MikeCurtis
Well-known member
I think for narrative productions with a moderate amount of shooting per day, Red Drive will make sense. For those shooting docs, news, etc. with tighter time schedules and higher quantities of footage per day, or low personnel shoots, Red is going to be a big challenge - somewhere in there is the threshold where it won't make sense. IT based solutions are looking to be cheaper overall (no expensive decks required, IT based backup pricing), BUT are looking to definitely be more complicated and manpower intensive.
Under stress and duress, would you rather have something simpler but more expensive, or cheaper but more complicated?
Simpler is going to often win out of necessity for many circumstances.
Keep in mind, Red isn't going to be ideal for every project and circumstance.
In terms of the proposed on set backup and processing - transfer speeds are going to be at least as fast as realtime (otherwise you couldn't have recorded it to that device, no?). Assuming you have a SATA bus on your laptop (think 3rd party card), perhaps copy over to something like another SATA drive or a multi-drive FW800 RAID like a LaCie or G-Tech model.
The other issue of on-set conversion to client friendly format (perhaps native codecs for Avid/FCP/PPro) - I'm inclined to guess that's going to be a slower than realtime process (but I don't know for sure) on a laptop - tough to hand to client at end of day.
Would you clone tapes on set and give one to client? Or just hand to client and it is their problem? These are all problems to be addressed, new workflows to be resolved. If you can copy off to cheap storage (that client is billed for or client provides) and turn it over, case closed - it is their problem to back it up, etc.
However, from my pre-press days back in the 90s, we often had to hnd over large amounts of data to clients. Client provided hard drives were notorious for problems - they wouldn't mount, they would fail and we'd get blamed and be expected to replace the data, or they'd be problematic - they'd have data on them, and gee, can we delete that to put your data on it?
And if we provided them the storage (Zip or Jazz carts back then), getting them back was a nightmare - they'd always hang on to them forever, or lose them, or something. So we had to charge a deposit for the carts, and tracking the billing on them was always a pain because the volume of the job flow was so large.
Then clients complained about getting charged $100 for a $50 item...which we needed to do in order to incentive them to return them to us, otherwise we were their Jazz cart store (a profitless business we didn't want to be in).
If you decide to have a bunch of Red Drives and will hand them to client and expect to get them back....well, you better have a bunch of them - producers will be busy, they won't have gotten it done yet, they'll be nervous about it waiting for a second backup. Or they'll have done that, and haven't had a chance to get it back to you.
Ideally, what we're going to need is a media format that is fast, cheap enough to GIVE to client and charge them a minor/modest fee for it (and media cost needs to be tiny compared to services rendered), and large enough to hold meaningful amounts of data.
I'd interpret that as something that could write data at a rate of at LEAST half that of the recording media, ideally faster than realtime, 50+GB in capacity, not too physically large, inexpensive/ubiquitous readers, a long shelf life, and cost in the $30-$100/hr range or less.
Then again, you can get hard drives for about $0.50/GB. 4K RAW compressed is about 100GB/hr...so a bare hard drive is about $50/hr. Hard drives do fail....from sustained use. Their lifespan is MUCH longer if you just stick them on a shelf, turned off and unused, and don't use them except to pull data. And a Mac Pro has 3 empty slots, you could just socket it in with a power cyle for ghetto cheap access. Or buy a cheap SATA card and hot swap enclosure...or if they client lacks all that, I have a cheap $30 gadget that lets me hook up a bare drive and copy over USB 2 (sloooooooow on Macs, but it works).
While it is great that you can get 3+ hrs of 4K@24p on a 320GB Red Drive...when those get old, they'll suddenly fail, and lose all data on them unless they have some kind of known lifespan or means of establishing viability other than a "Thar She Blows!" indicator of total failure. I could so older and/or abused rental units failing in the field...and unscrupulous rental facilities just reformatting them and sending them back out, hoping they won't fail again...all things to worry about and deal with in the future.
-mike
Under stress and duress, would you rather have something simpler but more expensive, or cheaper but more complicated?
Simpler is going to often win out of necessity for many circumstances.
Keep in mind, Red isn't going to be ideal for every project and circumstance.
In terms of the proposed on set backup and processing - transfer speeds are going to be at least as fast as realtime (otherwise you couldn't have recorded it to that device, no?). Assuming you have a SATA bus on your laptop (think 3rd party card), perhaps copy over to something like another SATA drive or a multi-drive FW800 RAID like a LaCie or G-Tech model.
The other issue of on-set conversion to client friendly format (perhaps native codecs for Avid/FCP/PPro) - I'm inclined to guess that's going to be a slower than realtime process (but I don't know for sure) on a laptop - tough to hand to client at end of day.
Would you clone tapes on set and give one to client? Or just hand to client and it is their problem? These are all problems to be addressed, new workflows to be resolved. If you can copy off to cheap storage (that client is billed for or client provides) and turn it over, case closed - it is their problem to back it up, etc.
However, from my pre-press days back in the 90s, we often had to hnd over large amounts of data to clients. Client provided hard drives were notorious for problems - they wouldn't mount, they would fail and we'd get blamed and be expected to replace the data, or they'd be problematic - they'd have data on them, and gee, can we delete that to put your data on it?
And if we provided them the storage (Zip or Jazz carts back then), getting them back was a nightmare - they'd always hang on to them forever, or lose them, or something. So we had to charge a deposit for the carts, and tracking the billing on them was always a pain because the volume of the job flow was so large.
Then clients complained about getting charged $100 for a $50 item...which we needed to do in order to incentive them to return them to us, otherwise we were their Jazz cart store (a profitless business we didn't want to be in).
If you decide to have a bunch of Red Drives and will hand them to client and expect to get them back....well, you better have a bunch of them - producers will be busy, they won't have gotten it done yet, they'll be nervous about it waiting for a second backup. Or they'll have done that, and haven't had a chance to get it back to you.
Ideally, what we're going to need is a media format that is fast, cheap enough to GIVE to client and charge them a minor/modest fee for it (and media cost needs to be tiny compared to services rendered), and large enough to hold meaningful amounts of data.
I'd interpret that as something that could write data at a rate of at LEAST half that of the recording media, ideally faster than realtime, 50+GB in capacity, not too physically large, inexpensive/ubiquitous readers, a long shelf life, and cost in the $30-$100/hr range or less.
Then again, you can get hard drives for about $0.50/GB. 4K RAW compressed is about 100GB/hr...so a bare hard drive is about $50/hr. Hard drives do fail....from sustained use. Their lifespan is MUCH longer if you just stick them on a shelf, turned off and unused, and don't use them except to pull data. And a Mac Pro has 3 empty slots, you could just socket it in with a power cyle for ghetto cheap access. Or buy a cheap SATA card and hot swap enclosure...or if they client lacks all that, I have a cheap $30 gadget that lets me hook up a bare drive and copy over USB 2 (sloooooooow on Macs, but it works).
While it is great that you can get 3+ hrs of 4K@24p on a 320GB Red Drive...when those get old, they'll suddenly fail, and lose all data on them unless they have some kind of known lifespan or means of establishing viability other than a "Thar She Blows!" indicator of total failure. I could so older and/or abused rental units failing in the field...and unscrupulous rental facilities just reformatting them and sending them back out, hoping they won't fail again...all things to worry about and deal with in the future.
-mike
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