Moving On...

[davidjakubovic]

So in the spirit of trying to learn, here is a new thread instead of the old one, with a more optimistic tone. Fair?

I just spoke to the AC on the project (and once again everyone, a very experienced AC). We talked about it for a long time, going over where the mistakes were made. Of course there are things here that are our own fault, I am not putting all blame only on the camera.

One of the things he said were interesting, and I got that from some of the posts here: is the Red not very friendly with movement?

If this is the case, then what are ways around it? I know that we had errors also when we used the cards, with dropped frames and the likes. And with the hard drive, the errors were not only during crazy handheld, they were also on a smooth jib.

So have many of you experienced issues with movement causing problems?

[Gunleik Groven]

I have (so far...) luckily not, after two weeks of everyday shooting (handheld, shoulder, jib & sticks) had these problems.

But some basic questions:
What firmware are you on?

Do you shut Redcode 28 or 36?

What size images (2k, 3k, 4k)?

16:9 or 2:1?


gunleik

[davidjakubovic]

We were shooting 4K, at first 16:9 but then we switched to 2:1 and had less problems but we still had them.

I will ask the AC about the other questions and get back to you asap.

David

[Fredrik Callinggard]

David,

If you can post some of the footage it might be easier to find the problems.


regards,


Fredrik

[davidjakubovic]

Well, I will get it tomorrow or the next day, then I will do what I have to to get it on my editing system (I hope that goes smoothly) and then we'll see about that, if you think it would be helpful I am glad to post a few seconds of footage.

[CJ Roy]

David-

The CF cards usually do just fine with movement. Vehicle, aerial, handheld, etc.

The drive, on the other hand, doesn't. Some users have come up with other drive modification solutions for it...:whistling:

[Shawn Booth]

David -

Thanks for sticking with it and trying to see how to overcome the tech problems. Once you have, I'm sure you will enjoy the RED.

Should you shoot again with it and production can't afford a "RED TECH", I'm sure you can find one where you're at to "HELP OUT" and help you have a more enjoyable experience shooting RED.

I am an experienced AC turned operator and I gotta say - I don't want to use another camera ever.

Aloha -
Shawn

[Nick Wolf]

Gunleik,

Did you do your jib tests already? whats your focus pulling solution for that? Are you doing those one-man-band or do you have a side kick AC ?

DogDay

[Gunleik Groven]

I'll need the Curt medcine for that, but yup, stuff worked, but obviously within reach... Let's not hijack this...

[Cüneyt Kaya]

So in the spirit of trying to learn, here is a new thread instead of the old one, with a more optimistic tone. Fair?

I just spoke to the AC on the project (and once again everyone, a very experienced AC). We talked about it for a long time, going over where the mistakes were made. Of course there are things here that are our own fault, I am not putting all blame only on the camera.

One of the things he said were interesting, and I got that from some of the posts here: is the Red not very friendly with movement?

If this is the case, then what are ways around it? I know that we had errors also when we used the cards, with dropped frames and the likes. And with the hard drive, the errors were not only during crazy handheld, they were also on a smooth jib.

So have many of you experienced issues with movement causing problems?


david just to clarify: did you use red branded cf cards? or other ones?

[Michael Schrengohst]

And you know you cannot change formats in mid stream?
If you started in 16:9 then you cannot shoot 2:1 on the same card.
You need to set your format, wipe the card and only shoot that
format on that card.
Same thing if going from 4K to 2K.....

[yoni maron]

Hi again. Here to support questions to my director David:
1. F.C were the RED ones
2. Redcode 28
3. Build 13
4. We actually shoot only hand held w/follow focus or Jib crane w/wireless follow focus. Jib op is the best around ! very smooth.
5. When switching from 4k to 4k2:1 problems disappeared for the most part but we still had random drop frame (on F.C) to the extent that the take was not recorded. at about 300dp it would stop recording. At some point the camera got a bit hot (small room) turning on the fan to "Hot" setting seemed to have a positive affect.
6. On the whole we got super nervous when these problems came along side
monitor out failure (not parallel to LCD monitor, I knew that in advance..)
and audio preview on camera, which again took us time to figure is not possible on build 13.
7. I will mention one more bug: while project is set at 4k2:1 on camera LCD, the monitor LCD indicate 4k. That was rather confusing and cost me with few more power downs and up + booting time etc..


yoni.

