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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 :)

A Weapon of Destruction..... has this issue occurred to any other owners/operators?

C

Chris Angelich

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After purchasing my new Weapon (I also own the Alexa) mainly for the need to shoot 'true 4K' for productions, while on location shooting my 2nd day with the Weapon, something occurred that was catastrophic to our day's work. I'll try to be brief:

Shooting both 4K R3d Raw/ProRes 4:4:4:4 proxies, Redlog/Gamma4. A red 512GB red mini mag that was formatted IN CAMERA (not on a computer). Camera was on, we changed a prime lense, and after composing the next shot, pressed "Record" on the side of the Weapon and nothing happened (at first). The media bay showed green. Pressed again and the sidekick gave us a message "Media Format: The media in the Side SSD is not formatted correctly to with with this camera. Do you want to re-format now .....with the choice "Cancel" or "Format". We had 460gb of material on the mag so naturally not going to format the card. I hit cancel and then used the two buttons to eject the media. I placed the mag into the card reader and it showed "ZERO" folders or files on the SSD. My curse (and my DIT's) rocked Lakeshore Drive in Chicago. I then inserted my 2nd "correctly formatted" red mini mag and after two takes the EXACT same message and same result. Corruption/Destruction.......so being a hard head, I reformatted the 2nd mini mag and after 12 takes I stopped for the evening and rushed back to my hotel to call "Tech Support" in Irvine, Ca. Spoke to a nice tech, who had me send in the log.txt files for both mini mags.

Being on location, the next morning took my Weapon to Keslow camera in Chicago, and had their techs look at the Weapon, found nothing unusual so while there we did a new install of the firmware, and well, hoped that it would be ok. I re-shot the previous day (again) but this time every 20gb we would download to our hard drives.......the Weapon behaved until that night when it did the same thing. "Card not formated blah blah" and the images (only 5 takes were erased). I called the end to the shoot, and flew back to LA yesterday and took the camera to the Red Store in Hollywood to send to Irvine for the white coat dudes to examine.

I have 2 main questions:

1). Has THIS ever occurred to any other Weapon owners? If so, what is/was the cause?
2). Would anyone but a fool ever trust this Weapon DSMC body again or should Red give me a NEW one? I have less than 35 hours shooting on it.

Thanks in advance.
 
I have no idea for the most part, but I always shut down for lens changes. Not sure if I really need to, and no idea if it's in any way related to your issue, but I'd be curious to know.

man, that was a super unhelpful response... but hope your issues are solved!

and given that it's across two or more different mags, I would be very wary of keeping that body, not matter how well they "fix" it.
 
I now have a habit of not booting the camera with the mag inserted if there are clips on it. .... Just in case.

EDIT: I didn't read the entire OP, but this looks like a different issue than the one people were having before. Others were having this issue but only when booting the camera with the mag in.
 
I have swapped lenses with brain on no problem many times. Hopefully someone from Red will chime in and get u a solution although RSH is definitely the place to take it for direct help.
 
As Sulekh mentioned, Id look at this thread:

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?142539-Forged-Weapon-killing-mags-on-power-up

The issues there appear to have been on powerdown (in particular improper ones).

This particular issue, Chris, Ive never heard of.

Id love some clarity from RED on this. Are these issues related? How can mags be better insulated from these corruptions?

These issues seem to affect a very small fraction of users, but some insight from RED would be useful and comforting.

Perhaps it's just your brain?
 
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I cannot fathom owning a camera that would require you to shut down (power down) to simply change a lense however IF that would have not caused the issue I would gladly do so from this point forward. There is NO mention of having to do so in the "owners manual that I remember. Glad that you take that extra step to avoid problems.
 
Chris Angelich said:
I cannot fathom owning a camera that would require you to shut down (power down) to simply change a lense however IF that would have not caused the issue I would gladly do so from this point forward. There is NO mention of having to do so in the "owners manual that I remember. Glad that you take that extra step to avoid problems.
Click to expand...

We changed lenses a few thousand times without powering down, on pl, ef,nikon and fd mounts, with no issue, so i doubt thats the cause.

The only times I seen weapon behave oddly is when using poor power source, I was powering the camera on a Dtap and long cable from the side of a blueshape battery, then we both had missing captures and strange gui things going on, without camera complaining on the power. Apparently the blue shape does not give enough amps and that can cause it to behave.

