SolidStore - Coming Soon

[Dylan Reeve]

I'll be announcing the details of our new 'SolidStore' product soon. A simple purpose-build portable device to facilitate the offload and backup of RED CF, RED Drive and other file-based systems.

Full details will follow in Feb, but here's a few tidbits:

One-button operation - insert the card or connect the drive and press the go button. The built in display with tell you about progress, and a status light will give clear confirmation when the process is finished.
Dual Removable Drives - all data is copied, by default, on to two removable drives (250GB default although available up to 500GB). The drive cartridges are readily available, and can also be used as external drives with a cable and power supply.
Gigabit Ethernet - connectivity to a laptop or workstation by GigE for footage review and REDCine access.
12-24V Power - runs with standard 12/24V power and has over and under voltage protection.
Expandable - Initially to support RED CF, and Firewire/USB drives, support will be expanded to P2 and XDCAM EX, and other formats as demand dictates.


We're aiming to have an initial production run ready to ship in August 2008.

Initial development will be targeted to RED usage, but other formats are also planned and will be added as they become possible.

Let us know what you'd like to see from this product, we're trying to make it as usable as possible for everyone. We want something that fits your workflow, not something that you have to fit your workflow around.

[Adrian Correia]

What I'd like to see? I'd like to see it now please.

[Jason Ing]

Approximate price range?

[Dylan Reeve]

Hard to say at the moment, still finalising hardware spec and suppliers... We should have better idea by mid February.

[Steve Tammi]

A good checksum, then delete all file from the CF card so it is ready for use.

Steve

[Dylan Reeve]

On-the-fly checksum for copy, and card reformat are planned features.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'd like to know price, form-factor, is it based on Windows / Linux or other more proprietary or specialized embedded system?

Trying to decide how this would compare vs. an all-in-one small form factor PC with dual CF readers, RAID storage and LTO-3 tape drive or hot-swap HDD bay.

The SFF PC concept is easy to assemble and maintain, cost effective, easy to repair in the field if needed and it can run REDCINE or other tools on location if needed too.

[Dylan Reeve]

I'd like to know price, form-factor, is it based on Windows / Linux or other more proprietary or specialized embedded system?

Trying to decide how this would compare vs. an all-in-one small form factor PC with dual CF readers, RAID storage and LTO-3 tape drive or hot-swap HDD bay.

The SFF PC concept is easy to assemble and maintain, cost effective, easy to repair in the field if needed and it can run REDCINE or other tools on location if needed too.

The SolidStore will be approximately 8x8x5" in a custom housing. It is built on Linux with cusomised tools and interface. As such it will not be able to run REDCINE, but depending on the tools made available by RED for Linux we'll endeavour to make it as useful as possible.

It won't be as flexible as a SFF PC (such as a Shuttle) but should be somewhat easier to use for those not keen to explore that. It requires no screen, keyboard or mouse. From what I understand, I believe the tools that Offhollywood are working on would be well suited for deployment in a small computer on set to streamline the process.

The SolidStore won't be a RED-only device, it is flexible enough that it should be able to support all major solid-state and drive-based formats (although support for them will be implemented after the initial release).

With Gigabit Ethernet and network-shared drives, there's no reason that the SolidStore can't be used alongside another PC when appropriate, but the SolidStore itself will serve primarily as an 'ingest' device, automating that part of the process, eliminating human error - the way we've imagined it, on sets where REDCINE functions maybe required, it can be run on any suitable Laptop accessing files directly over the network, in other cases, it can just sit unobtrusively in a corner doing it's thing.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The SolidStore will be approximately 8x8x5" in a custom housing. It is built on Linux with cusomised tools and interface. As such it will not be able to run REDCINE, but depending on the tools made available by RED for Linux we'll endeavour to make it as useful as possible.

OK, thanks. Good to know.

Will it be capable of running of battery power? The small size is very appealing.

[Dylan Reeve]

It will operate on 11-30V (roughly) and the production model will probably include 4-pin XLR for power (the most common and easily adapted too, I think). So it should be usable with just about any existing 12/24V supply fairly easily.

Boot-time should be fairly quick (aiming for under 20sec) and it will have low-power shutdown, and over and under voltage protection.

Depending on the cost in production we also considered adding mount-holes for AB and V-mount battery plates, but it would probably be easy enough to add them after sales if that was desired.

[Darren Orange]

It would be nice if it could be powered off a Red Brick, good idea, should be standard.

