Checking the Gate

F

Finner

Active member
So "Checking the Gate" is a film term but has been incorporated in to HD productions as well. For some who may not know before moving on to the next shot the focus puller will check the gate by hitting the return button and watching back the last 5-10 seconds of the last shot done to make sure the camera is recording properly.

There is a lot of apprehension to a hard drive capturing system by myself and many others who have been boned by a hard drive in the past.

So here are a few questions to the red team.

1. Will the red drive/camera have a return or similar feature to confirm recording took place properly?

2. Will the camera have a recording confirmation safety system to let you know durring or after the shot if there was any drive problems while recording that shot?

3. If you had decided to print shots 4,5,7 will it be possible to just input these shots and watch them back to confirm proper recording?

I know some may not see this as being that important but I know for others this is critical. A film-less tape-less system is a frightning, hard sell to most of the producers I work with. So I know options like the ones I mention in my questions would make getting producers on board with the Red a lot easier.

I know for many producers it just comes down to:

Film- tried and true it works.

Tape- tried and true it works.

Hard drive / Flash card- Holy crap new stuff it will fail and I will lose accounts and will have to drop my kids out of private school, my BMW will get repossed and I will not be able to pay for my 19 year old girlfriends apartment so she will get bitter and tell my wife.

(I sure hope none of my producers are on this forum)
 
Skittish producers

Skittish producers

Finner brings up issues that I judge to be critical to paying off this camera and making a living. Like most people who are not tech minded, the image quality issues that we drool and pant over are often lost on the folks writing the checks. I can easily justify the slightly higher risk and workflow adaptations to get a better image with lower consumables expense on in house projects but what about the "gun for hire" gigs that pay plenty of my bills?

The solution I have been furiously cooking up the last couple of months is to rig a camera van with a computer and storage on board for on set data management. My idea is to offer producers a "take-away" item, probably a hard drive(s) with the footage in whatever format they spec that has been spit out of RedCine in the van. I would also make at least one clone of the RedCode data for back up. I am looking to mix in a monitoring station/ rolling video village benefit from the same van and even on site editing capability at least for rough cut.

Until tapeless workflows have been around a while it is impossible to claim that it has the track record of film or tape. Those of us in the vanguard may find the footing very slippery in the early going.

Blair S. Paulsen
RedOne #19
 
alacritymedia said:
The solution I have been furiously cooking up the last couple of months is to rig a camera van with a computer and storage on board for on set data management. My idea is to offer producers a "take-away" item, probably a hard drive(s) with the footage in whatever format they spec that has been spit out of RedCine in the van.
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Just copying hundreds of gigs of footage is going to probably take too long for that to be a same-day on-set operation. Well over an hour for a full 320 GB, assuming RED's digital mag has a couple of laptop hard drives in a RAID 0 setup. The client probably doesn't want to wait around that long at the end of the day.

Actually converting three hours of 4K REDCODE RAW to some other format will take even longer.

I don't think handing something to the client on set the same day will be reasonable, unless you have a very limited amount of footage, you're not shooting 4K, or, of course, you just hand over the digital mag itself without making a copy.
 
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It's a bit pie in the sky, but I think it's worth waiting to see what sort of things the infiniband / fiber connection on RED will be able to do before getting too worked up about data transfer times. Also - transfer rates just keep getting faster and faster. A dedicated copying solution through eSATA onto a RAID wouldn't be all that slow - although 320GB is still a lot of data.
 
On set transfer of files no good

On set transfer of files no good

I served as DIT on a commerical where we captured uncompressed 4:2:2 HD over HD-SDI to a raided G5 set-up with a sort of home-brewed system running on a set of UPS units and it was ****ing great. The footage looked great and we started assembling footage in FCP during lighting set-ups. Sweet right? THEN WE TRANSERRED THE FILES TO BACK-UP DRIVES.

So, all the other departments started to break-down and I started to transfer 160 Gb or so to a sata drive on a weibetech combodock. 1hr and 58m later I loaded the whole DIT rig into a cargo van with a PA. Everybody else was long gone.

I am taking at least 3-4 reddrives into the field. 1 to the post house, 1 back in the camera case at night, 1-2 for back-up.

I am also sort of scared to clear drives of media until I know, know,know its verified and on some other storage device. Better for this decision to be made in the calm confines of a editing suite.

Seriously, ask the client to get the footage the next day or something. They have already saved the log and capture time by going tapeless, they can wait for a second.
 
