Red-drive

[firstcinemapictures]

I was just wondering, if the Red-Drive will be made available for other cameras?
I don't mean to ruffel any feathers with this question.
Darrell
FIRST CINEMA PICTURES

[AuditoryVisuals]

Probably not. Graeme and Jim haven't said anything on this thread, so probably not.

What cameras did you want to use it with?

[Graeme_Nattress]

I doubt it, as it will be fully integrated with the RED camera. It's not like a firestore type device.

Graeme

[Jay A. Kelley]

I doubt it, as it will be fully integrated with the RED camera. It's not like a firestore type device.

Graeme

Graeme,

Will the drive allow us to insert our own up-to-spec hard drives into the casing? That will be important since we will most likely be going through hard drives like water and it would be a bummer if RED Drive was built in such a way as to limit flexiblity.. I would prefer to see more of a Red Drive ENCLOSURE. That way we could buy 2 or three and switch them out like film mags.. We can save a LOT of money buying 10 drives at a time

Jay

[Graeme_Nattress]

Don't know yet. I've got my thoughts on this, but I think we'll just have to wait and see :-)

Graeme

[Nick_Shaw]

Graeme

Is the intention with the RED-DRIVE that it will have eg Firewire 800 ports on the unit itself so that it can be hooked up (bus powered maybe) in a stand-alone mode to an on-set laptop to download footage, and maybe even start a "one-light" conversion in REDCINE? Or does it need to be accessed via the Firewire/USB ports on the camera itself?

By the way, it was great to meet you in person at IBC.

[Jay A. Kelley]

You don't know yet?! Clearly you did not read your employment agreement carefully when you signed on to RED.. Let me refresh your memory:

"Employee, upon hiring, will assume all knowlege of 5 know deminsions, universe, where to find the best pasta, and all mattters of facts and concepts regarding the use of HD technology."

That said... Let's try this again..

So what can you tell us about the RED Drive Graeme?

:)

Jay

[donatello]

"switch them out like film mags."

i'm not so sure bare 2 1/2" laptop drives will work as mags that you switch out of a case...

i bought a 1394/usb case and 3 drives to switch them out as needed ... that lasted a few weeks of switching out then i bought another 2 cases one for each drive .... these drives are small .. they need protection around them .. the data connector pinns on drive bend easy ...

i do see where drives can be changed out of a USB/SATA/1394 case ( perhaps more weekly and NOT when you're under pressure) but IMO not for use as changing mags ( few times day/week) ... if you drop a drive you want the case to be around it when it hits the floor ...

[donatello]

"Firewire 800 ports "

XP SP2 pretty much did away with firewire 800 speeds ...
from my experience XP SP 2 gives you approx Firewire speeds between 400 & 800 ( i call it 600 speeds on reads and a little better then 400 writes) ... XP SP 1 will give you firewire 800 speeds BUT many programs need SP2 ... 3rd party 1394b drivers for SP2 are between firewire 400-800 speeds ..SP1 is the fastest 1394b speeds

for Mac's it's a totally different speed !!

[Jay A. Kelley]

Ok, since this forum is for suggestions, here's mine:

RED Drive is an important issue when it comes to how we rented out shooters will make our money.

It is EXTREMELY important that this product be more of an "enclosure" than a locked drive unit.

Under most circumstances, our clients will purchase their own hard drives for their project, or they will buy them from us (Hopefully a small profit center we can use to mark them up a bit as a lot of us will be using ten at a time!). We will record on the drives, then deliver them to the client as we shoot. In fact, it's even poossible RED Cine could be on set and viewing and preliminary color work could be happening (how cool would that be!). After writing this, it becomes important that RED Cine is NOT hard to come by.

That said the average number of enclosures would be 3. Two for camera and one for an edit system. As for ports, I would hope that there are a number of them, but I think you guys will handle that part just fine.

If this item came all as one unit, it would greatly reduce our flexibility as to how we work. You can tell us the model and speed of the drive needed, but we could pick the size based on the project we are doing.

