practical tapeless workflow

[sbaechler]

Hi

I know a few people who have an option for the Red camera and I hope to shoot the first short by the end of this year.
The one thing to consider is that it is not enough if you just rent the camera. You will need a proven solution to get all the footage safe to the editing room. Producers and camera assistants are used to a film and a tape workflow. Only very few have experience in a tapeless workflow. I have worked as a 1st AC on a feature film that was shot in the Panasonic P2 format and we have gained some valuable experience, although there was much less data than you will have with the red one. P2 is 1 GB/min.

I made a list of equipment for a feature length movie where you are on a location that has power and plan to deliver your material to the editor at the end of each day.

On Set:
1 MacBook Pro.
2-3 portable harddrives with 2 HDs each in a RAID-1 configuration. FW-800
1 solution to download footage "in the field". (Compare to P2 store)
Editing room:

1 X-Serve RAID 4TB. Raid 10 or 0+1 (Usable disk space 2TB)
1 Apple RAID emergency packet for immediate repairs
1 Fibre Channel PCI card
1 UPC power station
1 Power Book G4 with SCSI interface card
1 LTO or DLT streamer (alt. with Gigabit interface)

I spent a lot of resources on a redundant storage all the way through. I had discussions with another editor if this wasn't a waste of money. From my experience time is the most precious thing during production.
I think producers who have a due date for their film rather spend a little bit more money on equipment than to reserve an additional two days for emergency recovery and restoring data in case of a HD crash.

Regards
Simon

[vanguy]

I would think that you could do it a lot cheaper and simpler.

On set:

You could get four RedRAIDs, taking two to the set (5-6 hours recording time).

The other two are at the edit suite being transferred/archived/backed up. When the transfer is done, swap with the set drives. If the edit suite is a MacBook and some large RAID drives (as below), it could be portable, as long as you've got a power supply for the drives.

In the Suite:

A MacBook Pro or 24" iMac and a pair of LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme 2 TB drives, mirrored for safety. When you're done, put the drives on the shelf. Buy new drives for each project (they're reasonably cheap ~ $750). After 3 years or so, cycle the media on the drives.

If you really want to go with LTO/DLT, fine, but it's a large initial investment and a lot of work on each project. I'd think the mirrored drives would give you almost bulletproof safety, and they go back online instantly.

[Simon Blackledge]

I'd never use Lacie in a production enviroment.. but thats just me. Had to many fail in the past. If your data is important use enterprise drives in a raid.


s

[Stephen Gentle]

You could get four RedRAIDs, taking two to the set (5-6 hours recording time).

I assume that you mean RED DRIVEs, here. RED RAIDs are supposted to be big raids for recording uncompressed data - although I'm not sure if RED plans to make them, as no details have been released about them yet.

[vanguy]

I'd never use Lacie in a production enviroment.. but thats just me. Had to many fail in the past. If your data is important use enterprise drives in a raid.

You're probably right. I've had some iffy Lacies. It's never been the media, though, always the firewire connector. They're a lot less iffy with Firewire 800. And you can always pull the drive out and put it in another housing. I've had pretty good luck with G-RAIDs, although I wasn't as tough on them as the Lacies I've had.

But I like the single large drive you can store like a tape. Anybody know any decent, inexpensive modular enterprise RAID systems?

I assume that you mean RED DRIVEs, here.

Yup. Sorry. I was looking at the red.com Accessories page, which is a little unclear. Also, the RED DRIVE is a RAID, which confused me.

[Simon Blackledge]

Have a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500gig I'm playing with. Also has E-Sata so just waiting for a card. Giving it some grief on FW 400 and ok so far. Also we have MyBookPro's as one of the OSX backup drives and one at home also and there doing ok so far.

Only problem with enterprise class drives is they are meant to be in a raid.


s

[vanguy]

RAID is not that big of a problem, seeing as editing Red footage will require a RAID anyway. But most enterprise solutions cost at least a couple of Gs for 2 TB, and the Lacie is $769 MSRP. And it's RAID 0.

Apart from the firewire 400 whackiness (which can be solved by not moving wires around unless you have to) Lacies have been pretty good to me. Much better than other externals (grrr Maxtor).

I've even had some luck buying empty enclosures and putting Seagates in them. But it's a bit of a crapshoot. Some enclosures are not that great...

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Much better than other externals (grrr Maxtor).

Hehe, that's funny... Considering Maxtor was LaCie's primary supplier of hard drives for many years. Anyway I'm not a big fan of LaCie products. They're rarely any different or better than most of the consumer stuff on the market. But for some reason graphics and design professionals go for them -- because that's who LaCie primarily markets to. But just consider that LaCie makes very little of their own hardware, they're just an integrator that sticks their name on the products and charges a premium price.

[vanguy]

I've just finished working on a project where the producer insisted on using a Maxtor external (he'd digitized all his media to it). It crashed the system twice a day. The Lacies never did that. Probably the platters were fine, but something about the Maxtor enclosure is major trouble.

Lacie may be crap, and they may use other people's internals but I've always found they work as good or better than anything in the price range. Except for the weakness of the Firewire connector, they've never failed for me. Sure, an XServe RAID would be better, but it costs $6K for one terabyte, plus the fibre channel card. The Lacie Bigger disk 2TB costs $769. I don't see how the Lacie is overpriced.

The question stands: what is a good, reliable storage system that doesn't cost an arm and a leg; a practical tapeless workflow? If I throw out my Lacies, what should I buy?

[Chris Kenny]

Why not just get an eSATA card and port multiplier enclosure (like one of these). Add drives as needed. Fairly cheap, a lot faster than FW800, and probably a much better solution for scaling up your storage than having a bunch of FW drives kicking around. You'll also have a lot more flexibility than with an external FW RIAD (that shows up as a single drive to the host computer), particularly once ZFS shows up in Leopard.

Each slot on one of those enclosures is worth about $100 (an 8-drive enclosure costs $780), so loading the enclosure up with 750 GB drives is actually a little cheaper per GB than loading it with 500 GB drives. Loading up with 1 TB drives only costs a couple cents more per GB, so that's actually not a bad option. That'll get you 8 TB of raw storage for about $4000, once you fill the thing. (Less, if it takes you a while to fill it, since drives will keep coming down in price.)