Monitor Troubleshooting

[Peter Östlund]

Congrats priitp and thanks. Please update this thread with the results from the trip to repairs.
To be sure I updated both cameras to firmware 17. After being outside (-4°C) for a couple of hours I tried again. Both cameras booted without the stripes. Fine. I press REC. The one with the LCD works and records. The one with VF gives me the ROCKETIO_FAULT again. Furthermore the VF-screen seems to be tinted in a very non-black color.

I will now contact RED-support.

 

[Peter Östlund]

They will bring it back for repair.
The guy at RED-support is quick and nice to deal with.

 

[Eric Gustavo Petersen]

Just got back from shooting a feature called "Rust" in Saskatchewan, Canada where at its worst, it got down to -43°C (-45°F) with the windchill. I was the show's cinematographer and our 1st AC was Michael Pavlovsky and our 2nd was Meghan Cosenzo. They did a fantastic job of keeping the camera going under some awfully difficult circumstances. Throughout the nearly three weeks of shooting for this winter portion, the camera only shut down or locked up less then two dozen times. Not bad, I think, given the weather we were in.

Here are some of the things we did to keep the camera going when the weather got nasty outside:
• We taped up all but one vent on each side of the camera.
• About 10-20 hand warmers were placed all about the camera using tape or rubber bands. The hand warmers would loose strength while exposed to the cold and we rotated them throughout the day with fresh ones we kept in our jackets. (The camera looked like a smoking addict with nicotine patches all over!) Distribution of the hand warmers went roughly like this:
⁃ 3-4 on the top of the camera,
⁃ 5-6 around the EVF (always the first component to go south on the camera),
⁃ 2 on the back of the LCD onboard
⁃ A few more on the side of the camera that didn't have audio gear on it
• Over the top and sides of the camera, we placed a car battery warmer and on top of that some cloth (I think it was a cloth diaper!). Electrics always ran power to us, but we also plugged in a power inverter into the mini van that transported the camera and ran a line from that to the camera to keep the battery warmer going when we weren't near the genie.
• We usually kept the camera covered in a plastic bag to retain as much heat as possible and keep the wind from pushing air into the chassis through the exposed air vent.
• When things got really bad, the electrics dragged out a "blond" or "redhead" and aimed it at the side of the camera, usually the side with the EVF, or aimed it at the lens. When the camera needed to be kept outside but wasn't being used, we put a big piece of duventyne over the camera and aimed two "redheads" at it to keep it warm. We'd also aim the light at the side of the lens or tripod head since both got difficult to work as they started freezing.
• We used a back warmer of all things for our larger LCD monitor (Panasonic 1700) - nearest I remember, we never had problems with that monitor.

I find that the EVF is your "canary in a cold mine" indicator for when trouble is coming. If it starts to go, you best start making plans to keep the camera warm. When we did have problems with the camera, here are some of the things that happened:
• The menus would become unresponsive or slow
• The camera wouldn't finish posting a clip and would lock up entirely (this happened three times and the clips were lost)
• The camera wouldn't shut down after pressing the power button (act of last resort, pull the power plug)
We did get "rocketio" error message two times but both times were during interior sets. I still have to find out what that error message is.

For next time, I'd like to look into getting production to buy telescope lens warmers for both the lens and for the EVF. This idea was mentioned in a previous post here on reduser.net. There are USB powered mittens out there which I think would be good to keep the EVF warm since it can be plugged into the USB slot on the side of the camera. One of the vendors that we were considering renting the camera from was making a neoprene suit for the Red with pockets for the hand warmers - that to would be nice to have.

I know it's been mentioned on this forum before but plan a strategy for dealing with the camera and lenses if you need to go inside after being outside of any length of time. If we were using the zoom lens outside, we would move the primes inside with enough time so that the primes could get acclimated to the temperatures of the interior set. If you don't do that, you could find yourself spending 40 minutes to an hour using a hair dryer on your lenses (and possibly the camera too) to get them to room temp and condensation free.

It worked for us, hope it helps you too.

 

[Peter Mosiman]

What is this error message?? Has anyone figured it out?

RED #5746 or #5747 (don't know exactly which one) has the ROCKETIO_FAULT error that shows up when we try to record something. There is no image showing up on either the RED EVF or the RED LCD.

We have emailed RED support about it. Waiting for a response from them, just wanted to see if anyone else has found the solution to this.

Thanks.