District 9's 120TB of data article

[Jonathan Smiles]

Hi All,

Here is a link to an article in definition magazine on District 9's 120TB of data.
http://www.definitionmagazine.com/post/district9.htm

Some things I can add are...

We shot on 40 x 8GB CF Cards, these cards where recycled 2200 times during principal photography. For the other cameras we had 6 x 8GB SxS for the EX1/EX3s(Documentary look) and 4 x 8GB SHDC for the Canon HF100s (CCTV look).

The busiest day on main unit was 7 hours of footage across all the cameras.

On set I looked after the RED cameras from the sensor back, keeping them going in the harsh conditions of Soweto. Plus DIT and data management for all the file based cameras and the SRW-1 VTR for the Cineflex aerials.

All of the rushes rendering was done in editorial supervised by Gary Lam our 1st Assistant Editor. He found the RED footage easier to handle albeit slower at first than the XDCAM-HD and AVCHD footage, which at that time had to be rendered out by FCP as the Avid at that time could not do XDCAM-HD or AVCHD natively.

At first it was taking 12 hours to get 1 hour of RED footage in front of Julian Clarke our editor as 1080p DNxHD36, this came down to 2.2 hours for 1 hour of footage by the time we did pickups in December 2008 thanks to RED Rushes.

Thanks to all of the cast and crew plus special thanks to Neill, Trent, Pippa, Trish, Houston, Gary, the guys at RED,HD-HUB, MEDIA Joburg and finally my assistant Dez.

I will be in LA from November 23rd until December 2nd if anyone is interested in meeting up.

[Cam Crowley]

Thanks for the insight Jonathan - really interesting to hear about the ins and outs of such a big production.

Loved the film too!

Cam

[Emmanuel Cambier]

Great read, Thanks a lot.

Emmanuel

[Sarah C.]

I really enjoyed D9. Tried to get Red onto a certain very big feature last year, so I sent the link of the article to the nay-sayers I worked with. :)

[Stefan Christou]

I really loved D9, as did my partner Shari (she thought it was better than Terminator 2!).

[Jonathan Smiles]

Originally Posted by Sarah C.

I really enjoyed D9. Tried to get Red onto a certain very big feature last year, so I sent the link of the article to the nay-sayers I worked with. :)

You can get that with all the digital camera systems, shooting a test really helps.

[henryjacobkim]

Hey that was a good read, District 9 is by far my favorite film shot on RED

[Deanan]

Was all the redcode footage about 20TB for one copy?
It would be interesting to know how that 120TB broke down for
various dalies deliverables and copies.

[Jonathan Smiles]

I can't remember the numbers but 120TB is absolutely everything.

I estimate that for RED footage it would be 15 to 20TB for a single copy of all the rushes.

[kay madsen]

I went into the movie without knowing anything about it... I was in a theater in Santa Cruz when suddenly after 15 min into the film the screen went black... I expected aliens to storm the place any minute... it was really creepy... everybody left the theater using their cell phones as torch lights... complete power blackout... the whole city center was dark...

people in the streets were gathering around a group of drummers... it felt like ancient times before man had electricity and dancing around the fire at night was the only thing you could do to get over your fear of the dark...

2 hours later power was back on and we caught the late show... great movie... really enjoyed it...