Protocol for Footage on Set

[I Bloom]

This is a human engineering question:

What system will you use to prevent footage loss on set? In other words how do you insure that footage has been properly transferred from one medium say Compact Flash or a RED Drive to another such as a larger RAID.

I have my own system now for working with P2 cards, but I have to admit it can be flawed.

How will you ensure that all footage you shoot is transferred properly before formatting media, who will do what when you have multiple crew members handling footage? How will you prevent mix ups?

Will there be any additional tools and software that you will use in this process?

IBloom

 

[Dominique Grenier]

The proper way is to run an md5 checksum on the files before deleting anything. This way, you ensure that the data has been transfered and hasn't been corrupted in the process.

Also, copying to two drives, either in RAID1 configuration or on two seperate drives, is the way to go on the set. Two physically seperated drives is also safer than two drives within the same enclosure. So if you drop one, or loose it, or whatever, you still have another physical copy of the media.

 

[Mike Prevette]

simple. hire good people. for over a hundred years the toughest, hardest, most stressfull, and single most important person on a film set has been the loader. that still rings true on amodern film set. a lot of lay people skip over the importance of this person because they see the financial hiarchy on a film set, they don't realize the trial by fire system that has been set in place so everyone working their way up the camera crew knows the importance of a good loader.

 

[Jim Arthurs]

And before anyone thinks that the film workflow was loss-proof, I learned a couple of things by free-lancing in a motion picture lab in the mid '80's....

... the lowest paid guy in the building is the first one to touch your undeveloped film.

...And the "smack" sound as somewhere in the process a splice between reels fails and a couple of clients reels goes flying off the rollers into the soup.

... And the fun of fishing out a dead rat from the ultrasonic cleaning solution.

Film is bullet-proof.

 

[Simon Baechler]

It would be a good thing to have a custom software that takes care of the copying and validating of the files.

I've worked on a P2 feature and we lost a few media files (video or audio) without noticing. There was no error message and we only noticed when the card had already been formatted.

I'm working on a system for downloading and storing footage on the set. It also lets you watch clips and batch convert them. It will also feature a removable drive that can go to the editor every night. Of course it will be transportable and everything is stored redundant.

 

[Mike Prevette]

By no means was the film system perfect, neither was the p2, nor will the RED be perfect. My point was the best way you can hedge your bets is by hiring responsible, smart, educated people. There will always be room for error, but you can control that margin down to a minuscule percentage point. Software nor hardware will never fix that completely.
_mike

 

[I Bloom]

By no means was the film system perfect, neither was the p2, nor will the RED be perfect. My point was the best way you can hedge your bets is by hiring responsible, smart, educated people. There will always be room for error, but you can control that margin down to a minuscule percentage point. Software nor hardware will never fix that completely.
_mike

I agree with you. But smart educated people also get tired and make mistakes. A good system helps them prevent those mistakes. That's what I'm interested in a system or protocol. Software is only part of it, people are only part of it.

Ian

 

[donatello b]

never reuse the CF = no filed lost !!

 

[Chris Kenny]

It's been posted here before, but the David Fincher quote on this subject is priceless:

“The studios, for instance, often had what, for me, was a surreal response early on. They were trying to understand who, exactly, would take the digital media from the set and get it cloned and archived safely for them. I said, ‘The same, totally underpaid PAs who normally take your film from the set, in the middle of the night, to the lab. Now, instead, they will be taking an anvil case with a D.Mag in it back to the editing room.’” (Link)

Thanks to REDCODE, we'll have it a little easier than Fincher, since footage will be small enough to fit on pocket-sized hard drives.

We're planing to download footage onto two LaCie Rugged hard drives, set up in RAID 1 mode. We already have several of these drives kicking around, and we like them a lot. When transporting footage back to the office, we'll keep the two drives physically separate, probably with one in the personal care of the director and one in the personal care of the DP.

As far as making sure nobody erases flash cards before they're downloaded, if you write up a list of instructions that goes something like...

1. Checksum original data.
2. Copy data.
3. Checksum copy.
4. Make sure checksums match.
5. Erase flash card.

...it's inevitable that as people get tired, or multiple people switch off downloading footage, steps will get skipped.

