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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 :)

What the Hell is a "CODEC FAULT" ??

George D.

George D.

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I am VERY, VERY unhappy, to say the least. :(

We were shooting a very critical scene today, of wildlife, and unlike actors, we cannot reshoot if something goes wrong. Our Red-One, all of a sudden, stopped working and this flashed on the rear LCD panel: "Codec Fault" !

What the hell is that?

Because of it, we lost that shot, and the last four before it. "FIVE" shots, very important, non-repeatable, ones, down the shitter.

Will someone be kind enough to tell me what's going on? When this happened we were using our 320GB Red Drive, then after Unmounting it, we turned the camera off and back on again with a Red CF Card installed. The remaining shots came out fine and the camera worked OK.

So, what the hell is going on, and how can I prevent this in the future. For wildlife, that could be an absolute DISASTER.

Thanks.

.
 
Hi Georg, during the years I shot with Red One (wildlife stuff), had this only couple times after the very preliminary build that allowed to shoot in the 16:9 format at the first place. In these cases I was running the camera in 3K and 2K with maximum framerate. Despite the Codec Fault, the file itself on the Red Drive was completely usable although the camera playback was not able to play the file on the LCD. When tested this kind of shots, if remember well, found out that the Codec fault was somehow related to high contrast scenes when having the prerecorder on for a long time. The trick to avoid such problems was to decrease the framerate in 2K from 100fps to 98fps or in 3K from 50fps to 48fps.

Summing up, it worth while to check the files, they migth playback just fine on a computer. Of course, the recording stops at the"Codec fault" message.
 
I have had that happen and the shots were there, they just wouldn't play back and there were no proxies. Are you sure the shots are gone?

Nick
 
yep, shot is here. I had it happen 3 times in a row when shooting trees in the wind in backlight last month. Everything were here.

I can't even think how a codec fault would damage the 4 previous shots. Except if the hard drive itself is broken.
 
Lauri Kettunen said:
Hi Georg, during the years I shot with Red One (wildlife stuff), had this only couple times after the very preliminary build that allowed to shoot in the 16:9 format at the first place. In these cases I was running the camera in 3K and 2K with maximum framerate. Despite the Codec Fault, the file itself on the Red Drive was completely usable although the camera playback was not able to play the file on the LCD. When tested this kind of shots, if remember well, found out that the Codec fault was somehow related to high contrast scenes when having the prerecorder on for a long time. The trick to avoid such problems was to decrease the framerate in 2K from 100fps to 98fps or in 3K from 50fps to 48fps.

Summing up, it worth while to check the files, they migth playback just fine on a computer. Of course, the recording stops at the"Codec fault" message.
Click to expand...

Thanks guys, but the files are GONE. All that's left in the PC are "empty" file folders with nothing inside.

Very aggravating!!

.
 
Unless you've formatted, or otherwise used the drive, the files are there. Trust me, a HDD can't just suddenly turn it's little head and decide to delete files for no good reason -- the last shot might be corrupted, but the other ones are there; just probably hidden. Try REDUndead as suggested and keep us posted what you find.
 
I know my post wont be helpful but these posts are un-nerving to say the least. I see we have Restivo and a few others from RED on it and hopefully others listening. Question; Is there realisticlly ever going to be a sturdy system here. We need to know if the plan is
to get the bugs out. This, as most are, a reputation based industry and these events arent helping matters. Ive heard resposes like " well take a second body as a backup" to the issues that most of us thought were and should be by now long behind us. I cant believe this is going to find it way out of my mouth but here goes, I "almost" rather shoot 2k (ouch) if i know im not going to see any camera bugs. Please tell me you have solutions. Red ones, epics, rockets...all these ghosts are getting rather goulish
 
I can say that there is a chance the files are not there. A bad drive cable can cause this, where after a while the camera realizes that data isn't coming through anymore, or not at all, and throws this warning. In this case red undead will probably recover nothing or a scrambled mess. I would recommend trying a new cable, as these days detail based codec faults are rare.

I would thoroughly test both the drive and the cable before recording anything important on it.

