RED 4K on Tape

[Harva Raj]

The whole point of modular is about choosing a specific hardware and workflow that we want. some of us want a lightweight steady cam, some of us has to use that heavy 35mm zooms and such. And some of us want to work on tape.... ok,don't freak out...

is it possible to have a RED tape module that simultaneously records r3d on digital tape and ssd/hdd/cf. so we could toss the master tape in shelf and just pass the ssd/hdd/cf to DIT/editor to raid backup and start editing?

[Brandon Fraley]

not 4k, but you can record out the dual HD SDI to an SR deck.

[Harva Raj]

not 4k, but you can record out the dual HD SDI to an SR deck.

i realize that. but i'm talking about a 'onboard' , minidv/standard dv tape like recording device. it's not like recording 'video' to the tape. it's more like caching the r3d data and transferring to the DATA tape. like LTO.but realtime

[Brandon Fraley]

i realize that. but i'm talking about a 'onboard' , minidv/standard dv tape like recording device. it's not like recording 'video' to the tape. it's more like caching the r3d data and transferring to the DATA tape. like LTO.but realtime

I suppose never say never... but I'm gunna say it anyway. Never gunna happen.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

And, uh, why would you want this? Serious question.

What sort of tape and what type of format do you propose to use? Other than LTO/Ultrium and SDLT and perhaps AIT, there really are no forthcoming tape products anywhere. The future of tape looks somewhat bleak. I suppose LTO-5 will happen and LTO-3 and 4 are good solutions NOW for archival. But I wouldn't want a camera to lay tracks right to LTO as that's not really very productive for long-term archival and over time would create a lot of unnecessary bulk in terms of storage media.

I'm sure there would be a niche market for something like this. I'm just not sure what the true purpose of it would be other than to have an automated "lazy backup" of everything you shoot.

[Stuart English]

As a (RAW or RGB data) archive, tape has a role - perhaps an extremely important role.

But we have no intention of supporting a tape drive on the cameras themselves.

The medium is much too fragile, too power hungry and very restrictive in terms of data rate.

[Danish P.V.]

As we have 120 Gb of data from a single, SMALL project I really wonder where to put it when we`re done. I mean, I`m not going to keep them on my workstation`s drives. And I doubt that we can leave the stuff forever on our posthouse`s raid storage...
My point: When Red started off with their project some time in 2006 a lot of us guys (me including) thought that there would be some safe storage technology at the horizon. It`s 2009 now, but nothing there...

[Harva Raj]

And, uh, why would you want this? Serious question.

What sort of tape and what type of format do you propose to use? Other than LTO/Ultrium and SDLT and perhaps AIT, there really are no forthcoming tape products anywhere. The future of tape looks somewhat bleak. I suppose LTO-5 will happen and LTO-3 and 4 are good solutions NOW for archival. But I wouldn't want a camera to lay tracks right to LTO as that's not really very productive for long-term archival and over time would create a lot of unnecessary bulk in terms of storage media.

I'm sure there would be a niche market for something like this. I'm just not sure what the true purpose of it would be other than to have an automated "lazy backup" of everything you shoot.



How about DAT Tapes or something. I'm totally fine with workflows without the tape, but every now and then some client will go, "what do you mean you need another 8TB of raid? isn't that 16TB enough already? "

[Jeff Kilgroe]

My point: When Red started off with their project some time in 2006 a lot of us guys (me including) thought that there would be some safe storage technology at the horizon. It`s 2009 now, but nothing there...

Sure there is.. It's called LTO-4. :thumbsup:

I've had my RED One for 11 months now and I've archived over 30TB of RED footage, project data and final deliverables to LTO.

There's a common misconception out there that some new media needs to be developed for the purpose of storing RED footage or other digital cinema footage. But it's just data. Plenty of solutions available now and new ones entering the market every year or two. It's an IT problem, not a RED Digital Cinema problem.

Archiving or long term storage to RAID volumes is not cost effective or efficient in most situations.


@sky1walker --

DAT? Hehehe... That wouldn't even be the equivalent of a 2GB CF card, I don't think it would even be 1GB. :)

Tape is still the best technology for archival, in the form of LTO or similar. But like Stewart said above, it doesn't make sense to put it on-camera. And with the upcoming cameras, we will see increasing data rates and larger formats, meaning we would need even faster and more power-hungry tape systems.

As for clients and storage... It's a continuous educational process. Most people these days are trained to know that storage requirements are continuously growing and so are capacities of storage media. However, the requirements for digital cinema seem to always take people by surprise, probably because the data requirements are larger than most other forms of work. And the amount needed always tends to grow exponentially in post and more so than many producers / directors / filmmakers often anticipate.
Hard drives are cheap these days though... And while tape drives are somewhat expensive (and necessary companion software in most cases), the cost of tape storage itself is still rather cheap and will recover the cost of the drive over time.