The way to fix this is to reduce the number of manual steps. I'm probably going to write a script that does all of this with one click, and provides nice prominent messages announcing success or failure. Unless Red has something like this in RedCine already, of course, which wouldn't be a bad idea.

 

[Michael Schrengohst]

LaCie's are diasters waiting to happen. Look at G-tech instead.

 

[Chris Kenny]

LaCie's are diasters waiting to happen. Look at G-tech instead.

Yeah, we've had issues with their desktop drives, I wouldn't recommend those. But we've had several Rugged drives kicking around for a while now, and they seem solid, despite taking a fair bit of abuse.

 

[I Bloom]

1. Checksum original data.
2. Copy data.
3. Checksum copy.
4. Make sure checksums match.
5. Erase flash card.

I'd add to that a sanity check:
4B. Make sure all the footage on one drive matches the footage from the other drive, visually.
4C. Make sure no two batches of copied footage are the same.

I think the biggest problems arise with multiple flashcards or drives. Here is something that actually happened to me:

I had worked out a system to transfer P2 cards using a Macbook with a DualAdapter connected to a drive. Usually the DIT would get handed one card, and they would go dump it and hand it back. Since we format in camera there is a hand off, at which point the AC asks, is this card ready to be formatted, the DIT says yes. Then they immediately pop out the other card so as not to get it confused. They insert the card ready to be formatted, they format it. Reinsert the other card and reselect that first card so that we continue rolling on it. (RED only has one CF slot (currently), so if we format in camera, the process will be different.)

Here is where a problem can arise. Sometimes, you aren't in a spot where you can continually dump and you pass two or more cards to the DIT that all need to be dumped. Disaster can strike if the DIT, copies the same card twice and forgets another card. The checksum can't overcome that problem, we need several layers of sanity checks and organization to prevent it. It would be nice if software could warn you when the same footage is copied twice as well.

I got totally screwed by this one time...by the way.

Rereading this I can see how formatting at the computer will eliminate this problem.

IBloom

 

[Chris Kenny]

Rereading this I can see how formatting at the computer will eliminate this problem.

It eliminates both problems. First, you never download footage twice, and second, the card gets formatted by someone who has just personally verified that the footage has been copied. (Or, if you've automated the whole copy/verify/format process into a one-click operation, the card gets formatted by the same process which just verified the footage was copied.)

From reading in the other threads, the camera will need to format the blank card again when you insert it. But this is not a problem, because it automatically prompts for this. IOW, you never have the camera operator manually choosing to format cards. If the camera op inserts a card and doesn't get a formatting prompt, he knows something has gone wrong somewhere and he should immediately eject the card and hand it over to someone who can figure out what's on it.

 

[I Bloom]

It eliminates both problems. First, you never download footage twice, and second, the card gets formatted by someone who has just personally verified that the footage has been copied. (Or, if you've automated the whole copy/verify/format process into a one-click operation, the card gets formatted by the same process which just verified the footage was copied.)

From reading in the other threads, the camera will need to format the blank card again when you insert it. But this is not a problem, because it automatically prompts for this. IOW, you never have the camera operator manually choosing to format cards. If the camera op inserts a card and doesn't get a formatting prompt, he knows something has gone wrong somewhere and he should immediately eject the card and hand it over to someone who can figure out what's on it.

This seems slightly convoluted no? Maybe REDCINE needs a format option. Is it a necessary part of your human protocol that both need to format the card. Seems like the operator should just roll on anything that they are holding, and only worry about passing off cards that are full.

Ian

 

[Chris Kenny]

This seems slightly convoluted no? Maybe REDCINE needs a format option. Is it a necessary part of your human protocol that both need to format the card. Seems like the operator should just roll on anything that they are holding, and only worry about passing off cards that are full.

The format prompt on the camera serves a useful purpose here, actually. The operator will know that they should always get that prompt when they insert a card. If the card were formatted on the computer in a way that made the camera fully happy (so it didn't prompt when inserted), it would leave open the possibility that a card with data on it could be inserted, and the operator might not notice. They wouldn't format that card, but they might lose a shot when they realized too late there wasn't as much space on the card as they thought. (I don't know how obviously the camera makes this situation clear.)

