Can the back seat of an SUV be converted to a full editing suite?

[Evangelos Achillopoulos]

Years ago, I thing it was 2000-2001 I build this thing… A portable editing system with a 9 disks Raid array and uncompressed SDI video I/O….

I was wondering, could a thing like that with Li-polymer battery power and 16TB-20TB be useful in today’s world of Digital Cinematography?

It can build to weight 25-30 kilos, be waterproof, all mounted in shock absorbers and most interesting can be fitted in any SUV type of vehicle and in 2 minutes have a full editing or CC suite… Internally takes a full motherboard and accept full size cards…

Also the side breakout box can be custom fitted to accept everything…

Into the sea testing the floating capability...

An Opel Zafira was the SUV I used back then to demonstrate and rent the system...

In this last photo are the two bags that I had back then with the one having all the camera package and the other the portable system...

In the photos is the prototype... I have sold 2 systems in Europe back then. The one was in Russia fitted with six camera recording channels...

 

[Evangelos Achillopoulos]

Sorry guys something went wrong with the photos... now is fixed...

 

[Johnny Friday]

Now not fixed yet....photos no display

 

[William Albertini]

Yes they do display... Maxx Digital makes a kit like you are showing.

 

[Evangelos Achillopoulos]

Yeh, they do the DIT station and a cart… this is different I think… It has real terabytes for storage and gets full size cards support plus it can be used in the way you see with flipping table as a portable editing van kit… In example you don’t need to drive the converted editing van where you go… just send the flight case and rent an SUV where ever you go… attach the monitors lid to the front seats, drop the table connect the cable and you are set…

What we did back then was to connect the system to the SUV battery while leaving engine running with A/C on under a tree shadow and in this way we had a super editing room with comfort for two… Editor and Director… All that in the hot Greek summer of 2001… So the editor was getting all the footage from the camera in real-time and he was editing, while the others where shooting… (Yeh I was pioneer on digital edit while shooting back then).

For RED can be converted to do all the tasks of back up, editing and CC… while including power management (internal DC UPS), hold the full shootings of a movie in RAW for editing while do copies for secondary backups in external disks and due to the horse power the full size allows is able to do all in the same time… a rough cost can be around 15K euros to 30K euros depending on the setup…

 

[Evangelos Achillopoulos]

Anyone... opinion?

Is it too big? Is it useless? Ugly? What? Something??

 

[Colter Ripley]

Hey man, I love it. It's pretty kickass and looks like quite a bit of work went into it. We run a rental company and something like this would be pretty cool to be able to be rented.

It's a bit overkill with the amount of storage though. We have never shot more than 1.5tb in a day, but hey you never know if you're out in the field for a while.

I would actually love to build one for myself. I think I would just make it a bit less complicated. Still dual monitor, lots of space, built in card readers etc. Mostly a DIT/ DL station.

 

[Evangelos Achillopoulos]

Hmm, storage I think is never enough… wouldn’t be nice if you will be able to have a full future stored in the disks and not only the 1-2 days of footage? Wouldn’t that allow to pre-edit parts of the movie that are couple of days before? Off coarse you can use proxies, but is another thing to have the full RAWs…

I have a stock of the basic components for about 15 pieces to build the system up to the point the OS will fire… So to allow you guys to customize the rest like the I/O panel and the cards…

A bare system with PSU, motherboard, fans, flight case, no CPUs, no memory, with monitors with connection cable and disk array of X8 3,5” disks preinstalled along with couple of I/O panels ready to get drilled to install whatever you like, would cost something like 9000 to 12000 euros…

Or I can custom mount extra LTO and removable disks, REDmags, CF card readers... in addition to the array...

The machine in the side has plenty of space to do many things...

Is this a viable idea?