How SAFELY can you TRANSFER the DATA from a REDMAG?

[Hudson Tanimoto]

R3D Data Manager does reliably copy your red media in my opinion, but I don't think it's absolutely fool proof. I've found wavelet corruptions that were not caught by R3DDM but found using RCX while transcoding. That said, it does give me pretty good piece of mind that things are copying correctly (i.e. whatever's present on the card...no issues with cables or errors from readers).

This. I have recently had an instance where a R3D had corrupted frames but data copy was reported OK with R3D Data Manager. In this case it is probably not possible for R3D Data Manager to detect an error since the data is actually intact but the data is written corrupted by the camera (if that makes sense)

[Manuel Wenger]

check out Pomfort SilverstackSet, it´s not cheap, but def. the best solution out for your whole Data Management needs.
You can copy and checksum the files, generate reports, tag files for FCP / AVID export, play R3D Files back within the app, and soon color grade and save looks files (currently just for Alexa)
This app is well worth it´s money and with the internal playback just so easy to visually check, after you did the copy.

[A. Clint Litton]

Are you saying that the corruption was not on the RedMag, but on the copied Data only?

As others have stated, R3DDM will not report any errors/corruptions that exist on the original Red Media...it will only report errors during the copy. This does mean that visually inspecting footage plays a strong role in catching things early (like knowing you'll need to reshoot the master of a scene before they take apart a set, or if you're lucky, before production puts an actor on a plane at the end of their shooting stint). The fact that you can catch these things earlier than upon viewing dailies from a post house can be valuable.

Where R3DDM has really saved me was with card reader originated copy errors. There was a day last season on Louie when we were using CF cards on a lengthy car-rig scene, so I was copying cards over one after the other. After a few cards, I started getting copy errors (corruptions that did NOT exist on the original media). So after letting the card reader cool down a bit (didn't have a backup CF reader on hand...big no-no), I was able to get successful copies. Had I not been using R3DDM, I may have gotten identical byte counts (not likely, but maybe), or I might have even loosely checked footage in RCX, and still not seen the corruptions, and allowed that media to be reformatted. Which would have meant that Louis would have had some extra work to do in the edit.

Either way, I always try to stagger my copies so that I don't have to reformat any media on the day, so that if there's an issue after it's gone to post, there's at least a window of time where I can still check the original media to see if the corruptions or errors are present...if they're not on the camera originated media, we can re-copy and hopefully give post everything that they are expecting.

If your plan is to continually re-use RedMags throughout the day, I would at least give yourself enough breathing room that someone (re: human) can copy everything using MD5 checksums and then visually inspect the footage in its entirety (near impossible, I know) before you are forced to re-format and shoot over previous footage. If a production can't afford to rent additional media to make this possible, then they need to understand the kind of risk they are taking.

[A. Clint Litton]

It would also be great if Red would release some kind of software, whether or not integrated into the RC-X Pro application, that can alert users that there has been a corruption detected on camera originated media. In the days of the Red One, it was always good to know *during* a shot that dropped frames were encountered, and it would be nice if something similar could be implemented with Epic, both in-camera and at the DIT station. We may not encounter dropped frames due to shock and vibration anymore, but if a frame is corrupted, I'd really like to be able to tell the director/DP/producer where/when it happened so he/she can decide if they need to go again. If it helps me to figure out why a frame corruption may have occurred, that's extraordinarily useful, too.

Perhaps Red already has this in the works...if so, bravo, I can't wait. If not, please make it a higher priority than lenses and modules, as it sits at the core of Red's reputation for being a reliable capture medium.

Best,
Clint

[Will Keir]

and doubles the download time too? FW800, 500GB Xfer last night took 4 hours. Is there a way to copy and paste then check the footage after?

Yes, its called Red Data Manager... and it costs 80 dollars.. It does reliable copies and check sums, great tool

[Will Keir]

use disk utility repair on your Red SSD before using R3D Manager to off load your files

What does this do? Does it point out errors or just an extra step before offloading?

[Rocco Schult]

Most corruption is going to occur when transferring from one type of format, such as FAT32, to another such as NTFS or HREF. Beyond that if you're running on a Mac system use disk utility repair on your Red SSD before using R3D Manager to off load your files, it should avoid most common issues.

While there might be a doubtful technical truth behind that statement, there still is an OS behind it controlling the action. WHat do you mean by HREF anyway ?
All over the world cross-filesystem work is done on a daily basis (think Macs working on a NAS, most often no HFS format available). Same with Linux boxes.
Reality is, reparing an original source media is the single most dumbest advice I ever heard.

Never touch your source media - not without cause RED made the Auto-mounter read-only by default as do other [software] vendors too.
Never touch your source media unless there is no other chance to catch media, like the media was accidentally erased, e.g. in-camera.