Tim
 
sergio arguello said:
I know my post wont be helpful but these posts are un-nerving to say the least. I see we have Restivo and a few others from RED on it and hopefully others listening. Question; Is there realisticlly ever going to be a sturdy system here. We need to know if the plan is
to get the bugs out. This, as most are, a reputation based industry and these events arent helping matters. Ive heard resposes like " well take a second body as a backup" to the issues that most of us thought were and should be by now long behind us. I cant believe this is going to find it way out of my mouth but here goes, I "almost" rather shoot 2k (ouch) if i know im not going to see any camera bugs. Please tell me you have solutions. Red ones, epics, rockets...all these ghosts are getting rather goulish
Click to expand...


I've transferred literally thousands of terrabites of digital cinema data, from many cameras. And the all have hiccups. Almost every single camera job I've done, whether alexa, red, etc, have had a backup body. Backup parts are a critical part of working with pro gear on important (to somebody) projects. A lot of problems, in fact most, can be solved by re booting, or trying a backup cable or accessory. And that goes for every camera, and its even mostly true in film.

Knowing your equipment and at least knowing where to get a backup are important parts if important jobs.

Note: this reply is not meant as advice or a comment to the original poster, I know it doesn't fix his problem. It is a reply strictly to the poster above, as I have quite a bit of experience in this area.

Tim
 
sergio arguello said:
I know my post wont be helpful but these posts are un-nerving to say the least. I see we have Restivo and a few others from RED on it and hopefully others listening. Question; Is there realisticlly ever going to be a sturdy system here. We need to know if the plan is
to get the bugs out. This, as most are, a reputation based industry and these events arent helping matters. Ive heard resposes like " well take a second body as a backup" to the issues that most of us thought were and should be by now long behind us. I cant believe this is going to find it way out of my mouth but here goes, I "almost" rather shoot 2k (ouch) if i know im not going to see any camera bugs. Please tell me you have solutions. Red ones, epics, rockets...all these ghosts are getting rather goulish
Click to expand...

Sergio,
Its posts like this that fan the bs. I have 5 Epics and 3 Red Ones...in nearly 6 years I have not lost 1 single frame of footage. Thosands of terabytes of footage and not one lost frame. Don't get me wrong, shit happens, but we have no idea what actually went on with the original poster. How do we know based on post #1 if it wasn't a bad cable, bad drive, etc, that was caused by abuse. We have no idea what happened, so why do we want to speculate and turn this unfortunate incident into something greater?
 
sergio arguello said:
I know my post wont be helpful but these posts are un-nerving to say the least. I see we have Restivo and a few others from RED on it and hopefully others listening. Question; Is there realisticlly ever going to be a sturdy system here. We need to know if the plan is
to get the bugs out. This, as most are, a reputation based industry and these events arent helping matters. Ive heard resposes like " well take a second body as a backup" to the issues that most of us thought were and should be by now long behind us. I cant believe this is going to find it way out of my mouth but here goes, I "almost" rather shoot 2k (ouch) if i know im not going to see any camera bugs. Please tell me you have solutions. Red ones, epics, rockets...all these ghosts are getting rather goulish
Click to expand...

Of course it's sturdy. There isn't a camera system in existence - whether using videotape, film emulsion, hard disk or solid state media - that hasn't lost a clip from time to time. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying or ill-informed. That said, we did see a small increase in codec errors when recording to RED-DRIVE following the introduction of the Mysterium-X sensor. That was traced to the extra detail available from that sensor generating larger data files that tripped up the media, however that was addressed by camera software upgrades and has been a dead issue for many months.

So if a RED ONE camera is seeing any kind of occasional codec error, we need to verify the camera firmware version, sensor type and what media it was recording to, and that simply means sending in a camera LOG file to RED Tech Support. Analysis of the LOG file may or may not lead to a request to send in the RED DRIVE for maintenance.

It is unfortunate when any clip is lost, and I can assure everyone any report of that has our full attention.
 
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Hang in there George. There is a reason red switched to SSDs. Those spinning drives are a little sketchy. I've had a couple go down on me but we were always able to retrieve almost all of the seemingly lost data. Like one of the previous posters said "if you can afford it make the switch to SSDs."

Best, Peter
 
Definitely switch to SSD if you have a lot of shots like this that simply can not be repeated. Its the best available system at any price.

I also want to back up the statement that EVERY camera system has flaws.

I've shot with a wide variety of camera systems. F900, MiniDV, DVCPRO HD (TAPE) DVCPRO HD (p2), XDCAM (Optical) XDCAM EX, RED, F35 ... its a long list of cameras from every major vendor.