[yoni maron]

The Monitor LCD indicator was confusing and made me really unsure as to the actuall project settings as REDGUY here mentions. Card reader problems slowed us down significantly and that has nothing to do with RED off course..

[Cüneyt Kaya]

can you exclude the harmonica noise problem or how its called....loud music is bad for red

[Brent J. Craig]

7. I will mention one more bug: while project is set at 4k2:1 on camera LCD, the monitor LCD indicate 4k. That was rather confusing and cost me with few more power downs and up + booting time etc.

I don't understand why you say this is a bug. 4k2:1 is still 4k! Why would it say something different? Would you expect it to say 2k or 3k when it is set in a 4k mode?

I think an experienced Red TEch (or your rental house) would have told you to reinstall the firmware and check all of your cables.

Have you considered the possibility of electrical interference? Often on music video sets I find the video assist operator breaking the ground pins off of monitor plugs to 'fix' their problems. If this was the case, any stray voltage crossing over to ground would be going up the video cable and into/through the camera.

Were you using batteries or AC adaptor?

What was hooked up to the camera?

[Brent J. Craig]

Card reader problems slowed us down significantly and that has nothing to do with RED off course..

Strange. How did the card reader perform on your test day?

[Kenn Michael]

And you know you cannot change formats in mid stream?
If you started in 16:9 then you cannot shoot 2:1 on the same card.
You need to set your format, wipe the card and only shoot that
format on that card.
Same thing if going from 4K to 2K.....

You can change shooting resolution/formats within the same card without formatting as long as you don't change the project framerate.

If you're in 23.98, you can go between 4K 2:1, 3K 16:9 at 50fps and 2K 2:1 at 120fps all on the same card. The limitation you mention was true on earlier builds of the firmware.

[Fredrik Callinggard]

Yes but wasn't that limitation in build 13? Which they were shooting on?


Fredrik

[Kenn Michael]

Ah yes, I think you're right Fredrik, my mistake.

[yoni maron]

We definitely had loud music on set. Very loud in fact. I'm talking about a kick ass metal band. We actually felt that as close as we got to the drums the more problems we had..
CREWFIX: 1. I believe the LCD monitor was to indicate 4k2:1 and not only 4k.
2. Camera on batteries during errors. Working with AC powered camera on day 2 didn't introduce any problems.

[David Nardini]

The CF cards usually do just fine with movement. Vehicle, aerial, handheld, etc.

The drive, on the other hand, doesn't. Some users have come up with other drive modification solutions for it...:whistling:

what ??? not sure I get what you mean ... with all parameters being the same ... WHY would CF behave better than RED-DRIVE ??? and what modifications are you suggesting to RED DRIVE land ???

[Cüneyt Kaya]

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=11466

could this happened to you?
follow the link

Beware Of Harmonic or Noise Distortion

[Cüneyt Kaya]

what ??? not sure I get what you mean ... with all parameters being the same ... WHY would CF behave better than RED-DRIVE ??? and what modifications are you suggesting to RED DRIVE land ???

spinning storage medium vs. non spinning....but i would love to hear more about the modifications

[Cail Young]

We definitely had loud music on set. Very loud in fact. I'm talking about a kick ass metal band. We actually felt that as close as we got to the drums the more problems we had..

It's entirely possible the acoustic energy of the band was rattling the hell out of the hard drives.

[Fredrik Callinggard]

what ??? not sure I get what you mean ... with all parameters being the same ... WHY would CF behave better than RED-DRIVE ??? and what modifications are you suggesting to RED DRIVE land ???

Harddrive can't take the bumps but CF card being non spinning storage can.

[Fredrik Callinggard]

We definitely had loud music on set. Very loud in fact. I'm talking about a kick ass metal band. We actually felt that as close as we got to the drums the more problems we had..
CREWFIX: 1. I believe the LCD monitor was to indicate 4k2:1 and not only 4k.
2. Camera on batteries during errors. Working with AC powered camera on day 2 didn't introduce any problems.

So have we ruled out harmonic noise distortion????

