Adice needed - Red for documentary

[Scott Brown]

Hi folks

I'm looking for some advice.

We're due to start work on a documentary shooting on Red and I'm wondering about the best format to work with.

We're going to have a very tight schedule and backing up during the day is going to be tricky + due to drive shortages we only have one Red Drive to work with.

The documentary is for SD TV delivery in 16:9, so what format would we be best to use here? I know that 4K will offer the best quality but I'm unsure whether to go with 2:1 or 16:9? Build 17 offers 4K HD which looks great but I'n not prepared to run with Beta software on this shoot so that rules this out.

On several days we'll be shooting for up to 4 hours so this means that shooting 4K is not practical as we won't have the capacity on the Red Drive -with this in mind, what format should we consider? 2K or 1920 x 1080P (we're shooting PAL at 25fps).

I'm unsure what visually we we will lose going downwards from 4K to 2K to 1080P?

any help and advice on this would be appreciated.

Best wishes

Scott

 

[Marcus Struzina]

Why not try 3k 16:9, its a pretty good compromise, 2k is a problem for lens angle of view. In my tests the 3k down resed to HD looked way better than the 2k. I haven't tested it but I would think you would get 3 1/2 hours of 3k on a single drive. 3k extra frame rates (50 fps) are also useful occasionally .





www.belladonnathemovie.com

 

[Scott Brown]

Thanks for that, I haven't tried 3K yet but the extra shooting time will be a bonus.

For 4K what's the thought re. 2:1 against 16:9? If your end output is 16:9 should we automatically opt to shoot this or does 2:1 give us advantages?

 

[Ed Watkins]

Hi Scott,

I'd suggest not shooting until you fill up the drive, I've had a few issues with record errors as the drives approach being full. 4hrs of 3K 16:9 RC36 will be around 290-300GB (which is kinda pushing it)

Personally I'd recommend either trying to lay your hands on another drive (tricky I know) or offloading the drive when it is 2/3rds full max.

 

[Russ Fill]

3K 16x9 or 2:1 I just finished shooting the first part of a doco in Uganda and the resion I shot 3K is you still get 60fps and when we did some test with 4K one day we didn't see enough difference with our wide lenses to justify using the 4K and file management is a little easier.
Shoot 3K and you'll get the advantage of having a faster fps and better file management. I would not shoot 2K as we thought about that and after some test we are very happy to have made the 3K choice.

We used 2 RED drives and 2 CF cards. I would not fill any drive to the top as you might be putting too many eggs in one basket should something go wrong.

PM me if you have any questions but I strongly suggest doing some 3K test and Im sure you will find that the best choice for your final product.

 

[Florin Andrei]

I'd suggest not shooting until you fill up the drive, I've had a few issues with record errors as the drives approach being full.

Many (essentially all) filesystems exhibit decreased performance when near full. Looks like whatever filesystem is used by RED on those drives is no exception. So as it gets close to 100% full, the effective write performance starts to drop. There might be exceptions, but in general it's a good idea to keep this in mind when using hard-drives.

Many sysadmins, whether on Linux, Unix, Windows or whatever, typically recommend to keep any filesystem's usage below 75...80% or something like that. On the RED drive, you can probably get significantly closer to 100% because probably fragmentation is not that bad and probably there aren't too many files on it at any given time. But it's a matter of trial and error - see what works for you.

RED could probably alleviate this problem by increasing the size of the disk cache (if any), but that would make the camera more expensive.

 

[donatello b]

"we only have one Red Drive "

IMO if this is a paid gig and somebody is putting $$$ into it ... get another drive ( do whatever, pay the $$ ) .. there's a drive somewhere for rent out there ...
if your one drive goes down - down TIME will cost far more then whatever $$ it takes to rent one ( from where ever in the world)