How much storage would you use?

[Christopher Nagel]

From the professionals on this board, I'd like to ask how much on/near-camera storage you would like best? I ask because I notice most people swapping out their 8 gig cards before they're full, so I wonder if more is really better in the case of RED shooters?

This is preliminary to a business venture, so I'd really appreciate any assistance you could provide.

It's a "what-if" question, so feel free to dream big. :-)

Thanks,
Chris

[C.H.Haskell]

Hey Chris, Only two options available at the moment for on camera

A. 8GB CF cards
B. 320GB RED RAID hard drive

I think many people including myself tend to offload the 8gb before its full cause there is only one CF slot on the RED so to avoid running out of space while in the middle of your take, swap it out.

I think 16GB CF would be a sweet spot for me, I prefer to stagger footage down the pipe for safety reasons, not to mention editor can start his preliminary work on location.

Hope this helps.

[Christopher Nagel]

Thanks, C.H. - it's good to know your reasoning, that helps a lot.

Chris

[Mike Prevette]

8gig cards are awesome because they time out almost the same as a 400 foot mag on a film camera. Producers and directors love to hear that, and it makes them comfortable. I agree that 16gigs would be a sweet spot, before the bump up to drives for other jobs.

[Martin Weiss]

For me 32gb would be great. I often do longer interviews - where 16gb probably would be sufficient, but it'd be nice to have the extra cushion.

[Harva Raj]

it 's not about how many GB of card you need. it's how much time you are going to shoot with it. when scarlet or epic comes along with redcode 100, the length you can record on a 8 or 16 GB will be vary. The sweet spot will be different cards which can hold 4 minutes, 30 minutes and 1 hour in highest quality. doing slowmo is easy in 1 hour cards too.

4 minute cards - feature films, commercials (easy to backup critical footage and edit on set)
30 minute cards - interviews
1 hour cards - slowmo,concerts, car race coverage in helicopters, weddings! (when you can get only one shot at the (long) event

[Vigen Vartanov]

8GB is fine for me , Because you always can check data . It like Film , you now that you need to change type every 8 min. For me i need 32 GB nly for long Time Lamps.

[Christopher Nagel]

I'd never have thought people would *want* to change cards every 4 minutes, especially if they have the option not to, but the poll responses seem firmly clustered around low-capacity media as the "most desired".

From the posted responses (for which, thank you all), I gather the reasons to get the media off-camera quickly are:

1) to copy it (safety)
2) to review it
3) to let the editor get to it

(I didn't list the non-technical reasons, which I do understand.)

But if those things could be taken for granted, why not just keep shooting?

Chris

[Brandon Fraley]

I come from the miniDV background, but I've quickly learned to appreciate the benefits of low capacity media. HOWEVER, I don't understand why you would not want to have the OPTION of going longer if needed.

For me, 8gb is too small. Having both 16gb and a few 32 gb cards would be ideal.

[Fredrik Callinggard]

I'd never have thought people would *want* to change cards every 4 minutes, especially if they have the option not to, but the poll responses seem firmly clustered around low-capacity media as the "most desired".

The RED post workflow is quite time consuming and there's also a "risk" in not having your footage on a computer backed up. So a lot of us (especially the ones with cine background) tends to change quite often.

As Haskell previously said, it lets the DIT start working with the footage on set already. Often he needs to convert all of it to Prores or similar codec for offline editing. So he prefers to get it started as early as possible.

regards,


Fredrik Callinggard

[Costelloe Michael]

We tended to go for 10-12 minutes as the 'sweet spot' for footage as this is more or less 1000' x 35mm / 400'x 16mm. But for less 'convenient' situations then seemed to naturally defer to the 'not more than 15%' of a Red Drive. I suppose somewhere in our psyche this equates more to the length of an HD tape!

Odd but that's the way we found ourselves rationalising it!

Mike C

[Craig Schober]

it's silly to limit yourself to running times dictated by a physical medium when you're working digitally. red wasn't created to simply match 35mm quality and workflows but rather to supersede upon it in every way imaginable. expect 256gb. wish for 512gb. get used to 1tb of solid state storage and alter your workflow accordingly.

[RyanKunkleman]

16gb cards would be about right for the current redcode. It would be close to a 1000' mag and that makes people on set happy. we use the drives for long dialog scenes.

[amrrahmy]

if the epic would work with a 300GB san drive, i would say 1TB sata for backup on set would be enough(i think).
solid state will be, but is not yet fast enough for epic.