Tethered ingesting of footage?

[Sean Montgomery]

I'm trying to glean some knowledge on how to navigate a possible scenario. Hoping some of you folks can picture what I might be facing and suggest how to make it happen.

I met today with a fairly high profile client who is looking to build a capture setup in their research lab using REDs. By capture setup, I mean an array of REDs (perhaps 10-12 brains) in a circle, capturing a subject from every angle. At the very least, they would probably be looking at all Weapons, in case the DSMC2 ecosystem makes their goal more feasible.

What they are ultimately wanting to do is be able to ingest all of that footage into a computer WITHOUT having to physically shuffle tons of REDmags around. All cameras would be locked down in a studio, and they are hoping for a cabled/tethered solution that would record video and transfer it to a large storage drive (like a RAID) as they're shooting. This is a bit outside of my realm of experience, so I'm interested to know if this can be accomplished.

We did not yet broach the topic of whether each feed would need to be daisy chained together so they are sync'd. But having the ability to trigger record/stop simultaneously on all cameras may be a reasonable expectation, knowing what they have in mind.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

 

[Andrew Gentle]

As far as I'm aware coming from DSMC, the tether option is a way to stream the R3D data over a network connection. It's not so much of a file retrieval mode so much as a continuous stream you have to capture and store in real-time. I would imagine you'd need a pretty impressive system and network to stream from 12 REDs at once, but it may be possible. You are also required to start and stop the recording from the stream receiver, I don't think the camera can initiate recording.
So, the solution may be an array of computers which capture the streams to different disks and some kind of custom software which would be able to trigger recording on all the computers at once.

 

[Dave Winder]

Triggering record from the camera does work. So there are a couple options here, tethered record live and download after the fact. Live tethered record means you will have to deal with 10-12 gigabit ethernet feeds. We pretty much saturate the gigabit, so there is no chance of aggregating through a router. It will need 1:1 connections to NIC cards. There are also limitations on the frame rate and REDCODE. gigabit is significantly slower than SSDs. The other option is using our RFTP protocol supported by the REDLINK SDK to download from media after the record. This can not be done in parallel with recording to media as the media can not support that bandwidth. Depending on the length of recording, offloading 10-12 camera could take quite a while.
But triggering all the cameras is certainly possible using the SYNC port. You will probably want to also genlock sensor sync them as well if there is motion involved. Hardware to genlock 10-12 cameras could be hard to find.
I would also recommend feeding timecode to all cameras, the record start might not always be frame accurate on all cameras, although our testing has shown it to behave so.

 

[Sean Montgomery]

Thanks Dave and Andrew! This is all good and helpful information to know.