Compatible hard drives on set?

[La1120]

This may be a silly question, but what type of hard drives is everyone using to unload 4k footage onto? The general amount of HD space needed? A professor of mine thought that no standard consumer HD is fast enough - Any thoughts? Thanks!

[Mark L. Pederson]

This may be a silly question, but what type of hard drives is everyone using to unload 4k footage onto? The general amount of HD space needed? A professor of mine thought that no standard consumer HD is fast enough - Any thoughts? Thanks!

we used the G-Raid Mini -

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-RAID-mini.cfm

we actually only G-Tech drives for edit & finish - we are running their G-Speed XL rackmount until in out Scratch grading suite -

[Evan Owen]

This may be a silly question, but what type of hard drives is everyone using to unload 4k footage onto? The general amount of HD space needed? A professor of mine thought that no standard consumer HD is fast enough - Any thoughts? Thanks!

Your professor is probably unaware that 4K coming off RED One onto the compact flash cards is compressed using RED's wavelet based codec, REDCode, down to about 27-28MB/s. Most desktop hard drives, and current top-of-the-line compact flash cards can handle it just fine.

Uncompressed 4K at 300-400MB/s, well that's another story...

[Dominic Jones]

A professor of mine thought that no standard consumer HD is fast enough - Any thoughts? Thanks!
I've seen a few posts recently that have made the same mistake as your professor has made, so in an attempt to clear this up:

There is a big difference between capture/playback drives (in terms of speed required) and back-up drive spec. When realtime performance is needed (i.e. for capture or playback @ full resolution) you will need fairly fast read/write speeds - a 7200rpm array of RAID mode 0, 3, 5 or 6 will do you fine with any reasonably up to date controller. RAID 0 is by far the cheapest (although also by far the least safe) of these options, needing less disks (2 vs minimum of 3), losing you no storage space, and using a much more common (and therefore far cheaper) controller interface (RAID 0 can be found built into most motherboards these days, and external RAID 0 enclosures are plentiful and reasonably inexpensive).

When you don't need RT performance - e.g. when you're backing up on set, as you are talking about buying drives for - then the speed becomes irrelevant, other than how quickly you'd like to have the RedDrive/CF unit/whatever camera media you are using ready to wipe and shoot again. This is a non-realtime process (i.e. it doesn't matter how long it takes from a technical point of view - only your workflow requirements constrain it) and therefore you could, in theory, use a single 5400rpm IDE drive to back up onto. I wouldn't recommend that, by the way, but there's nothing technically stopping you from doing it!

So there you go, I think that's about the long and short of it - just remember to work out when you do and don't need RT performance...

[La1120]

Thanks for the clarification!

[Antoine Baumann]

what is speed limit of your G-Speed XL?

antoine.

[Poi Boy]

Mark, how long did it take you to download 8gig red cf to g raid mini and what card reader did you use ? How many cards where you using on your car extraveganza ?
Aloha
-A

[Jochen Schmidt-Hambrock]

A professor of mine thought that no standard consumer HD is fast enough - Any thoughts? Thanks!

Are you from Munich? The camera prof. there seems to spread a bit dated info around. (Talked to a young director fresh from the HFF a few weeks ago)

But this will change within a few weeks I guess. :-)

Jochen

[jaadgy akanni]

I'm surprised no one ever mentions these GLYPH babies with FW400, FW800, and eSATA, and are the ones I use with my NLE's and also Pro tools.
http://www.glyphtech.com/site/products/gt050q.html

i just got this one and it performs wonderfully:
http://www.glyphtech.com/site/products/gt062.html

[Michael Morlan]

I'm using the AMS Venus DS3R with great success. 2x IDE or SATA (depending on model), removable drive trays, FW400/800, USB, RAID 0, RAID 1,JBOD.

This may end up as my on-set backup drive solution. Fill the RAID 1, split the drives and send them to separate facilities. Note: 500GB drives take around three hours to format into a RAID 1 so include time to build a RAID overnight before a shoot.

[sbaechler]

I was looking into a serious system to have on the set that has to comply to the following specs:

easily transportable
data has to be stored on a RAID 5 or RAID 6
The data is verified after copying
Save shutdown at power outs (they happen on a set)
copies the footage shot that day to another drive that then goes to the editor
can format the camera drive (or P2 card)
does all of this without supervision

I have worked on a feature that was shot on the Panasonic P2 format and we were using a Powerbook with fire wire drives to download the footage. It worked but was not quite satisfying. We lost some data during the copy process. One video and one audio file. Just disappeared without warning.

I did find a company in Germany which has a specialized system and software that would be perfect for use with the RED camera with just a few modifications. The whole system will not be cheap. About 9000€ to buy. But I think if you are serious about your footage a lot of people would rent it.
As soon as I have a camera I'm going to test it out and see how it works.

Regards
Simon