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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 :)

Cf card and Red drive simultaneously?

Marc Berger

Marc Berger

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Hi
Is it possible to record simultaneously on CF card and Red Drive? or will it be possible in the future?
Cheers
Marc
 
No, it is not possible as of today.

As it stands, I wonder if it will ever be possible. Both the RED DRIVE and the CF module are on an eSATA bus - likely the same bus. I'd imagine that writing to one recording source saturates the bus, so writing to both at once may be an impossibility in the future.
 
I'm very much waiting for the option to download the CF to the Red drive in camera
 
Problem with backup to RED Drive from CF is that it would tie up the camera for the time it takes to do the copy, which limits the benefit of the feature pretty heavily.

Although, obviously at a pinch it could be helpful in some situations.
 
Sycophant said:
Problem with backup to RED Drive from CF is that it would tie up the camera for the time it takes to do the copy, which limits the benefit of the feature pretty heavily.

Although, obviously at a pinch it could be helpful in some situations.
Click to expand...

depending on how long it took, i think it would be well worth it
 
the idea is sort how a still camera works... you can shoot 17 RAW images in the RAM of the camera, then they get recorded to the CF card.... so with RED it would be neat to shoot 8GB of RAW, then that gets recorded out to the RAID, then shoot the same 8GB card again. no laptop...
 
You'd have to wait 3-5 minutes while it downloads... So shoot for 4-5 minutes then wait 3-5 minutes for download (at 4K)... You may as well just record on the drive... The RED Drive (as a non-redundant setup) isn't ideal for backup so, you'd still have to make another copy from that drive to a backup system. It's double handling.

Personally I'd much rather swap cards out as we fill them and backup on a separate device (a SolidStore, but that's just me).
 
im not really thinking for backup. I'm going to be shooting a lot with no crew, so im going to have to deal with the cards myself. If i could transfer the full cards to the drive. I could shoot without worrying about loosing frames to shakes and not have to worry about running full cards to a computer every 10 minutes.
 
Brook Willard said:
Both the RED DRIVE and the CF module are on an eSATA bus - likely the same bus. I'd imagine that writing to one recording source saturates the bus, so writing to both at once may be an impossibility in the future.
Click to expand...

how do you know this?

The CF unit physically sits where the raw port was to be. As I recall Mike Morlan's layout diag had them on separate esata ports.
Forgot how/who verified this, but I know we tortured Mike for month's on it!

Cheers,
 
It's confirmed that the CF is a SATA interface. It seems unlikely that there would be separate SATA controllers for both interfaces (the SATA for CF and the eSATA that RED Drive uses) when most SATA chipsets support two (some support four) devices.

I suspect (but of course can't know for sure) that sustained writing of ~360Mb/s to two devices concurrently on a single SATA bus would be difficult.

From a more practical point of view, it also creates difficulties with data management - what happens when rolling to CF and RED Drive and space runs out on one of them? If one were to continue recording and the other stops, then you'd have two files versions of what should be a single clip that are in fact different.

Also, I don't see a huge advantage to this, as if the RED Drive is a suitable option, why not use it exclusively? Where it could be helpful, I suppose, is the CF acting as a buffer of sorts to to protect against drop-frames on the Drive, but in practice that wouldn't work well either I don't think. I don't believe you'd be able to maintain full speed write and read from the CF, so it couldn't really be used as a pass through buffer. Also, beyond dropping frames, it is actually risking physical damage to the drives to expose them to shocks and jolts, so having a system that helped avoid drop frames would be encouraging the use of Drives in a situation that was potentially damaging for them.

I think that once the SSD and 16GB cards are available, this will all become rather unnecessary anyway.
 
Well we're led to believe that the SSD is tantalisingly close... And 16GB cards, well that's anyone's guess. There's a few that should do the job, but none seem to live up to it yet, but hopefully that'll be fixed soon.

That said, I don't know many people who're finding the 8GB cards to be especially difficult to deal with.
 
Sata bus standard wouldn't have any trouble maintaining the data rate. 2 drives/2 buses...well some speculation.....we discussed this stuff a year or so ago. Reddrive would be used as another (free) safety backup and I suspect in common practice the 8/16GB cf will be filling up before the 320GB gets full and if getting near full, well delete some old files or swap it out.
 
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