If you were in the line of fire it's possible the CF cards could fail as well - less probability, but still. Did it work when you were out of range of music ?


fred

[davidjakubovic]

We were always in the range of the music so that is a hard one to answer. But in a few weeks we need to shoot the second part of the video which is all actors stuff and not much music, so we will see what happens then, as we have to use the Red again so it looks the same...

[Clint Johnson]

We definitely had loud music on set. Very loud in fact. I'm talking about a kick ass metal band. We actually felt that as close as we got to the drums the more problems we had..
CREWFIX: 1. I believe the LCD monitor was to indicate 4k2:1 and not only 4k.
2. Camera on batteries during errors. Working with AC powered camera on day 2 didn't introduce any problems.

No RAID 0 drive array likes vibration. Striping the data onto two drives makes it far less fault tolerant and more likely that a write problem will crop up. That isn't a fault of Red but of the hard drive configuration that is needed to record that datarate.

If you needed takes longer than four minutes or were short CF cards, I would have suggested isolating the drive, even if it was just a t-shirt wrapped around it and taped to the cradle rather than hard mounted.

The CF dropping frames as well makes me scratch my head and look to the "battery bad / shore power good" problem and diagnose a poor connection on the battery mount as another possible cause of the troubles. Some of the cradles need a particularly forceful push to fully seat the battery for the first several mountings and that may have been what you ran into.

It is a shame that you ran into so much trouble with your first experience on the Red and I hope that you do give Red another chance - keeping the above points in mind when working with it.

[CJ Roy]

what ??? not sure I get what you mean ... with all parameters being the same ... WHY would CF behave better than RED-DRIVE ??? and what modifications are you suggesting to RED DRIVE land ???

Clint summed it up. Solid state vs spinning platters.

As for the modifications... It's a raid 0 box with two laptop drives inside. You can figure out the rest, not that I recommend doing anything to your drives. :innocent:

[davidjakubovic]

Wow... the hard drive, huh? Are there other Red hard drives available that would be more, shall we say, "shock absorbent"??? More meant for movement? Are they working on one? Anyone know?

[Brent J. Craig]

Wow... the hard drive, huh? Are there other Red hard drives available that would be more, shall we say, "shock absorbent"??? More meant for movement? Are they working on one? Anyone know?

Yup. They call it CompactFlash.

[Fredrik Callinggard]

Wow... the hard drive, huh? Are there other Red hard drives available that would be more, shall we say, "shock absorbent"??? More meant for movement? Are they working on one? Anyone know?

And the RED Flash drive (which is a SSD raid instead), expensive though.


Fredrik

[Clint Johnson]

Wow... the hard drive, huh? Are there other Red hard drives available that would be more, shall we say, "shock absorbent"??? More meant for movement? Are they working on one? Anyone know?

I'm afraid it is the nature of hard drive and RAID technology - not Red Drives in particular. Any camera needing to record that kind of bandwidth and using a hard drive drive like that will have the same problem. If vibration resistance is needed then it would have to move to a RAID 1+0 that would more than double the cost and complexity even if it could economically be made to handle the write bandwidth- which is why Red added the Red Flash Drive and the Red CF Module to their media line up.

The reason that some hard drive solutions at lower range camera systems may be more robust is because they are using a single drive, or better yet a RAID 1, that is all you need for the lower bandwidth.

And I gotta say that after having my camera for two months of shooting with the Red Drive from shoulder to dolly to cradled in my arms and braced against the door of a moving car... I have not had a single dropped frame.

Not one.

Of course, your mileage may have varied in due to the thumping bass line running through it and that will have me keeping an eye on this for future shoots.

That is if it wasn't just a matter of the battery plate not letting the Red Brick seat fully without a good push.

[Brent J. Craig]

I guess us film guys are spoiled. We have always worked with 4 minute mags and anything else seems like overkill. The fact that an 8GB compactflash card runs for 4 minutes on Red makes it more like film than anything else.

I can picture using the drive for long (tripod) interviews in a documentary-type situation. Other than that, 4 minutes is about the length of my attention span anyway.

[Chris Parker]

fully agree with crewpix. all i want is the thousand-foot mag, or 16GB card. that's all i'd EVERY need......until redcode 100. but as for record time, 8 minutes is MORE than enough. forever.

unless shooting interviews.