 40 seconds in some cases)? I've glanced on a couple of threads and I don't see any really big news for epic-x that would make this so different in the last year. Could it possibly be that when dragon was released with all its new features, it was bolted into the same universal installer and ended up bloated the old EPIC X bootup times?

'I don't come onto the boards as much as I used to and would be interested to know if there has been anything essential I'm missing for MX. If not, maybe this is a case where splitting the installers into Dragon/Epic/Scarlet would get back to where they were a year ago (for MX users.)