UDF Issues / Questions

[Joe Riggs]

I'll be using a MacBook Pro with either Catalina or Big Sur for offloading UDF formatted mags.
Production is mandating formatting to UDF to avoid the splitting of Pro Res proxies.

I was reading a few UDF threads (granted they were from a couple years ago) but it wasn't very encouraging,
even so much as the suggestion to keep a Windows machine around in case of mounting issues.



Are there issues with UDF and Mac OS in general?
Is it true mounting a card can take up to a couple minutes?
Do I need the Sony UDF driver?
UDF cards won't work with RedUndead?
Any other gotchas to look out for?



Thank you

 

[Michael Tiemann]

A really big gotcha is that if you lose power before prores proxy is properly finalized, it's a royal pain to recover. It's one thing to lose the last 4gb of shooting on a 1tb magazine, and another to lose 999gb on a 1tb magazine...

 

[Phil Holland]

I can only speak to the mounting times. Yes. It can take several minutes on various Apple and Windows OS versions to mount UDF. And the time it takes to mount is dependent on how large the mag itself is.

 

[Jan Balster]

Hi Michael, thank you for your previous response.

Does the gotcha you've mentioned also apply to .R3D files?

Thank you,

- Jan

 

[Michael Tiemann]

The R3D format can tolerate the loss of the last .R3D file in you RDC folder. If you are recording at 250MB/sec, you'll lose only 16 seconds worst case. It's a real heart-stopper when you have one single .mov file that doesn't have the magic ProRes checksum and 800GB on disk that won't show you a single frame.

 

[Jan Balster]

Thank you Michael, that's good to know. I'll stick with UDF and .R3Ds then.

- Jan

 

[Joe Riggs]

Jan, I think Micheal was referring to that occurring when using UDF. Therefore to avoid that wouldn't you want to stick to Fat 32?


Micheal, in UDF the R3Ds are still divided into 4GB chunks so even with that being so, are you saying there's still an issue
with R3D data loss in UDF?



Micheal or Phil any confirmation that UDF formatted mags won't work with RED undead?

 

[Michael Tiemann]

The R3D media recording format is the same on FAT32 and UDF. The big difference there is that FAT32 mounting and formatting is virtually instantaneous, whereas UDF is painfully slow.

There is no reason to use UDF if all you plan to record are R3D media files.

 

[Joe Riggs]

If you do R3Ds + Proxies in the FAT32 format, do you have to stitch the proxies together in your NLE
or do they come in as 1 file like R3Ds do in Davinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere, Avid, etc...?

Then are there issues with re-linking from the proxies back to the R3Ds after the edit due to them being spanned?

In UDF format when recording R3Ds with proxies, the proxies file contains a suffix of 001, does removing
the suffix via finder make Re-linking the the R3D easier or is it unnecessary to remove it?