How much storage do I need on set for shooting with Epic?

[Ask_the_dusk]

Hi everyone!

I'm directing 15 min short in few weeks. Good news is we found Epic for a very good price. Bad news is that I haven't budgeted for storage for the footage during production. I have Pegasus 1T non solid external hard drive . wondering if it is going to be enough if we film on 4 or 5 k. plus some kind of backup ?

What are your thoughts on this ?

[Ryan Patrick O'Hara]

It depends on the compression, frame-rate and duration/number of takes you shoot.

Lots of variables that really does not allow anyone to say 'yes' or 'no'.

Shooting 3:1 is different than 30:1... 120fps at 4k is different than 24fps at 5k. Shooting 12 takes of a 4 minute dialogue is another thing too. Who knows. Your best bet is to figure out what you want to do, estimate your length of shooting and consult a Red Epic data rate chart. I can't find it right now, but it's floating out there....

[Jordan Scott Price]

Here it is, Ryan.

RedEPICFileSize.pdf

I just directed a short on the Epic. We shot everything at 5K FF, 24p, REDCODE 5:1. We walked away with 800GB of footage for a 13-page script. Don't know what our shooting ratio is/will be.

I think we have roughly 2 hours of footage.

I would recommend having 2 x 2TB hard drives if it's a short (one to back up the other). That should cover you, but like Ryan said, there are a ton of variables with that camera - resolution, frame rate, REDCODE, number of takes, length of script, etc.

[Ryan Patrick O'Hara]

Thanks for the chart!

I've never shot 5:1, I shot mainly at 8:1 because I can't tell the difference underthat and we were in a remote location and I didn't want to run out of space on the SSD's. We occasionally shot 10:1 for the highspeed stuff.