I hope this suggestion reaches the right ears/eyes

Jay

[Nick_Shaw]

I mentioned Firewire 800 not only because I am a Mac user (I know Red are "platform agnostic") but because it's mentioned on the Red site.

http://red.com/techspecs.htm mentions "FireWire 800/400, USB-2 and e-SATA interfaces" for the digital media magazine, but is not specific as to how those ports can be used.

Are they on the camera, on the RED-DRIVE or both?

[Nick_Shaw]

Jay

I would not imagine the RED-DRIVEs are intended to be used as if they were "stock". Surely a better workflow would be to buy one large external drive per project (probably plus one as a backup) and transfer from the RED-DRIVEs onto that as you shoot. Then you could give those to your clients at the end of the job (or charge them for storage). A drive like a LaCie BigDisk takes up a lot less space than a box of film/tape, and is much cheaper per GB than a RED-DRIVE.

With RedCode RAW at 27MB/s that would actually play back (assuming the computer could keep up) directly from a USB-2 drive. 4K off a bog-standard drive - how amazing is that!

[Jack_Felis]

You know, I've got a 100gb Seagate 2.5" 7200RPM laptop hard drive in a Firewire/USB2.0 enclosure and I don't have to plug it into the wall like many other external hard drives since it's so small, it's powered by the Firewire or USB port. I'm using this drive for a film editing class and, even though it's working at Firewire 400 speeds, it's working great.

My only question about the RED Drive is what drive sizes will be used? Regular 3.5" hard drives? Laptop 2.5" or smaller hard drives? Flash-based something or other? As many of you know, the bigger the drive, the more GB storage and with sizes listed up to 180gb on the RED Drive, I'm figuring that 3.5" drives will be used? However, those drives seem like they would be pretty big for the RED, assuming that they slide into the camera like P2 cards for the HVX200, if external, then there's all kinds of options open I would think.

As was slightly glossed over, will the RED perhaps be able to output straight to a laptop for recording on the go versus having to use multiple RED Drives?

[Anders Holck]

The most plausible is a singe or dual 2.5" drives or even dual 1.8"
3.5" drives aren't made for portable applications.

[Nick_Shaw]

As I understand it, the RED-DRIVE will probably be a 2.5" SATA drive - hence 160GB max size.

It will be external to the camera, and fit in the holder at the bottom right of the attached picture. Apparently the Drive holder does not have to be attached as shown, but could be attached directly to a mounting point on the camera body if it was being used without the rails.

At least that's how I understand what I was told at IBC!

[OldCorpse]

As I suggested in another thread - what if RED offloaded footage wirelessly as it shot? That way you could have almost any kind of storage solution (as long as it accepted wireless downloads), and it wouldn't be tied to the camera by any wire etc. I suppose for power consumption reasons (and maybe interference) it would be limited to anything between 10 feet to 50 feet. Any intereference/integrity of signal issues could be solved with simple hashes (or maybe even encryption for security). Obviously, I have no idea if this is feasible at all - maybe the broadcast mechanism on the camera would have to be humonguous, or the power requirements prohibitive, or something. I'm not an engineer. But if the hardware/power required to pull this off on the camera were smaller than the hard-drive solution, then perhaps this might fly. Or is it total fantasy?

[Chris Kenny]

The issue with offloading footage wirelessly is bandwidth. 27.5 MB/s is 220 Mb/s. 802.11g/b wireless are only 54Mb/s, but in the real word typically achieve much less than that. It's barely conceivable that under ideal conditions the upcoming 802.11n could support sustained transfers of 27.5 MB/s, but I certainly wouldn't trust it to work reliably.

For uncompressed stuff... forget about it.

I think the best realistic option for separate storage is fiber. Apparently other 4K cameras offer options for this. A strand of fiber can be extremely fine and, in the proper casing, fairly durable. Trailing one tiny cable behind the camera wouldn't be so bad. And fiber has the bandwidth even for uncompressed, which is where off-camera storage is really important (because you need a RAID the size of a mini-fridge).

[CVB]

It's barely conceivable that under ideal conditions the upcoming 802.11n could support sustained transfers of 27.5 MB/s, but I certainly wouldn't trust it to work reliably.

