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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Request for anti-theft system included in brain.

Johnny Friday said:
i'd say it's just life. forget the gps tracker etc....Why worry about your camera? ...your best defense is insurance..
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I disagree, Johnny.

Prevention is better than cure. Insurance companies MAKE money by insuring goods. So, on average, it will cost you more, actually heaps more, to insure than to replace. But, cheper than to replaceme is to prevent a loss.

Prevention does not need to be expensive or difficult. Often simple, chep steps will prevent the loss.

Hide it under the bed, or an unlikely place, chain it, keep out of the public view, don't post your location to 1bn people, etc...

I never insured my equipment...I can't afford it.
 
Pawel Achtel said:
I disagree, Johnny.

Prevention is better than cure. Insurance companies MAKE money by insuring goods. So, on average, it will cost you more, actually heaps more, to insure than to replace. But, cheper than replacement is prevention.

Prevention does not need to be expensive or difficult. Often simple, chep steps will prevent the loss.

Hide it under the bed, or an unlikely place, chain it, keep out of the public view, don't post your location to 1bn people, etc...

I never insured my equipment...I can't afford it.
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....then i have to double disagree. Sure prevention is 100% best. I do same. I have a hidden wall with a safe that would take dynamite to blow it up. BUT, what do i do or you do when your traveling down the road in your truck or van (i do OFTEN) and camping for weeks at a time and you happen to go take a piss or a swim....car locked up, but someone breaks in and steals your gear. $100k in gear gone in 55 seconds. Now what? guess you'll have to save a lot. It's also called peace of mind. But this thread was actually about installing some type of device on the camera or some sort of call into RED for secure updates with a pin etc....What you are suggesting is common sense which i think most of us employ. Not sure about your parts, but i live in the wild west so to speak. Been broken into several times in the past. Now i have a 16 foot wall, security system, barbed wire around my compound and some ass biting dogs. BUT, dogs can be killed, power cut and doors broken down. I'm out of the country for long spells like you probably are as well. So, a vacant home? .....one might return after a month and find the place broken into (in my case). a .357 is also nice under the bed. but, without insurance -- i was also a non-insured player most my life. BUT now with the cost of the gear i have and the amount i work...my justification is this: "if i can't afford the insurance, i'm probably not working enough and shouldn't have this gear. But if you do work it and make money from it, better just factor it in. I think my insurance at $150,000usd is around $1,500 per year more or less. So, it costs me $150usd a month or so....i'd have to say if you aren't able to make that nut, then why own this camera or any gear for that matter. Anyway, if it works for you great. Good luck and glad to hear it. But you/me also work underwater. A camera flood is ALWAYS an EXTRA added risk. Did i mention travel? Let me think of the last trip.....I count myself lucky--never had a missing bag. BUT, did check my bags a day later after TSA inspected them out of my sight....oops, a lens removed from its protective cover with smudges on it AND a CRACKED....hell, it was only my 18-50. Don't use it a lot and not really a lens i even like, but that's what a $4000 lens? I have nightmares of my 8 cases i travel with and one NOT showing up on a job. SURE GLAD I HAVE INSURANCE. and common sense to watch my gear like a hawk. but can't watch it every minute.
 
Brook is oh so often onto the coolest anything.
I like this Undercover stuff.
 
Brent J. Craig said:
It wouldn't be very hard to implement having Redcine call home once in a while and say "now processing footage from camera #0006".
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If the SDK had this then every application that decoded REDcode could try to call home.

Once it found a stolen camera's PIN the RED decode portion of the app could lock up for THAT footage, phone home and if it couldn't phone home then it could log the info on the computer and try to phone home on every launch from there on.

Undercover = Cool. Perhaps EPIC could be Undercover compatible. Shouldn't the cops be setting up sting operations with that software?
 
Password protection as an option. No password entered -> boot aborted.
 
Pawel Achtel said:
I disagree, Johnny.

Prevention is better than cure. Insurance companies MAKE money by insuring goods. So, on average, it will cost you more, actually heaps more, to insure than to replace. But, cheper than to replaceme is to prevent a loss.