I've done the home-brew rig capture as well, and yeah, copying to a single drive takes forever because the data rate of the video is so high.

Fast drives help.
 
He does have a valid point. i like security, and knowing if i get home from a 14 hour shoot, my footage will be there.
 
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I suggested to red over at DVinfo that if it would be possible to run two red drives in tandem whilst recording. That way if you only recorded one red drives amount you would then have a back up copy. Rob from red team kindly replied about the red drive in raid form. But why not have it in raid form and still have the option of running in tandem. Or will we have the option of a mirrored raid in the red drive. Since i am new to all this i ask the question: how many of you would feel secure enough with just one copy of your footage on red drive. It worries me that i hear stories of hard drives loosing data. The time element is important, after a long day out on the field who wants to spend hours transfering footage for archiving. Is it beyond us to have a simple cheap hard drive to connect to the red drive and transfer the footage by some simple device that is cheap and user friendly that is capable even of doing so whilst you drive home from your destination.

Michael
 
Finner said:
This is not that big an industry and talk like that can have repercussions later in your career!
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True. But so far... some guy named "Zakaree" and some guy named "Finner" know to avoid eachother... if only they knew just who the hell the other actually was...

Not much on the line when you're under an alias, welcome to the internet.
 
On set solutions

On set solutions

I respect the personal experiences of people who have used this approach in the field. From their pain I hope to draw inspiration for a better solution. First off I am planning to outfit my camera van with serious hardware. I am including voltage regulation and UPS units to clean the electrical and proper cooling capacity. A rep from Atto suggested a SAS card to feed multiple RAIDs so that I can make multiple clones simutaneously off the RedDrive. Writing the on site client copy is only one piece of the puzzle and if they are anxious to bail at the end of the day they may only get the stuff we shot before lunch.

I still believe that with the right approach that the advantages of on set data management are numerous. It can enable quicker turnaround times, reduce the amount of data that goes into editorial and support composting, FX, etc.

Blair S. Paulsen
RedOne #19
 
im.thatoneguy said:
True. But so far... some guy named "Zakaree" and some guy named "Finner" know to avoid eachother... if only they knew just who the hell the other actually was...

Not much on the line when you're under an alias, welcome to the internet.
Click to expand...

I don't know who either one is but I will be sure to keep my mother away from Finner.
 
Thoughts on all this storage stuff - RAID 1 typically cuts write performance in half - so the data rate of the format in question would have to be REALLY low. Coordinating two simultaneous writes at single drive speed is more complicated than regular stuff.

Finner - as for "checking the gate" type stuff - there is no tape head to position, it is just reading/playing back files - so "return" doesn't have an equivalent here. I'm betting you'll be able to play back any clip you want in at any time. if you want shots 4, 5, and 7 - just convert those shots in Redcine.

-mike
 
Finner - I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that zakaree missed a pretty important detail. Like the fact that your PRODUCERS have the beamers and 19-year-old girlfriends and not you.

It's the only way I can see his post making sense.
 
I was never upset just a little suprised that Zakaree would say such deflammatory things about someone he doesn't even know. Hence why I tried to put the humour in, I guess some of you read it as anger. Trust me I have far more things to stress over then someones post on this site and I don't let those big things get to me. Just thought some would find it funny?

By the way Egproductions you have sparked my interest. Tell me more about your mother.
 
I can kind of understand where you're coming from, but for me coming pretty new into this from an IT background, I have just as much confidence in harddrives as anything else.

Of course you have to take precautions, but in 10 years with my current company how many serious hard drive failures have we had that resulted in a loss of data? None. You use Raid5 and backup daily. Having said that we've never had a Raid5 unit crash entirely, the only time we've had to recover from backup is when users delete stuff they shouldn't. We have had the odd drive go in an array, but then hot swap it out and it reconstructs itself.

All of this great money you guys earn is tracked by IT systems in banks that use harddrives. They're susceptible to similar things as tape and film - heat, moisture. Yes, we don't know how long they'll last like film, but we know that they are in use in millions (billons?) of places round the world, so from that perspective they are tried and tested and in fact will improve in quality much faster than tape or film as the use of them grows so fast. Even mobile phones and GPS systems have them in now!

So, I think this is a bit of a phase - I'd be more wary of Sony's suggestion of writing to optical disks! I know that probably won't help your producers, but maybe try and look outside of the video/film world to see whether you can trust this media or not.
 
Every couple of months I have disk drives fail, and they are sitting in servers doing edit tasks most of the time. not outside in the rain, cold, heat, getting beat up!!
 
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