I think 802.11n is supposed to have data rates up to 250 Mbps and Pulse~LINKS CWave UWB is supposed to be in the 1000 Mbps range. Maybe its not such a crazy idea.

[Chris Kenny]

No interface actually achieves its theoretical peak bandwidth, and wireless interfaces are particularly notorious for falling far short. The 54 Mb/s 802.11g reliably achieves less than half of that, and that's with line of sight or something close to it, no interference, and fairly short range. And this is unlicensed spectrum... even if the bandwidth is there under ideal conditions, there's no reasonable expectation that it will be there when you need it.

I just looked up the specs on a 2.5" laptop hard drive. Only four ounces! Maybe you'd get up to half a pound with an enclosure, etc. RED-FLASH should be even lighter. Are you really going to risk losing a shot to cut half a pound or less from a camera that with batteries and a lens is going to weigh at least 12-15 pounds anyway? I just don't see a use case here.

Now, what would be useful is if the cabling to the RED-DRIVE and batteries could be fairly long. For doing handheld work, it would be great if I could clip the batteries or RED-DRIVE to my belt or toss them in a backpack on my back, and run the cables to the camera.

This should be easy with the batteries. We don't know what interface RED-DRIVE will use, though. FireWire 800 is a decent choice, as it can provide power and data over a single cable and has more than enough bandwidth that the 2.5" drive would be the bottleneck, not the interface. It also supports cable lengths of 15 feet or so, and there are repeaters that can extend that significantly (including fiber optic repeaters which can extend it over 300 feet), so that shouldn't be a problem either.

[visceralpsyche]

I'd just like to second the ideal of having a RED DRIVE cage that supports a 2.5" SATA hard drive (7200rpm would seem a necessity). We could buy in bulk for clients and backup purposes, and I'd wager most people would then buy three bare drive cases to fill them with.

Gives maximum flexibility for dealing with client footage as noted by others and means that you could theoretically have one on the camera, one as backup and the third downloading to a cheaper 3.5" hard drive for conversion in RedCine or backup purposes, to be given to client at end of day's shoot.

I understand that you want to make sure that users don't put hard drives in there that don't meet spec, but if you have a good sticker or warning on it to only install the hard drives that can sustain x amount of MB/s (provide a known good list on your website, or a benchmarking program to test with on a normal PC/Mac) then I doubt people at this level are going to skimp on it as it would mean capturing or not capturing a shot.

[Jaime Valles]

I would not imagine the RED-DRIVEs are intended to be used as if they were "stock". Surely a better workflow would be to buy one large external drive per project (probably plus one as a backup) and transfer from the RED-DRIVEs onto that as you shoot. Then you could give those to your clients at the end of the job (or charge them for storage). A drive like a LaCie BigDisk takes up a lot less space than a box of film/tape, and is much cheaper per GB than a RED-DRIVE.

I think this is the best solution as well. The Red-Drive will most likely be a specialized RAID of a couple of laptop drives. I see no problem in filling that up, then plugging in an off-the-shelf Firewire or USB2 drive and transferring the footage in one fell swoop. Then you give the hard disk to the client / editor / producer and you're set.

Actually, what I'd rather see happen is for the Red-Drive to be solid state memory, not the spinning HDD variety that are more prone to failure. For all the criticism that P2 cards have received, I think Panasonic got it right with the HVX. Solid state beats Hard Disks any day.

[Nick_Shaw]

Isn't the solid state version of RED-DRIVE the REDFLASH, which I believe goes inside the camera?

That way you can have a stripped down lighter weight setup, at the expense of storage capacity (currently max 128GB as opposed to 160GB) for those "run and gun" shots where the robustness of a spinning HDD might be a concern.

If the price per GB of REDFLASH is cheaper than P2 (and everything we've seen so far leads me to believe it will be) then that is a very viable option.

Nick Shaw

[WesVasher]

Isn't the 32 GB Redflash targeted at under $1000 as well as the 80 GB Reddrive? With higher capacities going up from there? I thought I saw this in one of those IBC videos. Please correct me if I'm wrong anyone.

[Graeme_Nattress]

The size of the drive is TBD. Drives increse capacity rather fast these days, so the exact specs will be determined much nearer ship date.

Graeme