RED Cine X - won't open on my old Windows XP laptop

[Aaron Shirley]

I've got this old core 2 duo laptop (convertible gateway tablet) with 4GB of ram, running WinXP tablet edition on a 200GB 7200rpm drive, and I've had both Avid and Premiere on it at one time and they both worked fine, but I can't get RCX to work on it.

It always installs fine, but when I try to start it up, either by double clicking a R3D file or by running it from the start menu, there is a short moment where the computer seems to consider loading (task manager shows a small spike in CPU usage, and the curser might blink), and then nothing happens. I've tried 12, 12 beta, and 13 beta.

After installing 13 beta, I tried the R3D player, and it actually runs, but when I load a R3D in, it just shows a white image (this usually suggests to me there is a codec problem). I've tested R3D's that I know work on other machines, both before and after trying them on this one.

This is my mobile office computer, and it would be really handy to have it double as a R3D offloading station on shoots where I don't have a DIT. I even found a PCMCIA to eSATA card for it and it dumps SSD's amazingly quick (about 2GB per minute). Working with P2's 1GB per minute cards, I always thought the bottleneck was with the PCMCIA ports!

Has anyone seen something similar or have any ideas?

[Matthew Yaeger]

A white screen in the video player indicates there wasn't a graphics card available that meets the minimum requirements. If RCX had loaded you would have seen a message in the status area notifying you of that.

If you could send the logs from C:\Users\{your username}\AppData\Local\red\RED PLAYER\Logs and C:\Users\{your username}\AppData\Local\red\RedCineX\Logs to redcinex at red dot com I can verify for you what is going on.

[Aaron Shirley]

A white screen in the video player indicates there wasn't a graphics card available that meets the minimum requirements. If RCX had loaded you would have seen a message in the status area notifying you of that.

If you could send the logs from C:\Users\{your username}\AppData\Local\red\RED PLAYER\Logs and C:\Users\{your username}\AppData\Local\red\RedCineX\Logs to redcinex at red dot com I can verify for you what is going on.

The two file structures you list don't match up with my computer (one difference is I don't have local folders), but I looked in similar places, all of the Application data folders, etc, and even did a general search for "logs" but I can't find anything like this that looks like it could have been generated by RED software.

Do you think that maybe since I couldn't load any footage, no log file was created?

What is the extension for these log files? .txt like in the cameras?

[Matthew Yaeger]

Anytime the Application starts you get a log. They should start with "RCX" and end with ".log". Red Player Logs will start with "RVP" and end with ".log"

[Aaron Shirley]

I have searched and searched, but I can't find any of these .log files. I even set RED Player to verbose logging, and still noting shows up in my .log, RCX, or RVP searches that have anything to do with RED software. Keep in mind, this is a WinXP Home Tablet I'm talking about.

I looked at my Win7-64 workstation to see what I should be looking for. I see the "C:\Users\{your username}\AppData\Local\red\RedCineX" path and found it's RCX*.log files, and looked in the other path and found a few RVP .log files.

So my theory for why I can't find any RCX .log files on my WinXP laptop is that RCX won't open, so no .log files get created from that, but as for RVP .log files not being found is still a mystery. Either way, WinXP-32 RCX and REDplayer definitely have a different file path that they do in Win7-64.

Any idea what that file path could be and why RCX nor REDplayer appear to be creating .log files on my laptop?

PS- I just installed the Adobe PS6 beta, and it loads R3D files just fine on my laptop, so I guess it's not the codec giving my OS problems, which is a great relief. This means I at least have a way of checking R3D files as I unload them in the field... at least until this beta expires.

[Matthew Yaeger]

Red Player does not use any codecs.

Can you generate a system .nfo file on your machine and send it to me at redcinex at red dot com?

I know under win 7 you can run the following command in the command line to generate the .nfo file:
MSINFO32 /nfo %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\System.nfo

I don't know if that command works on xp or not.

[Aaron Shirley]

Red Player does not use any codecs.

Can you generate a system .nfo file on your machine and send it to me at redcinex at red dot com?

I know under win 7 you can run the following command in the command line to generate the .nfo file:
MSINFO32 /nfo %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\System.nfo

I don't know if that command works on xp or not.

It doesn't seem to. I'll try to find an XP equivalent, but I'm going to be working most of the time for the next two weeks.