Prevention does not need to be expensive or difficult. Often simple, chep steps will prevent the loss.

Hide it under the bed, or an unlikely place, chain it, keep out of the public view, don't post your location to 1bn people, etc...

I never insured my equipment...I can't afford it.
Click to expand...

hi pawel, insurance costs around 1% of the replacement costs per year.
so if you have gear worth 300 000 usd, its just 3000 usd per year.
definitly worth it.
 
Password and username on booting should be something easy to integrate in the Epic/scarlet. Is not a problem solving but at least makes the camera useless for thieves (at the begining)
 
re rental concerns, when u rent a macbook pro or so you get the passwords and thats fine, so same could work with cameras.
 
How about having a hidden compartment built into the custom foam of the camera case. Put a GPS tracking device in there. And to avoid paying monthly fees, only activate it if / when the case goes missing.
 
The easy short term solution may be to conceal an extra GPS enabled cell phone in the camera case. We track our field techs by their phones (Sprint/Nextel). A phone with the ringer turned off and an extra high capacity battery is good for several days of on time. If the theft is discovered quickly you might have a good chance of catching the perps.
 
IF ANYONE IS AGAINST ONE OF THESE PRECAUTIONS
there should be payable options

; we should have the choice to have it for ourselves if we need it and pay extra for it

;we should be able to disable all security for reasons like some of you came up with (for renting, expensive shoots, foreign shoots with no acces to internet and such...)

i've gone through trouble with reregistrations and such a couple of times as well, lost my pins of my phones , but eventually I've always been able to unlock them whether by calling to the provider which has acces to such codes when giving your ID number , address and related answers to the private questions they might ask related to your personal information...

So red could come up with some 24/7 line or internet application where you'd be asked to enter information you only could answer to give you your reregistration or authorisatoin codes again.

ASKING FOR THIS INFORMATION WITH EACH DOWNLOAD OF EACH NEW BUILD SEEMS REASONABLE TO ME;;;

if someone then is running 1 of the 1st builds , it's very clear he is using probably a stolen system


an obligated 2 or 3 month login with camera to your account could also be a very efficient way to disable stolen systems
 
Stuart English said:
We want to do all we can to help recover stolen cameras. So make sure to log your camera's 9 digit PIN number and keep that in a safe place. This PIN is written into each frame of footage recorded, so there is a continuous trail of evidence being created by each camera.

The PIN is always displayed on boot up, but what else to do is an open question. Any suggestions on this subject are most welcome...
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Stuart,

Thinking of this from a different angle. For the camera to have any value, it must produce recordable images - which requires processing. As you point out, the PIN is recorded into every frame. I believe that this is baked in and is not able to be disabled or hacked (pls confirm).

Software produced by RED is part of every post production workflow - and updates come out often.

What if:
RED Camera is stolen. Serial number is reported to RED. Verification of ownership, etc. confirmed.

RED updates the list of stolen RED cameras within the code of the next release of RED__x__ version of software.

When the PIN number in a frame matches the data in the software that tags it as a stolen camera, a message is displayed on screen:
"NOTICE: This footage may have been recorded on (Fill in legal language). Please notify RED at ____ . Thank you for keeping our community safe"

An added "exploding ink pack" could superimpose a warning bug over any footage processed until cleared with a software update issued by RED.

This approach would force anyone with hot camera footage to use a build that pre-dates the report of the theft.
Once the camera is recovered, the PIN could be deleted from the code that RED sends out in the next update.

It's not a 100% clean approach, but it does place an invisble alert onto everyones computer that will work with RED footage.
#6 will be on everyones radar, but what about every other camera stolen - even those from several years ago that many have forgotten about. It is an updatable means of identifying rouge cameras.
 
Everyone realizes that GPS is a one-way, receive only technology, right?

For any sort of GPS tracking to work you would need an additional transmitter, such as a cellular data modem, to send the location data to somewhere it can be used. This would mean additional batteries and paying for an extra cell phone plan or data service.

There are lots of these devices available now if anyone is interested: Google Link. Most are geared towards vehicle tracking, since they can tap into the vehicle's battery for power. The self-contained models should work, as long as you always remember to charge your case-tracker. Maybe someone smart will make a device to use one of your Red batteries to power the tracker!
 
