CF or RAID - Why?

[Brent J. Craig]

Sounds somewhat like an opportunity for assistant editors to get some time on the set.

I've seen that. It wasn't pretty.

They are not used to being on set: the hierarchy, the workflow, the urgency, the hot craft girls.

They are used to doing things their own way, at their own pace, with their own tools.

It is my understanding that they usually work with their shoes off in a nice warm little room sipping cappucino and listening to their iPod. Sometimes they have to put their shoes back on to get more cappucino.

You get the idea.

 

[Dylan Reeve]

It is my understanding that they usually work with their shoes off in a nice warm little room sipping cappucino and listening to their iPod. Sometimes they have to put their shoes back on to get more cappucino.

I don't think many place mind if you go make you cappucino in bare feet. Of course many assistants get stuck with nightshifts anyway, so there maybe no one would even know...

That said, the roles are merging somewhat I guess. What would traditionally be the Edit Assist's job is now starting in the field, and where they pick it up from isn't exactly set in stone at the moment. Plus, increasingly, more of what they do may find its way to being done on set.

It's a fast changing world. I think I'll kick my jandals off and go find another coffee.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Mark - about Red Drives - I'd say at LEAST two - you want a spare anyway in case one gets dropped or lost or stops working or whatever.

Rental houses? Probably need 5 or so for day shoots - the two you send out that get backed up at some point, two more to go out on the next day's job since the first two haven't been archived and verified yet if gear returned the next AM, and a spare beyond that.

Of course, doc/reality shooters will need more if rolling tons of footage...

-mike

Hey Mike -

we are looking at several features that would start Feb/March - we are going to try a different approach than we did on the two we shot -

we will shoot primarily drives, swapping two throught the day for offloading during setups and turn-arounds -

we will still LTO back at the facility -

but we will clone and verify AND process dailies on set -

we are going to try a custom fly-pack (acoustically isolated) with enough storage to hold a "protection copy" of the entire feature with REDCINE FILES for each day of the shoot. That will be on set all the time. So our tech can pull up any shot fairly instantly. Cloned/verified shuttle drive heads back to facility each night for LTO WITH 1K prores proxys for edit. We expect to be able to deliver multiple copies of DVD dailies 45 minutes after camera wrap - I'll keep you posted - we are also testing some new storage that has a HARDWARE RAID 5 -

 

[Antoine Baumann]

I am thinking pretty the same as Mark:

shoot primarily drives, swapping two throught the day to copy data during setups and turn-arounds on RAID 1 two drives bay.

Data check the copy on set and screen from the RAID 1 bay or copy to an other RAID 0 array for that.

Go back to post faciliy copy to LTO tapes and to RAID 5/6 array, data check and then empty the RAID 1 array (and the RED DRIVES if not done yet) for the next shooting day.

LTO are long term archive, data on RAID 5/6 array can be used for editing (in FCP) or the data can be copy once again to an other computer for editing.
Once editing is finished, export XML, transform it, and load it in REDCINE, render from the RAID 5/6 array to a RAID 0 array in 10bit dpx for vfx and color grading.

antoine

 

[ChristopherKenworthy]

It'll be interesting to see how quick and or easy it is to take the drive off and put another one on. If it's a fast and easy as using CF, I might be convinced to go this route after all. We would keep each mag change down to every 12 mins shot, as a rule, but could go over if we had to. What the fastest anybody at Red can swap the drives? (Safely.)

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

It'll be interesting to see how quick and or easy it is to take the drive off and put another one on. If it's a fast and easy as using CF, I might be convinced to go this route after all. We would keep each mag change down to every 12 mins shot, as a rule, but could go over if we had to. What the fastest anybody at Red can swap the drives? (Safely.)

Seconds. A few more seconds than switching CF cards to have it locked into the cradle - but we are talking seconds here - NOT minutes.

 

[Drew Suppa]

The drive is a RAID stripe obviously so there's still the issue of needing to make a duplicate copy (or copies) for data redundancy. I guess insurance companies will have some demand about how soon that must happen, but I'm guessing that'll have to be done on set, or very soon afterward.

In some ways it's possibly easier to manage the copy of a few 8 (or ideally 16) gig CF cards at frequent intervals, but harder to manage a copy of 320GB of data in one go.

I D.I.T. RED shoots fairly often, and haven't had an issue with my setup...

For the 2 camera shoot I'm on now, we have 3 320GB drives that I load onto the 2 RED Ones, with the third as the one I give to the Operator while I download his last Reel.

I'm using a 15" MacBook Pro with Firewire 800 to the REDDrive and USB 2.0 out to a G-SAFE 1TB Mirrored hot-swap ESATA standalone drive.

Works flawlessly.

 

[Drew Suppa]

Seconds. A few more seconds than switching CF cards to have it locked into the cradle - but we are talking seconds here - NOT minutes.

If you want to do it right, with reformatting the drive and including a new reel number, it can take anywhere from 20 seconds to 3 minutes, depending on how full the drive is you are putting back on the camera, and that's a full swap from one drive being unmounted and taken off the cradle to the new one being mounted and formatted.

That's just from personal experience.