Poll, how will you handle footage?

[I Bloom]

I'm just curious as to how people plan on handling footage in the field?

[Manuel Wenger]

as i described in antoher threat, a Macbook Pro with an external HDD will come to set with my RED.

Manuel

[Paul Wizikowski]

I intend to shoot everything 4k REDCODE RAW. For most instances I intend to use a REDDRIVE per day of shooting and each of these will be my "reels" for post. I will if close to the post house drop it off for offloading that night or next day and use a second REDDRIVE for the following shoot day. I intend to have a Macboook Pro on set for offloading to secondary drives each day before I leave set AND for offloading Expresscards. Expresscards currently seem to be the most accessible medium for Flash drives (straight into the MBP) This option (the flash card) will be used for steadicam, underwater, or high intensity situations.

Paul

[Paul Wizikowski]

A quick addendum;
I am currently using LaCie Rugged Drives as my on-loction backup drives. I chose them for their Firewire interface and use of power through the firewire cable. Allowing my laptop's battery to power both the computer and the drive. Truely tether free. It has worked well for my P2 shoots.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'm in the same boat as Paul... Shoot to RED DRIVE. Offload after the shoot, or even during the shoot as drives are swapped out if I have the time or the help to do so.

I like the 1.8" SSD for FLASH media, but the ExpressCard looks like it will be more accessible. Can't argue with the straight drop into a MBP or other EC equipped notebook. For offloading of RED DRIVE data, I'll be using the OWC dual-drive enclosures that connect via FW800. Nice aluminum enclosures and I can equip them with dual 320GB drives in an internal RAID-1 mirror. Gives me redundant backup right in one box... 320GB drives are about $80, the enclosures are $120. I probably will have a few enclosures, but will swap out drives for backup so I don't keep buying $120 enclosures. I will also have a tape or other archival solution in place, but that is undecided just yet. If I had to buy today, it would be DLTS4... I like LTO-3 a bit better, but I can get DLTS4 units that can be rack mounted away from my systems and accessed via ethernet rather than depending on SCSI. Hopefully some of these options change by the end of this year when I need to have it all sorted.

[Dominique Grenier]

I'll be using the OWC dual-drive enclosures that connect via FW800. Nice aluminum enclosures and I can equip them with dual 320GB drives in an internal RAID-1 mirror. Gives me redundant backup right in one box...

Are you talking about this one [link (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEFW924AL2K/)] ?

They only mention that you can do either a RAID 0, a SPAN or set them up as independant volumes. Are you sure you can put them in a RAID 1? Or maybe your talking about setting them up with a SW RAID1?

That's something I was planning to do, but with individual case for each drive. If I can save money this way, that's something I'd be interested in!

[Poi Boy]

I will shoot red raw and use solid state media and a red drive depending on the situation. My first choice will always be solid state unless there is a time issue.
Aloha
-A

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Are you talking about this one [link (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEFW924AL2K/)] ?

Yep, that's the one... A friend of mine has a couple of those enclosures and he's been very pleased with them. He is using RAID-1 on at least one of the units... I've made the ASSumption that it handles RAID-1 onboard, perhaps it doesn't... Which means the unit gets configured as JBOD and then you would have to run SW RAID mirror. Hmmm... I'll double check that. There's always the G-RAID options, but they're a lot more expensive and include the drives already. There's not a whole lot of options out there for compact FW RAID enclosures.

[Ralph Oshiro]

OTHER:

I'm only going to shoot a fraction of a drive's worth of footage on my single RED drive on any given production day, so I'll just come home and ingest into my NLE.

[Ace]

How will I handle footage? With great care thats how.

The weakest link in the RED system will be the human. Not the equipment. Just recently I had done a friend a favour (never do friends favours, but thats a different story) of shooting his small wedding on my DSLR. A few gigs into it, we went to dump the stuff onto the lappy and confirmed that everything had copied, so as to reuse the cards. Kept shooting. Next day. Get a call. 90% of the ceremony pics had somehow corrupted during transfer process. Great. The hills are alive with the sound of oh-fuck.

Obviously it will not be possible in some cases on location to review 3 hours of footage everytime you dump it, or even make multiple copies. So I wonder how important it would be to impliment a data check feature in software which would match source with destination, intellegently verify, then give you a green light!I know for sure that if it saves just 0.0005% of file transfer grievances out there it would be well worth it for RED and the workflow integrity in general.

[Curran Giddens]

I will shoot red raw and use solid state media and a red drive depending on the situation. My first choice will always be solid state unless there is a time issue.
Aloha
-A

I'm with you on this. I will go with one RED-RAM and one RED-DRIVE and offload to a Macbook pro in the field. Luckily the RED-RAM is my first choice for solid-state memory since it is the only one I can use.--I'm getting the RAW port....

[Jaime Vallés]

I will shoot red raw and use solid state media and a red drive depending on the situation. My first choice will always be solid state unless there is a time issue.
Aloha
-A
Same here. Right now I'm thinking Expresscard/34, and direct transfer to MacBook Pro. Seems to have the fewest questionmarks for reliability.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The hills are alive with the sound of oh-fuck.

Hehe.


So I wonder how important it would be to impliment a data check feature in software which would match source with destination,

Just do a copy with verify turned on. Takes a bit more time, but it will verify the written data with that being copied to ensure a 1:1 match. I plan to offload footage to RAID-1 or RAID-5 storage whenever possible. Sure, in most cases that's paranoia, but we all know that the one time we really, really need that one shot... A hard drive WILL fail.

If REDCINE software allows offloading of footage through its interface, it hopefully has data verification. On the Mac, I don't believe data verification is enabled by default within Finder and I don't even know if it's an option. But you can use ditto from a terminal window as it copies with verification -- or I think it does. In terminal if you just use cp, there is no verification. Or run an MD5 checksum, but that could take a while. I believe that creating disk images also has the option to verify. On Windows, Win Explorer has verification turned on by default, but does not verify when using the copy command from the CMD prompt. Most decent backup software has data verification.

Anyway, I guess that's all stuff to think about.. Perhaps a little RED Offloading utility with data verification would be desirable. Similar to P2 Genie -- if anyone here is familiar with that along with the HVX or other P2 based system.