Feature request: "keep rolling" mode

[Joe Vinson]

Sorry if this has been discussed elsewhere, or if it's already an existing function (my camera's still boxed -- come to papa, Birger mount!), but here's a neat feature I would love to see:

"Keep rolling" mode

I can think of several times when I've set up a camera static on a tripod and just waited for something (usually a natural phenomenon) to happen -- for a bird to fly into frame, a bug to crawl into the macro view, lightning to bolt through the sky, etc.

Rather than taking potentially hours of footage, or stopping the camera intermittently to reformat and start over, could the RED have a shooting mode where it constantly writes to the compact flash card and disregards the unneeded footage in reverse chronological order?

It would work in the same way that DVRs buffer a few minutes' worth of whatever you're watching, in case you decide to record that program after it's already started.

Then, once you've got the "moment" you want, you push the stop button and it will have only the last 10 minutes or so (dependent on your CF card) of footage.

Any thoughts?

 

[Lauri Kettunen]

Yes, happily second Akabaka's request. This kind of buffer, say even 10-20 seconds would be great.

 

[Brook Willard]

It's been requested a zillion times over the past few years... I don't know if RED ever officially said it'd happen or not, but I bet it will be an option in a few firmware builds. It seems that it'd be easy enough to program...

 

[Michael Booth]

You can do this with the HVX so I'm sure the Red team could easily implement something.

 

[Barry Green]

On the P2 cameras it's called "loop record" mode. It records continuously in the avaialable space on the cards, and when you stop recording, it just goes with whatever the last minutes were.

Something like this would be great on Red. A limitation of "loop record" mode is that it takes up all the available space on all your cards; it'd be nice to set the loop size to a specific size (say, one minute or two minutes or whatever).

 

[Noah Kadner]

Or they could do it as it's done on the Phantom HD where the drive is partitioned into segments and each segment can become it's own loop. Works like a charm.

Noah

 

[Jarred Land]

we listen..

wink. wink.

 

[Andrew Benz]

On the P2 cameras it's called "loop record" mode. It records continuously in the avaialable space on the cards, and when you stop recording, it just goes with whatever the last minutes were.

Something like this would be great on Red. A limitation of "loop record" mode is that it takes up all the available space on all your cards; it'd be nice to set the loop size to a specific size (say, one minute or two minutes or whatever).

Or they could do it as it's done on the Phantom HD where the drive is partitioned into segments and each segment can become it's own loop. Works like a charm.

Noah

we listen..

wink. wink.

Hell to the Yes!:devil:

 

[Joe Vinson]

Great to hear, Jarred! You guys rock.