What are we looking at?

[JohnF]

Okay I'm excited, I've just seen the prototype photo's and I've been quietly following RED's development so forgive me if all this has been asked before.

1. I need time-lapse and retro cache(buffered pre-record) for projects I have in development will this, is this likely to be on RED? (I really need them)

2. The on-board hard drive magazine - what is it's run/record time at all resolutions? (say with a 160Gb Hard drive magazine and yes I've heard the data transfer rates but only the 4K rate 1.65Gb/min)

3. Will RED's hard drive magazine be able to run from a laptop to transfer data to BU drives at reasonable speed? And will it require a RAID drive setup or a single(SATA) BU drive?

4. (I'll get lynched for this) I cannot stand Apple computers, will RED's codec and other software be aimed exclusivly at mac's or will it be able to run (fully featured) on other computers?

Enquiring minds need to know!

JohnF

[Rob Lohman]

1. I'll let Stuart answer that one

2. Others have not been decided yet. But 2K is 4 times less data for example (but you can record at higher frame rates which makes it go up again)

3. What do you mean by "BU drives"? The drive will saturate firewire / USB connections. RAID is not needed but might make it go faster depending on your drive performance (that you're copying to)

4. I'm a Windows guy myself. All software is being developed for Windows & Mac. Our REDCINE application has some CPU & GPU restrictions and won't run on a Mac PowerPC (G5 for example).

Platform is a personal choice. I don't see the need to lynch or flame anyone for what they want to work with or on. To each his/her own!

[Sanjin Jukic]

Quote:
"Our REDCINE application has some CPU & GPU restrictions and won't run on a Mac PowerPC (G5 for example)."

What about 15" and 17" MacBook Pro 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics with 256MB SDRAM for REDCINE?

[Rob Lohman]

It will probably run on that. We'll have to see how fast. Obviously also depends on your input resolution (what you shot at).

[Sanjin Jukic]

With a laptop doing 2k and hd 1080p (with external 30" cinema display) would be enough for the beginning with REDCODE?!

[Blaine Golden]

Well, that sounds like a good enough excuse to upgrade to the new Macs.

[JohnF]

Thanks for the response Rob.

Okay let's say at 25fps at 2k would that give (going by halving 1.65Gb/min at 4k) a recording time of ~190min on a 160Gb hard drive magazine?

About point 3. Apologies for my poor language! BU is my shorthand for back up (a term I use for everything that's not a master drive/tape) I know there's a correct terms for those things but old habits and all that!

By "saturate firewire / USB connections" does that mean these connections won't be able to cope or just that all bandwidth will be used? This is an issue for me as some of the shooting I plan to do involves limited crew numbers, 2 tops for some shots and often in the middle of nowhere, therefore being able to manage data easily and portably to get magazines ready for shooting via a laptop is important.

JohnF

[Brook Willard]

It essentially means that all of the bandwidth will be used. Using FW800 is your best bet - it's the fastest standard that they have announced support for. The limitation will probably come into play on your backup drive side - that is, assuming the backup drive is connected by anything less than FW800. It can only be as fast as its slowest link.

That said, if you're shooting 4K all freakin' day, you may consider a 2nd mini-RAID. My G5 copies about 2GB/min via FW800. That means we're talking about 80 minutes to dump 160GB of data off of the drive. If you need that camera up and running immediately, have another mini-RAID "magazine" on hand.

And tons of storage.

[Pol Turrents]

I'm very interested in time lapse recording. But the thing is that I will love to have a slow speed in order to have a nice ligh trail. Something like 2 seconds of exposure for every frame...

[Rob Lohman]

Brook's points are excellent. If you need more recording time than you can fit on one drive and can't wait to copy it off get another drive. You should be able to clean one while filling the other. I doubt you'll need more than 2 drives per camera per day, unless you have it recording 4K for 12 hours straight.

[JohnF]

Thanks for clearing that up Brook, I agree that it would be essential to have at least 2 hard-drive magazines available for almost any shoot allowing for "download rotation".

Polispol, yes a decent selection of exposure times would be great too. And if possible some exposure modes like aperture priority(where the shutter speed would vary whilst the optics would remain the same) would help too with long t-lapses with large changes in illumination over time.

I'm looking forward to capuring some very exciting images using RED's impressive latitude...

All said though running a 1fps (as mentioned on RED's website) would give pretty good t-lapse effects as long as one had a variety of shutter speeds.

JohnF

[ColinSmith]

It will be interesting to see what timelapse specific features make it onto the camera, but even without those there are workrounds; for example shooting 24/25/30p with a 360 degree shutter and blending frames will let you make you a continuous long exposure clip of any exposure time you want...although you are recording a lot more raw data.

From my experience on DSLR TL any automatic feature will give you flicker from frame to frame, and that is much harder to deal with than a simple "stepped" exposure change done manualy, although that obviously that needs somebody sitting with the camera....