Non-Tethered Option, Out The Door...

[Kyle Mallory]

Red guys, I know your busy... and anyone is welcome to answer (non-red guys included), but I'm curious, and I apologize if this has been asked already...

There has been lots of talk about RED-RAID, and RED-FLASH, and eSATA, and HD-SDI, etc.. But I don't recall hearing anything definitative about what kind of storage options will exists for the camera when it ships?

In short, since RED-RAID and RED-FLASH are still in the works, is the eSATA connection such that we can use third-party SATA drives with sufficient performance characteristics? Or are we strictly limited to the HD-SDI feeds comming off the camera, and thus a tethered solution?

I'm trying to figure out the rest of my equipment needs and workflow, and want to prepare for the inevitable. People don't like to be tethered, but if that's what it takes, some will be willing. If on the otherhand, a portable, self-contained solution is possible, even if for only a few minutes of footage, then I'd like to know what that is, and even remotely how it will work, so I can start planning for it.


Thanks,

Kyle Mallory

[SF Geek]

I believe that the Red Drive is planning to ship when the camera does. That's the small two drive raid for recording redcode raw.

[Kyle Mallory]

Thanks Geek,

Are there any mockups, renderings, specs, etc for how the Red Drive will look, and interface to a PC? I see on Michael Morlan's block-diagram that RED-DRIVE, RED-FLASH are supposed to support USB/Firewire/SATA. I guess then, I'm looking for whether this will be viewed as a standard external hard-drive by the PC/Mac, and I just plug it in and copy?

Or is it more of a plugable drive assembly that has to plug into a special base? (think removable drive caddy)?

Ultimately, what I'm after is a smooth transition for the camera dept.. Can I treat the Red-Drive like a film roll? When it's full, it's pulled off the camera, a new one is plugged in and production keeps rolling? Or do I have to plug the camera into a PC to offload the footage, and hold everything up?

[Chris Kenny]

Are there any mockups, renderings, specs, etc for how the Red Drive will look, and interface to a PC?


There are some renderings in RED's photo tour section. This (http://red.com/images/photo_zoom/redone_37.jpg), for instance, shows it mounted on top of the camera, along with a battery. It can also be mounted on the rail system, and used to counterbalance the camera/lens.



I see on Michael Morlan's block-diagram that RED-DRIVE, RED-FLASH are supposed to support USB/Firewire/SATA. I guess then, I'm looking for whether this will be viewed as a standard external hard-drive by the PC/Mac, and I just plug it in and copy?


Yes, though you might have to use the REDCINE software to copy data, since apparently it has to be segmented into 4 GB chunks on the drive (since it's FAT32 formatted).



Can I treat the Red-Drive like a film roll? When it's full, it's pulled off the camera, a new one is plugged in and production keeps rolling?


Yes.

[IAN SUN]

You can have multiple RED-DRIVEs, offload footage from one to a computer, while you dock the next to the RED ONE and keep rolling.

[SF Geek]

You can see a mockup of it on the red website. it's mounted behind the body with the battery. The battery is the one with the percentage-full lights like on an IDX battery, the other thing is the drive. I believe you will plug it into a computer and dump footage via esata, firewire, or usb2. Whatever you are using for your system. I'm not sure what ports are on the Red Drive. That has not been released.

The drive is like 320 gigs. At normal redcode raw rates you should be able to shoot over 2 hours of footage without changing it out, definitely not as often as film mags.

[Brook Willard]

The format options on this picture are not complete or fully accurate so ignore them. The picture is what you should focus on.

The 320GB storage size is equivalent to some ~17,000 feet of film.

[Anders Holck]

Hope they are able to deliver enough Red Drives upon launch.
I can see myself ordering a bunch of them at that price.

[Chris Kenny]

I can't imagine there would be many bottlenecks in producing the drives. A REDDRIVE is probably just going to be a couple of commodity 2.5" hard drives (which RED won't be buying in significant numbers, relative to the computer industry) and a fairly simple custom ASIC.

[SF Geek]

I was just looking at the image above and it said it could record up to 60 fps in 720p but I thought you could go up to 120 fps in 720p. Which is right?

[Brook Willard]

As I explicitly stated in bold in my previous post, "The format options on this picture are not complete or fully accurate so ignore them. The picture is what you should focus on."

To answer your question:

S35mm@720p60
S16mm@720p120

[Chris Kenny]

It will come chunked, but you don't need to process them in REDCINE. The QuickTime codec sees it as a single sequence as well.

That's cool. I didn't know QuickTime was that flexible. I wonder why Apple doesn't do this with their MPEG-2 codec.

Can REDCINE automatically concatenate these files while ingesting them, to make managing footage a little easier?

[Rob Lohman]

For QuickTime it is something we're doing specifically. REDCINE will indeed load it as a sequence as well.

[Chris Kenny]

Nice.

[MikeCurtis]

Rob - I didn't know about the FAT32 and chunking thing. Is there a thread that spills out the details? So if QT sees it as a sequence, are you doing some kind of ref file thing in QT? And will it play seamlessly, or hiccup at the joins?

Sounds like Redcine is getting more and more necessary...

[Chris Kenny]

Mike, there's some discussion of the file system issues starting on this page (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=363&page=7&highlight=FAT32).

[Rob Lohman]

A hiccup should not occur if you have a fast enough drive system (needs to seek to the right place etc.). The footage REDCINE ingest is exactly the same as the QuickTime codec.

FAT32 was a choice we unfortunately had to make. Any other system was just not compatible enough at this point in time. The choice was not taken lightly! However, we've worked hard on minimizing the impact of this, by having the apps see a sequence of files as one, for example.

It will be interesting to hear your thoughts once you see the full details at NAB Mike!

[Neurodancer]

Hi I am new to the forum and I was wondering (probably asked a dozen time already) if I can use an off the shelf drive for 1080 with the Red?

[Rob Lohman]

You can offload it to any drive. But for reliability reasons you want to get the recording options straight from RED.