I had tape dropouts on a reasonably new Sony Digital Betacam shooting the President of the United States. I've had a dropout on tape during someone's wedding. A pilot I worked on (XDCAM EX) nearly lost the whole production due to bad data management. (I didn't trust the data guy and camera just didn't recycle media, or else it would have all gone away.) I worked a hockey game where a player stepped on some Triax and killed a few cameras.

Oh and film loses data too. Or maybe you've never been on a shoot where someone flashed a mag? Or how about a shoot where the new loader loaded the film with the emulsion facing the wrong way, and they lost whole days? Sometimes the film gets safely to the lab and the lab screws up processing.

The only camera systems I haven't lost data with at some point is DSLR. I assure you that is just dumb luck though ... if I shoot it enough it will lose data too. (I've only shot about 8TB of camera data with DSLRs, and only about 2TB on my personal unit.) I already had one "scare" with DSLR, but all that experience doing data recovery on motion imaging saved the shots.

I think every camera operator that's been around the block has seen their footage lost. If this is your first time... then you are very very lucky. Plan on it happening again, no matter what camera you use. The point is to have a plan and to try and never need that plan.

As far as extra bodies ... hell! Even film shoots carry extra bodies when they have the budget.

Data loss happens - whether that data is on film, tape or digital media. My experience is that the digital systems have better than average reliability, and that the Red cameras are way above even that average.
 
Sean R. said:
As both Dan and John (on the support ticket) suggested try running REDundead on that drive to recover the clips. You can download that here: https://www.red.com/support/all/downloads/13/release_history/97/agreements/4
Click to expand...

Thanks Sean, but I tried downloading Redundead, and it says that it is NOT supported by this operating system. My OS is Windows7 64bit, so I don't understand the problem.

If it is still downloadable, please let me know how.

Thanks for your help.

.
 
Alexander Ibrahim said:
Definitely switch to SSD if you have a lot of shots like this that simply can not be repeated. Its the best available system at any price.

I also want to back up the statement that EVERY camera system has flaws.

I've shot with a wide variety of camera systems. F900, MiniDV, DVCPRO HD (TAPE) DVCPRO HD (p2), XDCAM (Optical) XDCAM EX, RED, F35 ... its a long list of cameras from every major vendor.

I had tape dropouts on a reasonably new Sony Digital Betacam shooting the President of the United States. I've had a dropout on tape during someone's wedding. A pilot I worked on (XDCAM EX) nearly lost the whole production due to bad data management. (I didn't trust the data guy and camera just didn't recycle media, or else it would have all gone away.) I worked a hockey game where a player stepped on some Triax and killed a few cameras.

Oh and film loses data too. Or maybe you've never been on a shoot where someone flashed a mag? Or how about a shoot where the new loader loaded the film with the emulsion facing the wrong way, and they lost whole days? Sometimes the film gets safely to the lab and the lab screws up processing.

The only camera systems I haven't lost data with at some point is DSLR. I assure you that is just dumb luck though ... if I shoot it enough it will lose data too. (I've only shot about 8TB of camera data with DSLRs, and only about 2TB on my personal unit.) I already had one "scare" with DSLR, but all that experience doing data recovery on motion imaging saved the shots.

I think every camera operator that's been around the block has seen their footage lost. If this is your first time... then you are very very lucky. Plan on it happening again, no matter what camera you use. The point is to have a plan and to try and never need that plan.

As far as extra bodies ... hell! Even film shoots carry extra bodies when they have the budget.

Data loss happens - whether that data is on film, tape or digital media. My experience is that the digital systems have better than average reliability, and that the Red cameras are way above even that average.
Click to expand...

Boy, are you right Alexander. I've had many of those things you've described happen to me too. Film being exposed to light somewhere during the handling process was always a fear, "back then". And, tape based cameras? Ouch!!

After reading all these great comments and suggestions, I've come to the conclusion that it is most likely NOT the camera's fault, but either the Drive or the cable, since I just bought them both "used".

I wish anything, we "could" afford moving up to SSDs. But, where we'd come up with the money I'll never know.

I will be buying a new cable from Red, and I'll have a back up drive at all times.

Thanks to everyone, but I want to make sure you all understand, that in no way, shape, or form, am I slamming the Red-One. This is probably the finest camera I've ever used in my 38 years in the business. Well, my Arri16 was a really reliable work horse though, I have to admit that. But, even it, failed me on occasion.

.
 
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