In an ideal world, RedCine would have a feature where, with one click, it could copy footage to two drives at once (not RAID mirrored -- it's safer to have two fully independent volumes in case of software-based file system corruption), verify the data, format the card in a way that made the camera happy, and pop up a nice reassuring message that everything had worked (along with a list of the files copied, including digital slating data). On top of this, the camera would have an extremely prominent warning if a card with footage on it was inserted.

 

[tj williams]

I have a friend who is a dit in the uncompressed world. They have very complete systems approaches already worked out. I will try to get a complete run down here. I sure hope the software folk at RED are reading this thread as the idea of the workflow being built into RED cine as a script which simply gives us a big COPY SUCCESSFUL/CHECKSUM SUCCESSFUL then asks if the dit would like to reformat the card or Mag. and only asks this When the copy and checksum are successful will do wonders to prevent embarrassment to our camera system.

I would also like to be able to dual record on 2 CF cards at a time or onto two hard drive mags at a time. This would be good for really important stuff when it just cannot be lost and enable the production to have 2 recordings at all times right from the camera. I agree that it will be rare for the mag drives or cf cards to fail, but the more redundancy you show the insurance folk the better accepted the gear will be! Also this clearly makes the reliability of the storage more capable than film.

 

[Ramesh Jai]

By no means was the film system perfect, neither was the p2, nor will the RED be perfect. My point was the best way you can hedge your bets is by hiring responsible, smart, educated people. There will always be room for error, but you can control that margin down to a minuscule percentage point. Software nor hardware will never fix that completely.
_mike

That has alway been my motto; hire the best people for the job so that you can do your job best.

 

[Jonathan L. Bowen]

Yeah I also find it ironic that the person who handles the footage, which is the raw components of the final product itself, is often underpaid and considered low on the totem pole even though if he fails, you are really in trouble.

I saw someone post an ad on Craig's List that really shocked me. The guy wanted a P2 card downloader, someone to transfer the footage to a laptop I mean, for $100 for a full day of shooting and expected the applicant to provide a laptop for them and the means by which to connect the P2 card to the laptop. I mean, $100 a day is terrible pay, but could be acceptable if you're just expecting labor and figuring the person will get experience, but to pay someone $100 AND expect them to bring expensive equipment to the set is ridiculous to me. I'm sure the guy still had 15-20 people interested even so. Sad.

 

[david farland]

I would also like to be able to dual record on 2 CF cards at a time or onto two hard drive mags at a time.

You can always keep on adding redundancy until you nuke it off the face of the earth but I'm not sure double disks or flash drives are the option.

If I was going to that length I'd probably prefer recording to 1 cf card and 1 Reddrive (raid 1) at the same time, swapping cf cards out as they were full and then backed up to laptop etc.
But I can see where it'd be cool to have dual hot swappable cf drives for continous recording...or to be still recording to cf as you hot swapped reddrives.
Cheers,

 

[M Most]

I have a friend who is a dit in the uncompressed world. They have very complete systems approaches already worked out.

"The uncompressed world" these days usually means S.two recorders. In this case, the backup situation is handled by a dock system made by S.two. The backups are not on mechanical disk storage, but on LTO3 data tapes. In most cases, the system loads the D.mag from the S.two (about 30 minutes worth of material) and backs it up to two LTO3 tapes simultaneously. The D.mag then gets recycled. Verification of the data is done by the backup software. This is a good way of doing it, and illustrates a couple of things about the high end market - where failure is not acceptable - and the more "DIY" market, where cost is the primary consideration. First, proper backup and verification takes some time. Second, mechanical storage - like hard drives - and fragile storage - like CF cards - is just not considered as reliable in the long run as a more solid, designed-for-the-purpose solution, such as LTO3. Third, proper backup at the source is rather critical when you're recording on a medium that is not permanent (i.e., temporary data storage as opposed to, say, videotape or film).