Another idea ...

T

themusic

Active member
Hello,

I was at the screening yesterday and my only feeling of despair came from the fact that I only have one on order.

That said, I wonder why the RedOne doesn't have a firewire 800 output so that we can record to a commercially available firewire 800 drive. Don't firewire 800 cables come in extremely long lengths and record at over 28 MB per second?

Also, I'm wondering about both the LCD screen and the focus assist and how that's going to work.

Any info?

Thanks
 
Does this mean it could use a "home made" drive connected via USB 2.0 or Firewire 800 to record Redcode Raw just as the Red Drive would? I just purchased a 160 gig 2.5" drive for 175$, slap on a 20$ USB 2.0 cage and you are in business?

Thom
 
The REDDRIVE has a FireWire 800 port. The camera doesn't, as far as we know. What the interface is between REDDRIVE and the camera is unknown.
 
Chris Kenny said:
The REDDRIVE has a FireWire 800 port. The camera doesn't, as far as we know. What the interface is between REDDRIVE and the camera is unknown.
Click to expand...

I see, what that means is that the REDDRIVE can be emptied via USB or firewire--that makes sense (the ports are not host ports they are slave ports only)

I would assume the REDDRIVE either mounts in place of the flash/raw connector we saw on the latest pictures or connects to a card that slides in same place. Either way we can't use off the shelf drives to record redcode direct.
 
Digital Magazine Interface

Digital Magazine Interface

The Digital Magazine mounts behind or above the camera body and connects via a short cable and a custom pin out, weatherproof, push to lock connector on the back of the camera. So it isn't Firewire 800 or USB between the camera and Digital Magazine, but the Digital Magazine does include Firewire 800 and USB-2 for connection to your computer once it has been disconnected from the camera.
 
Thanks, Stuart. Is the custom pin-out cable/interface with the RED-DRIVE anything remotely familiar or are you using an entirely custom interface [hooked to a standard bridge?] to get data from point A to point B?
 
... But why not have a firewire 800 out of the camera so that we can easily shoot to readily available hard drives with cable runs up to 100 meters? Firewire 800 transfer rates are 786 Mbit/s per second .... almost 200 MB. It seems like this would be the quickest, easiest, and most readily available solution.
 
themusic said:
... But why not have a firewire 800 out of the camera so that we can easily shoot to readily available hard drives with cable runs up to 100 meters? Firewire 800 transfer rates are 786 Mbit/s per second .... almost 200 MB. It seems like this would be the quickest, easiest, and most readily available solution.
Click to expand...

Cos if you can do that, you won't buy a REDDRIVE will ya? And at some point in the game RED have got to make some money on this deal or team morale will start to wane.

That would not be good.

Blue.
 
themusic said:
... But why not have a firewire 800 out of the camera so that we can easily shoot to readily available hard drives with cable runs up to 100 meters? Firewire 800 transfer rates are 786 Mbit/s per second .... almost 200 MB. It seems like this would be the quickest, easiest, and most readily available solution.
Click to expand...

786(Mb) Mbit/s /8 would be rather 98 (MB) Mbytes/s.

I understand your idea, however, neither firewire or USB would be a suited interface. to fragile, not fixed, their connectors wouldn´t last long under shooting conditions.

In most scenarios, it would be better to buy 2 reddrives and have a notebook on set to unload the filled one, i suppose.
 
But why not have the ability to record straight to a firewire 800 drive? Wouldn't that be better/easier/cheaper/more efficient?
 
Better is in the eye of the beholder, but why do you think it's more efficient?

Personally I wan't to make sure it just works when I push the button. I do not want to worry about if the drive can keep up with the datarate. The drives will also be in cases designed for field work, not just sit on a desk.
 
Seems to me allowing recording over FireWire or whatever to arbitrary devices just makes things a little more flexible. Maybe some third-parties want to build digital magazines with different capabilities. Maybe in some applications it would be useful to have long periods of continuous shooting, so you might want to hook the camera up to, say, an external 750 GB drive.

If there were a utility to allow Redcode footage to be ingested directly into a computer as it was being shot, that would open up even more possibilities. In the studio, you could have a workstation on set pull the data in and send it straight to the SAN, with no need to copy it over.

Conceivably, a sufficiently powerful system could do live mixing, titling, etc. from a Redcode stream and output a live program from it -- there's talk now about broadcasting live programs directly into digital theaters, so this isn't such a nutty application. Even if there's no system this fast on the market today, there probably will be well before Red becomes obsolete.

The more open the system is, the more cool and unanticipated stuff people will end up doing with it. The desire to lock down the system to make sure people don't do stupid things and end up with bad results in certainly understandable, but with a professional tool I think openness (with appropriate disclaimers, of course) is the better approach.
 
themusic said:
But why not have the ability to record straight to a firewire 800 drive? Wouldn't that be better/easier/cheaper/more efficient?
Click to expand...
1: I want it to work perfectly. There could be the potential for latency in an off-the-shelf FW drive configuration.
2: RED needs to make money.
 
I would only buy a certified drive for any professional work. I also like the locking connector concept since USB and Firewire were never designed with movement in mind.
 
I can see the efficiency coming from distribution problems.

I'm in Norway, and I see all the time that I need things yesterday when a new gig bounces in the door on stuff I couldn't possibly defend to buy the day before is all of a sudden the neccesary thing.

The option to plug in a FW-800 raid and just record is far from optimal in some respects, but it could defenitely save my day (and gigs) if I have to wait a month to get the first, second or third magazine needed for this particular gig.

I too agree this is not optimum faultproof, but it could just save my day...

Gunleik
 
Drive Interface

Drive Interface

The drive interface may yet finish up as Firewire 800 protocol but currently it is SATA. Using SATA eliminates the need for bridge chips between the camera and the drive(s) and enables native communications without any translation.

The custom pin-out cable/interface is by definition non-standard. But its just an expression of the standard SATA pin out plus power, within a secure and weatherproof professional connector. Nothing there that would stop you from isolating just the communication lines and hooking those up to an A/C mains powered RAID.
 
Wow, good to hear and I'm sure someone will create a patch cord to do just that, so that a normal off the shelf SATA drive can be roped in at short notice in an emergency :)
 
Very good news!
I don't mind eSATA instead of FW at all. I just happen to have some FW 800 RAID cabinets + FW has a longer cable length spec, if I'm not mistaken.

Gunleik
 
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Advantages of FireWire rather than eSATA would be:

1) Longer cable length (and availability of optical repeaters, etc. for really long runs).

2) Power and data over a single cable. (Though maybe Red's custom connector does this anyway?)

3) Potential for ingesting into a computer rather than just going straight to disk.

Also, I believe FireWire would allow arbitrary data to be sent between the digital magazine and the camera, while SATA has a limited command set. This might be useful if the digital magazines are "smarter" than bare drives.
 
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