So what power source was used?
 
Thanks for the thread but after reading the 12 pages there is not consistency in why/ how it is occurring. The only commonality is that IT IS happening...
 
Nick Morrison said:
As Sulekh mentioned, Id look at this thread:

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?142539-Forged-Weapon-killing-mags-on-power-up

The issues there appear to have been on powerdown (in particular improper ones).

This particular issue, Chris, Ive never heard of.

Id love some clarity from RED on this. Are these issues related? How can mags be better insulated from these corruptions?

These issues seem to affect a very small fraction of users, but some insight from RED would be useful and comforting.

Perhaps it's just your brain?
Click to expand...

Well I agree it could just be my brain.. Bad build, electronics, something. Since the other thread about this issue began in March 2016, I have not seen it being resolved by Red.
 
Curran Giddens said:
I now have a habit of not booting the camera with the mag inserted if there are clips on it. .... Just in case.

EDIT: I didn't read the entire OP, but this looks like a different issue than the one people were having before. Others were having this issue but only when booting the camera with the mag in.
Click to expand...

If it had occurred after booting up with a new mag, I would hate that it happens but for me -- it had nothing to do with powering up or inserting a new mag. My mini mag has done over 180 clips on it and it happened while the camera was powered up. This bites!!
 
Sorry to hear about your stressful situation.. And sorry I have no real advice on what to do... Apart from learn how to use 'redundead!!'

Redundead has got us out of loads of user generated problems... For example .. Instead of downloading a DIT once half formatted a red mini mag in the Mac download station.. He Paniced and grabbed the mag out the reader and in doing so we are left with a unreadable mess... Fucked?.. We put the mag back in the camera reformatted (light version)... Put the Mag back in the reader and ran redundead. Got every clip back!

We treat our cameras as the robust tools they have proven to be... No pussyfooting about with shutting down or not booting with media.. a proper set is not the place for having to remember special care instructions.

Report back where you get to and do try to talk to someone technically good at red as they can really help!

Good luck

M
 
Scary stuff. Wouldn't it be possible to introduce dual recording? For extra safety. Or perhaps even remote recording of fiber optic cable.
 
Michael Lindsay said:
Sorry to hear about your stressful situation.. And sorry I have no real advice on what to do... Apart from learn how to use 'redundead!!'

Redundead has got us out of loads of user generated problems... For example .. Instead of downloading a DIT once half formatted a red mini mag in the Mac download station.. He Paniced and grabbed the mag out the reader and in doing so we are left with a unreadable mess... Fucked?.. We put the mag back in the camera reformatted (light version)... Put the Mag back in the reader and ran redundead. Got every clip back!

We treat our cameras as the robust tools they have proven to be... No pussyfooting about with shutting down or not booting with media.. a proper set is not the place for having to remember special care instructions.

Report back where you get to and do try to talk to someone technically good at red as they can really help!

Good luck

M
Click to expand...

Michael I also own the Arri Alexa so I come from the "a camera should not cause it's owner to be scared every time they use it" but my situation is a bit different. After the first mini mag had the "Reformat needed" I called tech support and he hand walked me step by step Thru RedUndead and t ran thru the program. It reported recapturing 184 clips but in actuality all it recaptured was one frame of each clip and then the 2nd frame was corrupted. Over and over and over.
 
Oh man, sorry to hear this. Try REDUndead but, if the same issue I had, it won't work. RED can probably recover it but it will take a long time and rather considerable expense.

Hopefully they hey can release a new REDUndead capable of recovering these weapon mags
 
Yes. In my case only with a lense change. So, how would that affect the SSD module? .3 seconds of air while changing a lense? I do not see the connection between the SSD and changing a lense?
 
Probably something else then. If an electronic lens, the sudden data change may be glitching out the camera. Definitely needs to be sent to RED
 
What is a truly scary final aspect is that when this occurs is that it doesn't just end up with just the final/ last clip being corrupted (which would be bad) but instead you can lose an entire mini mag of footage as I have had occur twice.
 
Not much consolation, and it wouldn't help with a camera body problem, but having more than two mags can be a lifesaver, despite their cost.

I usually try to have a minimum of three, preferably four or more.
 
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