Low budget DIT Station

[Ross Bolidai]

Hi Everyone,

I've been put in charge of putting together a DIT station for an upcoming low-budget feature that we're shooting at the beginning of November. I'm trying to work out the best solution for keeping the footage safe, along with saving a little cash in the long run. My issue is that I am a Camera Operator and know relatively little in terms of computing.

My plan at the moment is the following:


Redstation eSata ---->Lacie eSata to TB -----> Macbook Pro TB ----->Lacie TB to eSata ------> 4 Drive Hard Drive Array -------> 3 separate 500GB Seagate Barracuda Drives.

At the end of the day one drive will go back home with me, another with the producer, and the third will go in a fireproof safe at the office. We've calculated that we won't be shooting any more than 2h45 of footage per day, which should fill the 500GB drives nicely. We'll be shooting for 21 days, so it looks like we'll fly through 63 drives, but we should have some very good redundancy.

My main concern however is transfer speed, as we only have 1x 64GB and 1x128GB redmags. Unfortunately we've been told that we cannot hire any more redmags due to the camera budget, so the transfer speeds will have to be snappy. As we're using a 4 drive array, I was thinking of having two drives in RAID0 to boost the speeds for the initial dump, at which point the DIT on the day could return the card and proceed to then backup to the other two 500GB drives. Would this be a risky procedure? What's usually the deal with larger productions?

Thanks for your help and apologies for the lack of coherence, I am somewhat out of my comfort zone on this one


Ross

 

[Brian Merlen]

Are you planning to use r3d data manager to do the copies? Is anyone doing playback or scrubbing the downloaded mags before wiping? Are you going to do check sums? Unless some/any of this is thought about rushing to cycle mags without making sure something wasn't corrupted in a copy might be a bad idea. If your an owner op getting an additional mag to keep in your back pocket wouldn't hurt, if your renting then forget it. Using SSD for transport drives will increase speed significantly, then use big raids for storage

 

[Ross Bolidai]

Thanks for your reply Brian,

The plan is to use r3d manager with checksums, but as far as I'm aware this really slows the process down, do you know if this is correct? Thanks for your word of caution in regards to rushing the mags at the expense of losing data, that is also a big concern of mine. Could you please elaborate on using SSDs as transport drives? What kind of raid solution would you recommend? Would Raid5 be adequate or would you advise safer measures? Our insurance states that one copy of our footage must live inside a fireproof safe, hence our initial choice of singles.

Thanks,
Ross

 

[Nick Shaw]

Using single spinning drives to download to is immediately putting you under pressure. The REDStation eSATA can read at about 180MB/s via the LaCie TB Hub, and you really want drives which can take the data at least that fast.

I would also caution against sending an SSD back to the camera after making only the first copy, and that onto a RAID0. Two REDMAGs is really never enough. You need three at an absolute minimum, meaning one is in the camera, one is being downloaded, and one is ready to be loaded into the camera at any time. This gives the DIT a buffer, so they can be more confident an SSD is copied and checked before it goes back to the camera. You never want to be the person who has to say "sorry, you can't shoot yet. I haven't finished downloading this REDMAG."

 

[Brian Merlen]

for the raid, using raid 5 is a good measure of both speed and large storage. as for the single drives, they will copy super slow and for those your better off using ssds. just use them for transport and download them and wipe daily when they get to where ever the data lives long term. the raid doesn't need SSD if its not in the budget, but you can get crazy speeds with a four drive raid and SSD. the reality is the faster you can download, checksum and wipe the less you spend on mags. So spending big on consumer raids, or raids with ssds or using ssds as transport will still be far cheaper then buying more mags

 

[Greg Huson]

Short sighted

Short sighted

Not having extra mags is very short sighted- 'penny wise pound foolish'. Heck, not having a second body in the truck shows a certain lack of experience. Unless this is a non-sag feature where everyone is working for free, you"re paying nothing for locations, everyone's bringing their own lunch and second meal, and you've got an open ended schedule, you should probably bring this potential bottleneck to the attention of the producer, and soon. Even if you get Crazy fast transfer speeds, you should still have more mags. Also- how much price difference between 500g and 1tb? Leave yourself headroom.

Unless you're shooting a lot of high speed, consider more, smaller mags. Don't set yourself up to fail.

.02

 

[Rob Ruffo]

You don't need a second body, you need a well-tested camera (that has been well tested on the firmware currently on it). We have had zero issues with our Epic and Red One that could not be fixed in 5 minutes or less.