Cüneyt Kaya said:
sidenote: insurance wont pay as long as there is the possibility that the cam can be found.
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Then your insurance company sucks, find a new one.
 
Liam Hall said:
Botswana's not rough!! It's Africa for trainees and newbies- you should try shooting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Somalia:)
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Your right.... Botswana is/was a breeze. It was really rather buggy going through Johannesburg's downtown barrios that had us on edge. Really any large metropolitan city. And it was rather obvious of some of the chaps who were trying to pull scams and a few small gangs of guys that you really did not want to be anywhere near.
 
Carey Lee Coffey said:
I like that idea, but no exploding ink. We don't want the thieves to know they're being tracked.
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Consider that most thieves are probably not cinematographers or producers. They are dirty scum sucking thieves - and deserve to be caught and _____.

If any of us would see a "Stolen Camera Alert" message come up on the screen when we were loading footage, what would we do? Alert the thieves or call RED?
IMHO, This approach has the greatest potential to recovering cameras. If the message does not come up on screen, the footage is considered to have been acquired with a clean camera. Message on screen, possible problem.
I don't think a thief is the most likely person to drop footage onto a computer and begin editing it. Far more likely that an "innocent" indie renter or producer would be the first to be alerted.

Consider also that there are probably a ton of people that download the RED software to play or work with files - and they are probably not keeping track of whose camera was stolen when. Which of these low budget houses would not want to be a hero by reporting that a stolen RED has surfaced?

The "exploding ink" would not be embedded in the RAW file - only in the software that is processing it. So, once tagged footage is cleared by RED, it is no longer ink stained - this way, if there was a mistake, no long term harm done.

Probably the best part about this approach is that it is internally proactive - no post house needs to check the PIN embedded in a job to a hot list - the software released by RED does that job in the background. The screen graphic lets them know - after that appears, they know there is an evidence trail. Worth putting your post company or reputation up to the risk?

Finally, once word is out, it certainly devalues the resale value of a stolen RED. The perps would never know what magic day someone with a conscience happens to load up a shot that kicks off the investigation. Each frame is a piece of evidence - who, what, when and where. Prosecuters would love it.
 
I always have to shake my head and wonder about threads like this. Too many people watching poorly written action films and garbage TV. As pointed out above, GPS is a receive-only technology. So it needs a transmitter of some kind. The most logical would be a GSM transmitter that can relay the camera PIN along with location coordinates. But what if the camera is switched off? What if the cell transmitter or its batteries (if independent) is disabled? What if it's taken out of coverage area? Any thief that knows about it will pull the battery or disable immediately. just like LoJack on laptops, what a frickin' joke. Most any serious laptop thief shuts off the computer as he takes it. They pull the HDD or access it from another system, usually looking for info they can use -- banking, personal, identity theft type stuff. That's the reason most thieves steal computers these days, not the computer itself. They'll wipe the HDD and hock it at a pawn shop or sell a crate full of stolen laptops to an overseas buyer for nothing.

LOL @ Kensington locks... I can snip that cable in 1/10th of a second. I can remove the lock dongle itself in about 3 seconds. If you manage a data center and IT operations for a decent sized company long enough, you will eventually learn all this. Even have to bust a few of the locks yourself because someone loses keys or doesn't show up for work and we need to move it now. Every laptop computer thief with only remedial skill can do this with common pliers or nippers that fit in a pocket. The only reason most companies put those ports on their hardware is because many large corporate clients won't buy unless it's on the spec list. Another fine example of suits making decisions without a working knowledge of basic hand tools.

Pad locks, locking cables, etc.. They're good to keep honest employees from having a moment of weakness. That's about it. They don't stop thieves with intent.

Equipment gets stolen, that's a way of life. We're talking about a frickin' camera... get over it. Be aware, be observant of your environment. Doubly so when traveling to places where you may be more vulnerable or around unfamiliar people. Have good insurance. Don't keep all your stuff in one place. Especially if you're in a travel situation where it can't be secured.
 
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