[Brent J. Craig]

I like the idea of using two completely different systems for footage backup.

If your entire footage management system is built around one technology, for example a Macbook, you have a single point of failure. All you need is some OS bug that no one has discovered yet, or a firewire connector spitting out bad bits and you could lose it all - including the backups made by the same system.

A standalone system that uses a different OS and different copying approach is a good safety net.

[Jason Wingrove]

LOVE the idea and personally love that it can be stand alone. Keep the system that does mission critical backups separate to ANYTHING ELSE, much less possibility of snafu's.

Also from a human engineering point of view i think that automated erasing of the master card is potentially a BAD IDEA. Any erasing of the card should be a "do you want to erase this card" & "Are you sure" step arrangement. Its like leaving untaped cans of film lying round the set.

Making it 'read only' via ethernet would be worth considering (or at least a default but overideable setting) to look at a file, edit and only be able to "save as" rather than being able to too easily delete a file remotely.

Great idea guys cant wait to see even a prototype :-) just like with RED one, as much feedback from the community at the early stages will no doubt really add to product and mean more sales down the track
j

[Dylan Reeve]

The automatic format will only ever happen at the end of a copy process (and even then will be an option that will probably be off by default). No opportunity to format a card unless we know for sure that all the media on the card has been moved to onboard storage.

I'd had assumed that the network export would be read-only, although maybe optionally read/write.

The base system is flexible enough that we should be able to grow with the community as need be, there will be software updates after the initial release to support new formats and features.

[Jason Wingrove]

probably some applications for high end stills too?

[Dylan Reeve]

probably some applications for high end stills too?

That is something I've considered - although for that environment, I think there'd be more need for a decent resolution colour LCD, which the SolidStore doesn't include.

The market for stills is fairly well served, although none of the products I've looked at feature any sort of redundancy of storage. There is certainly the option to expand the product to fit another market if there is demand I suppose.

[Dylan Reeve]

We've released initial details on our website now...
http://www.shotwrangler.com/solidstore/

[Dylan Reeve]

Some thoughts on what we've discussed here so far...

Card Formatting
This is a big one.. The reason it makes most sense to format on the camera is this - it knows what's be shot. Imagine you have 8 CF cards cycling through... When you have Reel 1 in the SolidStore it has no way of knowing what other Reels have been shot, you may have already formatted Reel 2 in the camera, but the SolidStore doesn't know that. It will format the card with the next Reel number it knows to be free, which will be 2. It requires more thinking really. As long as all the formatting is done in one place (either camera or SolidStore) there should be no problem, but if you mix it up then there's the risk of dupe reels.

Power Input
We'll probably include on 4-pin XLR and standard 2.5mm DC plug inputs, but may make a RED Lemo -> XLR adaptor as an accessory.

[Jason Wingrove]

Dylan,
Heads up mate please.
cheers
jas

[Dylan Reeve]

Dylan,
Heads up mate please.
cheers
jas

Sorry Jas,

I've been flat out with a bunch of stuff lately. We're currently putting the 'finishing touches' on our prototype units and will begin testing them very soon. At which point we will have a lock off on hardware spec and suppliers and be able to determine a price and development timeframe.

Ideally we'll be putting first run of production units together in September. They will ship with core functionality, and further stuff will be added shortly thereafter.

Will have updates on our website in the next few weeks.

We are looking at accepting pre-orders with a modest deposit to help us gauge production volumes also. I will work on the details of that once we have pricing.

All the people who've placed expressions of interest with us will receive updates via email when we have a slightly firmer schedule in place.

Thanks for the support and interest!

Cheers,
Dylan

[Martin Weiss]

Interest expressed.

[Dylan Reeve]

Power Supply --

We'd initially intended to support both 12V and 24V DC supplies, but in practice it's surprisingly difficult to source a versatile PSU that meets our design requirements while supporting such a wide input voltage rating.

I know that 24V is common on some film sets, but so far our informal discussions with potential users leads me to believe that a 12V supply shouldn't be a problem on almost all sets.

Anyone have any strong feelings about 24V supply?

[Rocco Schult]

Am I completely out of my mind if I think about 14.4 ?
Anyway, 12V sounds like good ol' stuff and available.

[Dylan Reeve]

12V nominal - so realistically anything from 11.5 to about 16 will be fine.

[Rocco Schult]

Even better, thanks for your reply!